A Useful Analogy (Hindsight is 20/20)

Ha-Joon Chang, in his book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, makes a case for increased government regulation of the financial sector, despite the logic that "the government does not know better than those whose actions are regulated by it . . . the government cannot know someone's situation as well as the individual or firm concerned" and so "government officials cannot improve upon the decisions made by the economic agents," but he explains that regulations often work not because the government "knows better," but because the regulations limit complexity, and of course this applies to the sub-prime mortgage crisis, where the financial instruments and derivatives were more complex than the experts and investors could predict, and Chang makes this useful comparison: when a company invents a new drug it cannot be sold immediately . . . first the drug needs to be rigorously tested on carefully monitored patients because the interactions of a new drug in the human body are complex and unpredictable, and it will take a while to tell if the new drug has more positive benefits than its side effects . . . and, of course, this was not done before we sold unregulated sub-prime mortgages, packaged them into mortgage backed securities, packaged those into collateralized debt obligations, and insured those with credit default swaps . . . and it turns out the side-effects of this financial treatment are nausea, irritability, unemployment, mental confusion, erectile dysfunction, depression, problems sleeping, constipation, diarrhea, kidney failure, hostility, hallucinations, canker sores, foreclosures, and panic attacks.

F*&king Failure and F*%king Triumph

I was very angry Saturday morning -- I tried to do some music recording, but my MIDI keyboard was creating some kind of massive feedback loop in my Sonar X1 digital recording software, and so I tried to look up how to fix it, but all I ended up doing was swearing a lot . . . and so I tried to fix my son's ceiling fan -- he decided to swing from his bed on the light fixture's pull chain and ripped it out of the switch and broke the fixture, but the replacement fixture did not fit into the fan . . . so I brought the broken fixture to Home Depot and a nice dude helped me, he actually went and got a screwdriver and took apart my fixture and showed me how to insert the new porcelain light mount into the old metal fixture (my favorite part of the the tutorial is when I asked if I needed to change the wires to the pull switch and he said, "You don't need to fuck with those, they're fine as they are," and so I followed his instructions and didn't fuck with them and he was right, they were fine) and, thanks to his help, I was able to fix the light (I was never so excited as on my trip up the stairs, after flicking the fuse back into place in the basement, when I thought I noticed extra light coming from my son's room . . . I was actually scared to get to the top of the stairs and find that I might have failed, but my instincts were right, it was extra light . . . f#%*ing triumph!) and then, perhaps inspired by my first mechanical victory, I realized that perhaps it was my drum tracks, which were routed through the MIDI Omni port, that were bleeding into the the other tracks and creating the crazy noise loop, and my instinct was once again correct, and I fixed that as well . . . and you might consider this miraculous, that I fixed two things in one day, but it wasn't higher powers at work; it was all me . . . I was skillful, adept, and persistent, and I'm pretty sure this will never, ever happen in my life again.

The Rule Gets Bigger and Better

One of the wonderful things about teaching is that you get to expand and develop ideas that you barely fleshed out the year before . . . unlike real life, you get as many chances as you need to get it right; several years ago I extemporaneously introduced this important life rule to my class, but then I forgot about it until last Tuesday, when a number of students who were absent before the holiday weekend came into class and did the typical -- just before class, one at a time, they approached my desk, and asked me "What did I miss?" and once I explained to one student, then another materialized and asked the same question, and this reminded me of my rule, and so I delivered a monologue that I will approximate here:

"I'm going to introduce you to a rule that does not just apply to my class, or education in general; this is a rule that you need to learn if you want to participate in our American educational system, and it is also a rule that you need to learn if you want to participate in our American economy . . . if you wish to move to the woods and live like Thoreau then you don't need to listen this, but everyone else, please pay attention . . . if you are ever absent -- from school, from work, from a team meeting, from a committee -- from any event, and you need to find out what happened at this event from your superior, then when you ask, you must provide some piece of information about what you missed, you need to ascertain some piece of information about what you missed, and include this when you ask your superior what to do about your absence -- and this is to show you care  about what you missed, and so you will approach me and say, "I was absent on Friday but I know we had to read an essay and write a page about the theme, and I was wondering if there's anything else I need to make-up?" and if you don't approach me like this, with some piece of information about what happened in class when you were away, then your failure will be epic and monumental, because there has been no generation in the history of mankind that has been more connected technologically then your generation, no generation where information has been more accessible, whether through Facebook or texting or e-mail, and so your neglect in having any idea of what went on in class is both insulting and irresponsible . . . I realize that in past times, when you needed to beat a drum or send smoke signals, in order to communicate that the plague is coming, or some other horror, that it was much more difficult to share information -- but now you have the wherewithal to at least pretend that you care, it's easy to fake it, and I fake it all the time -- I'm a coach, so I get to miss all kinds of meetings, which is one of the things I love about coaching: I get paid to miss meetings and be outside and run soccer drills, but when I meet with my superiors, I pretend that I am interested in what I missed . . . I say, "I know I missed the diabetes presentation, and what can I do to make this up?" even though I don't care about diabetes, because that's what you do in order to pretend to show that you care," and I know my monologue hit home, because the next day, when a girl who was absent for the monologue asked me what she missed in class, the students erupted in a chorus of "Don't say that!" and then they quickly filled her in on the life-lesson from the day before.

Dreams Are Dumb?

I've always been a proponent of the Anti-Freudian "dreams are dumb and indicate nothing" school-of-thought (and may COVID-19 kill me dead if this blog becomes a dream journal) but I woke up at 2 AM this morning-- possibly because of an earthquake-- in the midst of a particularly vivid and possibly symbolic somnolent vision; here's what happened: 

I was trekking through the jungle at sunset and came to a spot where I could see through the dense foliage and I spotted a hippo in the tall grass, and the hippo's wet skin was reflecting beautiful streaks of red, purple, and orange from the waning daylight and then a jaguar walked out of the jungle and he hopped up on top of the hippo and just stood there, posing (and there was also a random llama in the background) and so I grabbed my phone and took a picture of a JAGUAR ON TOP OF A HIPPO (with a llama in the background) and all three animals were magnificent, iridescent from the setting sun in this wild tableau and then I raced back to camp to show Catherine the miracle I had witnessed and when I tried to find the pictures on my phone, they were gone-- total technical failure-- and it was my fault, I had pressed something and lost them all, the greatest nature photos ever snapped . . . and that's pretty much how school feels so far this year.

Men and Women are a Little Different

The head of my department recently progressed from looking a little pregnant to looking very pregnant, and she's getting the usual curious glances and awkward comments-- especially from older gentlemen, who won't mention the actual baby living inside her and instead ask vague questions about how she is feeling . . . but this is to be expected, as carrying a baby is so incredibly foreign to men, it's completely out of our ken . . . while men and women are certainly more similar than different in how they perceive and experience the world, there are certain things that will never translate, such as the complete failure of a woman's ability to comfort a man after he's just been hit in the testicles by a sharply hit softball.

Dave Spends $5 Dollars on Future Human Capital

I recently showed my college writing class The Big Short-- we just finished a paper on Karen Ho's illuminating (but rather long and repetitive) essay on Wall Street culture in the aughts: "Biographies of Hegemony: The Culture of Smartness and the Recruitment and Construction of Investment Bankers" and I wanted to show them what happened to this insulated system that Karen Ho critiques-- and my son Alex saw the cover of the DVD and decided he wanted to watch it . . . I told him it was a great movie, but long and complicated, and he said, "My favorite movie is Inception, Dad, I think I can handle it" so  I sweetened the deal and told him if he endured a short lecture from me before the film started-- on mortgages and subprimes loans and stocks and bonds-- and then, at the end of the film, if he could explain the systemic failure and how the financial crash of 2008 actually happened, I would give him five dollars, and-- withour irony and in the spirit of the movie, he agreed to this; Ian also watched and endured several of my financial asides, but when it was all over (and they watched the entire thing last night) Ian declined to try to explain it for five dollars (though he claimed to understand the plot) and also declined to make a sidebet on whether Alex would be able to successfully explain the origins and nature of the crash, but Alex rose to the challenge and gave me a fairly accurate portrayal of the crisis, including mortgage backed securities, CDOs, credit default swaps, fraudulent ratings, how to short the market, premiums eating into your account, the big pay-out and the bail-out . . . the only thing he had trouble with (which the movies glosses over) is the idea that the banks were unloading toxic securities they had created onto investors before they accurately marked the price, then shorting those same investments in order to attempt to balance their books -- creating a crazy conflict of interest feedback loop . . . you can learn about it in this special episode of This American Life, "Inside Job," which details the arbitrage, fraud, and corrupt strategies and tactics that Magnetar used during the crash-- and Alex was suitably annoyed with the result, a taxpayer bailout that funded the very institutions that created the crash and paid big bonuses to many of the engineers of the bubble, a bailout that so enormous that it might be incalculable and probably resulted in the election, oddly, of Donald Trump . . . because, as Jared Vennett clairvoyantly explains at the end:

In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating-agency executives went to jail . . . the SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivative industries . . . just kidding! . . . banks took the money the American people gave them, and used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby the Congress to kill big reform . . . and then they blamed immigrants and poor people, and this time even teachers . . .

the end of that little bait and switch speech surprised both my students and my children-- but it makes sense, as it too boring and complicated to completely understand the forces tearing apart our economy-- so it's much easier to blame the other, the barbarians at the gate and the freeloaders within; anyway, I'm proud of both my kids for making it all the way through-- Ian could have defaulted to The Walking Dead and Alex has decided he's going to read the book . . . maybe if enough youngsters understand what went wrong, they'll vote some people into office that will enact some policy to prevent this kind of thing . . . or maybe they'll blow all their savings on cryptocurrency and we'll all have another great movie to watch.

 

To Coddle or Not To Coddle

My take on Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt's new book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure is that it's based on a fairly reasonable premise:

prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child

and I think the authors do a great job extending the ideas from the viral Atlantic essay they wrote a few years ago . . . since then, there have been even more issues of "safety-ism" and the abrogation of free speech on college campuses and the book details these, including the shrieking girl at Yale, the assault at Middlebury, and the riots at Evergreen College; the authors worry that this new generation of students, labeled iGen, have been taught three great untruths:

1. what doesn't kill you makes you weaker

2. always trust your feelings

3. life is a battle between good people and evil people

and this has led to all sorts of logical problems, such as catastrophizing, call out culture, overgeneralizing, emotional reasoning, etc and that the fact that college campuses have become more and more liberal, with less and less representation by conservative professors, has led to a very sheltered and polarized, almost religiously fanatical us-against-them atmosphere on certain progressive campuses (I just read that more people identify themselves as LGBTQ than conservative at Harvard and Yale) and while this may have some very just causes-- the President Trump/Alex Jones nut job fringe right wing contingent-- there is still a serious problem with the lack of perspectives and the inability of many young people to deal with a diversity of thought, and this ability to debate and discuss ideas that might be slightly repulsive is an important part of a democratic nation; the first amendment is an extraordinarily powerful right, to not only believe and speak, but to amplify with the press, assemble other like-minded people and then petition the government . . . and the authors see some of the behavior on college campuses as a strike to dismantle this right . . . especially because administration rarely support the "offending" professors, who often meant well-- but intentions don't matter, only feelings-- and because college is so expensive, it's less a place of intellectual discourse and more of a luxury item, where "the customer is always right," but the book does offer hope and sees a way forward, away from "micro-agressions" and victimhood and blame, and towards CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and debate and dialogue . . . and this all sounds excellent to me-- I teach logic and rationality in my Philosophy and Comp classes, and regularly try to expose my students to controversial texts and topics (right now I'm presenting my sophomores  with Bundyville, a different take on the American Dream than they are used to) and I teach them to have reasonable and intellectual discourse on ideas that may be foreign to them . . . but apparently not everyone agrees with me about this book-- there's been some blowback-- and some view the book as a betrayal and a turn rightward by "elite liberals" in America . . . this Guardian review says it all, the advice is fine and good if your middle class and the book (horror!) was written by a couple of white guys, so it's easy for them to be reasonable-- and it might even have good advice if you're a minority attending one of these elite institutions, to help you navigate the waters, but if you're really progressive, then it's not enough to prepare the child for the road . . . you need to imagine how the new generation can change the road . . . but that's a little scary to me, to narrow and pave the road means serious revision to our first amendment rights, and in a society that's moving towards total surveillance, that may be all we have left . . . people -- especially kids-- are not that fragile, and the dangers that plagued humanity for most of our existence-- disease, constant warfare, threats of violence and crime, inequality and slavery-- there have been great inroads made in all these areas and so instead of seeking more and more safe havens, isolated from those that are different, we need to find common ground with the people that we don't necessarily share values with and understand that our children are going to come in contact with texts, words, people and ideas that they disagree with (and perhaps even disgust them) and that sunlight is the best antiseptic . . . anyway, read the book, see what you think, and perhaps even put some of the ideas into action, while raising your own kids or thinking your own thoughts.