Category: Books and culture

Love Libraries

John Quiggin7 Comments

As well as being Valentine’s Day, today is Library Lovers Day.

Libraries are one of the great institutions of our society, and the public library was the first great manifestation of the idea that ‘information wants to be free’.

These days, I do most of my library use online, and physical visits to libraries are more of a consumption experience. It’s great to browse through stacks of books and enjoy the odd contiguities created by cataloging systems – in my experience, Dewey has a particularly large random element. Of course, the Internets have their own versions of this kind of thing, but the magic of the stacks is still there.

A really great experience not long ago was touring the New York Public Library, one of the great public libraries of the world, which benefits hugely from endowments provided by once-poor migrants who got their education in its reading rooms. Over the fold, there’s a picture of one of its treasures, a Gutenberg bible (it turned out I wasn’t really supposed to photograph it, but I wasn’t asked to delete the photo so I assume it’s OK to share it in the general spirit of library love).
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Prada, princesses, product placement

John Quiggin27 Comments

I watched The Devil Wears Prada not long ago – as the name implies, it’s not short on product placement, though of course this is part of the fun. The central character, played by Meryl Streep, is the editor of a fashion magazine and the heroine/narrator is hired her assistant. Streep’s character is represented as an impossibly demanding princess – the first illustration of this being an imperious demand for Starbucks coffee, delivered in a paper (or maybe even styrofoam) cup. Even allowing for the needs of product placement, and the curiously high status of this coffee-shop chain in the US, this strikes me as way off the mark. Surely she should be demanding her own personal barista, freshly grinding exotic coffee beans, and delivering the product in brand-name china (compare the gangster-movie financier in Mulholland Drive who spits out the coffee with which his hosts have struggled desperately to please him).

But all this comes to the central contradiction of promoting luxury consumption, discussed here not long ago. On the one hand, we want to read about and watch the luxury products of the rich and famous, and advertisers want to exploit this. On the other hand, if we could all afford to buy it, it wouldn’t be luxury consumption. There are ways around this – for example, Gucci makes its name with impossibly expensive clothes, but makes much of its profits by attaching its brand name, and the associated high markups, to lower-priced products like sunglasses.

Of course, I’m using “luxury” in a special sense here. Refrigerators were once available only to the wealthy, but they are valuable because they are useful. Now they are cheap and widely available (note that other items, like university education are going in the opposite direction), but this isn’t a problem. By contrast, the kind of luxury I’m talking about, represented most clearly by high fashion relies on exclusiveness for its value. In the end, this is a zero-sum game, which probably explains some of the oddities of fashion.

Edited in response to comments

What I’ve been reading

John Quiggin23 Comments

Multiethnic Australia by Celeste Lipow McLeod. It’s aimed at a US audience, and gives a potted history of Australia since European settlement, from a pro-multiculturalist point of view. More here. Written after the Cronulla riots, the book maintains an optimistic viewpoint, which I think is broadly consistent with our history in the long run.

It’s worth remembering in this context that until quite recently, resentment about immigration and multiculturalism was directed mainly against East Asians. This was true both of Pauline Hanson and of the previous big backlash in the 1980s led by among others, Katherine Betts, Geoffrey Blainey and John Howard. In the decade since Hanson’s famous maiden speech, this kind of prejudice has ebbed dramatically, even as the number of Australians of East Asian background has increased rapidly. And the still older prejudices against Southern Europeans have disappeared almost entirely, along with most of the feelings of resentment and exclusion that were once very strong among these groups.

It may be a while before we overcome our current problems, but I’m confident we’ll do so in the end.

What I’ve been reading

John Quiggin3 Comments

The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross. SF meets horror meets spy thriller (in the drab Deighton mode) as underpaid bureaucrats struggle to stop revenant Nazis loosing an infovorous ice demon on an unsuspecting universe. Those of a certain age will feel right at home by page 3

Logged in, I find myself in a maze of twisty little automounted filesystems, all of them alike.

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Also The Marketplace of Christianity by Ekelund, Hebert and Tollison, interesting both as an instance of economic imperialism and as part of a growing literature, largely emerging from the US, that treats religion and religiosity as goods, independent of the truth or otherwise of the doctrines being propounded. Oddly enough, this kind of reasoning to be welcome to many religious believers, though not to those who think the issue through. I’m just beginning on Ekelund et al, so more soon on this I hope.

Cole concludes

John Quiggin37 Comments

The Cole Commission has finally reported, and I can take some comfort from the fact that my predictions at the start have been borne out almost entirely.* No conclusive proof of government wrongdoing has emerged, no minister has resigned, and the government’s defenders have had no trouble squaring their denunciations of Saddam with the fact that we were financing his rearmament program up to the day the war began.

Only the last of these points really mattered, since it called into question the whole rationale for our participation in the war, and the good faith of those who urged. But now that the war is almost universally recognised as a disaster, this probably no longer matters. Even for those who justified the whole deal on the basis of commercial self-interest, it should be clear by now that we have lost any positive standing we had in the world wheat market and that the US will be able to lock us out of many markets we might otherwise have competed in with success.

For those who want more, though, occasional commenter Stepehn Bartos has produced a book called “Against the Grain – The AWB Scandal and why it happened”. It is published by UNSW Press in their briefings series, can be ordered online at http://www.unireps.com.au. He says

The book goes beyond the Cole Inquiry concerns of who did what when, and instead looks at the underlying causes of the scandal including inadequate due diligence at the time of AWB privatisation in 1999, poor design of regulatory supervision, and most importantly, the fact that Ministers and AWB officials were all part of the same small, closed circle and not inclined to ask questions even when information alerting the government to the possibility of the kickbacks started to come out.

It sounds like a substantial effort, given the short time, but of course many of the fundamental issues have been familiar from previous episode.

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The end for endnotes?

John Quiggin10 Comments

I’ve been reading Karen Cerulo’s Never saw it coming and while it’s generally pretty good, it contains what I assumed was a howler of a mistake, but turns out to be a gross misjudgement. Cerulo argues that the generally optimistic view taken by Americans does not extend to deviant groups, and uses as an example, the Heaven’s Gate cult which, as she states believed that they would be removed from the Earth by a spaceship following the comet Hale-Bopp, their true home’. As she says, most reporting of the group treated it as the epitome of the lunatic fringe. I assumed that Cerulo was somehow unaware of the fact that all the members of the group had committed suicide in an attempt to ensure that the spaceship didn’t miss them. I looked at the endnotes to check the dates on some of the cited media reports and discovered a note reading

144. Henry 1997, 4. Readers may recall in order to hasten their arrival in heaven, all thirty-nine members of the group engaged in a mass suicide

which to my mind justifies the lunatic fringe description. In any case, surely this point was important enough to include in the main text, or a footnote on the same page.

While I’m on this subject, is there any excuse for persevering with endnotes in books*? They’re just about useless, (those that don’t give something worse than useless like “ibid” or “loc cit”). If the material is of too little interest to be included in the main text or in footnotes, and can’t be omitted altogether for reasons of academic nicety, couldn’t it be placed in a supporting website?

* Footnote/endnote: A bit more discussion of this at Andrew Norton’s blog (thanks to Damien Eldridge for locating this for me)

What I’ve been reading

John Quiggin9 Comments

Never saw it coming by Karen Cerulo is a study of disaster preparedness or rather its absence. Cerulo argues that the failure to prepare for disaster is not a matter of individual incompetence or fecklessness. Rather she argues it reflects a bias towards optimism that is deeply embedded in American culture.

In the abstract the argument seems convincing, and there is plenty of psychological evidence to support it. But I find myself disagreeing with a lot of the detailed argument. On the one hand, some disasters can’t be prepared for in any effective fashion, so it makes sense not to worry about them.

On the other hand, Cerulo cites as an example of successful preparedness the massive Y2K remediation effort undertaken in the United States. As I’ve pointed out on many occasions, other countries undertook no preparation and came out fine. Russia and Italy are notable examples – the US State Department issued a travel advisory for Italy as did UK authorities and Australia actually evacuated its embassy in Moscow leaving a skeleton staff to wait out the cataclysm. This isn’t being wise after the event. Once the 2000 fiscal year began with no serious incidents it was obvious that for anyone except nuclear reactor managers and the like, ‘fix on failure’ was the optimal response.

I’m not sure what to make of my disagreements on the details.Some disagreements is to be expected in any detailed argument. But the range of disagreement leads me to think that maybe handling low-probability catastrophic risk is something we are not very good at, sometimes preparing for non-existent risks and at other times failing to foresee obvious possibilities.

Social democracy triumphant?

John Quiggin25 Comments

Among other things, the 2006 US election marks the end of the Republican revolution that began in 1994 when the Republicans led by Newt Gingrich gained a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years and sought to push through the radical “Contract with America”. This can be seen not only in the Congressional results but in the defeat of a series of tax limitiation initiatives. Even in the US, the appeal of social democracy remains strong.

So, this is a good time to run my piece on Sheri Berman’s The Primacy of Politics, which was part of a Crooked Timber seminar. Mark Bahnisch has more. And the debate with Tyler Cowen over US and European economic performance continues.
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