Author Archives: Will Wilkinson

America’s Other Audubon

Posted on by
Reply

America's Other Audubon :: Princeton Architectural Press

I love this:

Inspired by viewing Audubon’s lithographs at the 1876 World’s Fair in Philadelphia, twenty-nine-year-old amateur naturalist and artist Genevieve Jones began working on a companion volume to The Birds of America, illustrating the nests and eggs that Audubon omitted. Her brother collected the nests and eggs, her father paid for the publishing, and Genevieve learned lithography and began illustrating the specimens. When Genevieve died suddenly of typhoid fever, her family labored for seven years to finish the project in her memory. The original book, sold by subscription in twenty-three parts, included Presidents Rutherford B. Hayes and Theodore Roosevelt among its subscribers.

Only ninety copies of the original book were published in 1886, and fewer than twenty-five copies now remain in institutions and private hands. Featuring reproductions of all sixty-eight original color lithographs, archival photographs, selected field notes, and a key to the eggs and birds, America’s Other Audubon chronicles for the first time the story behind the making of this extraordinary nineteenth century book.

via Sadie Stein at the Paris Review.

Buy the book.

James Otteson on the Morality of Capitalism

Posted on by
Reply

Otteson makes a Smithian case:

What the free-enterprise system—Smith’s “obvious and simple system of natural liberty”—proposes, then, is the adoption of those political and economic institutions that manage to combine not one but two great moral imperatives: allowing people the opportunity to rise from the impoverished existence that seems to be humanity’s miserable, if equal, status quo; and respecting people as the irreplaceable and precious individuals that they are. That is a sublime conjunction of material prosperity and moral agency, the likes of which no other system of political economy has ever contemplated, let alone achieved.

Capitalism is not perfect. But no system created by human beings is, or ever will be, perfect. The most we can hope for is continuing gradual improvement. To this end, we must honestly examine the prospects of the available systems of political economy. The benefits of the free-enterprise society are enormous and unprecedented; they have meant the difference between life and death for hundreds of millions of people and have afforded a dignity to populations that are otherwise forgotten. We should wish to extend these benefits rather than to curtail them.

Would you say that the United States political economy is a “free-enterprise system”? That Smith’s “system of natural liberty” tends to function rhetorically as a justification of capitalism-as-we-know-it suggests some confusion.

via Issues 2012 | An Audacious Promise: The Moral Case for Capitalism.

Daniel Clowes Interview on NPR

Posted on by
Reply

Listen here…

Clowes says his instructors were mostly minimalists and abstract expressionists. “They were all so beyond figural drawings and all that stuff that was so buried and in the past, they couldn’t believe anybody was bringing that up again,” he says. And Clowes didn’t just want to do figure drawings, he wanted to make comics.

“They would just say, ‘Well, comics are basically inherently stupid.’ The preponderance of the evidence was such that that was possibly true. There were just years and years and years of really dumb comics.”

I can relate.

via The Serious Comic Art Of Daniel Clowes : NPR.

Austerity Facts?

Posted on by
4

Russ Roberts wants the facts:

Which nations in Europe have slashed government spending? I suppose “slash” is an ambiguous term but when you write  that the experiment has been tried, don’t you have to show that spending has at least been cut or reduced, right? Maybe some European states have slashed the growth rate in government spending? Is that what he means? If so, shouldn’t different words be used? And either way, should there be some facts on this “experiment.” The word implies something scientific. But it all appears to be going on in the mind of the writer rather than in the real world

I’d like some facts. I have seen many articles on austerity. I can’t remember seeing any that suggest that government spending in any European country has actually fallen. Yes, there is talk of spending cuts or cuts in growth rates. But I’d like to see the data that shows the cuts have actually been implemented.

Me too. Where should I look?

What Does Geography Explain?

Posted on by
Reply

 Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson on Jared Diamond:

Another major problem for Diamond’s argument is that it has little to say about inequality within continents, which is an essential part of modern world inequality. For example,  the orientation of the Eurasian landmass might explain how England managed to benefit from the innovations of the Middle East without having to reinvent them. But it doesn’t explain why the Industrial Revolution happened in England rather than in Eastern Europe or in the Ottoman Empire.More critically, as Diamond himself also recognizes, China and India benefited greatly from very rich suites of animals and plants, and from the orientation of Eurasia. But most of the poor people of the world today are in those two countries.

via What Does Geography Explain? – Why Nations Fail – Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.

Renting Prosperity

Posted on by
3

Daniel Gross :

The U.S. economy needs the dynamism that renting enables as much as—if not more than—it needs the stability that ownership engenders. In the current economy, there are vast gulfs between the employment pictures in different regions and states, from 12% unemployment in Nevada to 3% unemployment in North Dakota. But a steelworker in Buffalo, or an underemployed construction worker in Las Vegas, can’t easily take his skills to where they are needed in North Dakota or Wyoming if he’s underwater on his mortgage. Economists, in fact, have found that there is frequently a correlation between persistently high local unemployment rates and high levels of homeownership.

http://t.co/veL8xdK0

James Galbraith on Inequality

Posted on by
Reply

Galbraith interviewed by Brad Plumer:

Between the end of World War II and 1980, economic growth in the United States is mostly an equalizing force, and job creation isn’t dependent on rising economic inequality. But after 1980, economic booms and rising inequality go hand in hand. So what’s going on? In 1980, we really went through a fundamental transformation. We stopped being a wage-led economy with a growing public sector that was providing new services. Programs like Medicare and Medicaid were major drivers of growth in the 1970s.

Instead, we became a credit-driven economy. What the evidence in the U.S. shows is that the rise in inequality is associated with credit booms, which are often periods of sometimes great prosperity. One was in the late 1990s with information technology and one in the 2000s with housing, before everything fell apart. But this is also a sign of instability — the crash that follows is very ugly business. If we’re going to go forward with growth on a more sustainable basis, then controlling inequality and controlling instability are the same issue. One is an expression of the other.

via How economists have misunderstood inequality: An interview with James Galbraith – The Washington Post.

Morten Høi Jensen on Martin Amis

Posted on by
Reply

Irving Howe wrote of Saul Bellow’s prose that it was sometimes “strongly anti-literary,” that it tried to “break away from the stateliness of the literary sentence.” Amis, in turn, credited Bellow (his literary mentor and surrogate father) with attempting to find a voice appropriate to the twentieth century, and his own fiction is an extension of this ambition. In London Fields the writer-narrator Samson Young muses that, “perhaps because of their addiction to form, writers always lag behind the contemporary formlessness. They write about an old reality, in a language that’s even older.” Contrary to this tendency, Amis risks form in the pursuit of a language that mirrors the contemporary formlessness. His best novels — Money, London Fields, The Information — are oddly shaped and (with the exception of the nearly-perfect Money) very uneven. But unlike your run-of-the-mill Booker contenders, routinely jettisoning their cargos of contemporary speech in order to stay afloat on a sea of polite style, Amis’ novels go right into the currents and whirlpools of modernity, surging and hoarding without constraint.

via Los Angeles Review of Books – Mr. Amis’s Planet.

X-altruism

Posted on by
Reply

According to Oakley and her colleagues, excessive kindness and empathy can generate “a slew of (results), including genocide, suicide bombing, self-righteous political partisanship and ineffective philanthropic and social programs.”

“It is almost heretical to suggest kindness and empathy can cause harm,” they explained. “But helpful behaviour taken to extremes blinds us to its harms.”

Misguided altruism can, indeed, result in genocide, war and political upheaval, but also to heroism and sainthood, Haidt reported. Its practitioners feel physically and psychologically “elevated.”

“But, altruism can bleed into misplaced, self-righteous and self-serving pathologies,” cautioned Paul Zak at Claremont Graduate University.

According to Elkhonon Goldberg at New York University, excessive kindness toward others can take the form of “self-sacrifice in the name of some delusional cause.”

Scott Atran at the University of Michigan concludes excessive humanitarianism can cause a schism in society by sacrificing “in-group solidarity in favour of concerns for out-groups.”

via When doing good is bad – Winnipeg Free Press.

An Experiment

Posted on by
3

Okay. Until we move to Houston, I’m trying to pick up the blogging pace. I’ve been collecting lots of links as I hunt for bloggable items, and it occurred to me that link-blogging, with a quick comment now and again, might be a good use of this space, which I would like to keep alive. So I’m gonna try it for the next week and see how it goes. If it’s a hassle or a time-suck, I’ll quit. If it’s no sweat, maybe I can make some beer money. The smart bet is on quitting, but sometimes I surprise myself.

A Whole Other Country

Posted on by

Kerry, Winston and I are moving to Texas!

This Summer/Fall, I’ll start work on an MFA in creative writing at the University of Houston, specializing in fiction. I couldn’t be more excited. For my money, Houston’s prose faculty is as good as it gets: Antonya Nelson, Robert Boswell, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Alexander Parsons, Mat Johnson, Nick Flynn. ZZ Packer will be visiting this Fall. (James Franco is definitely not coming, though.) And Houston’s a huge, diverse city with cool neighborhoods, good food of all sorts, and an amazing array of cultural offerings. Yet the rent is in not too damn high. Iowa City’s been great, but we’re ready to get back to the many amenities of bigness. Also, Kerry has a really bad time with cold, and it’s hard to find a place less cold than Houston. And there is a giant dog park named after a presidential pooch! Houston is exactly what we need right now. It’s perfect.

Some of you will ask: Why? Because I want to write novels. Some of you will ask: Why not just write a novel then? (My colleague Jon Fasman does it!) Well, why don’t people who want to be economists or philosophers just go and write economics papers or philosophy books? Seriously… because I’m not satisfied with a life devoted primarily to politics and punditry, and it’s not so easy to pivot, just like that, to a life of literature and art. I could definitely use some instruction and, more importantly, a good chunk of time to write literary things immersed in a community of literary writers. The MFA did the trick for Kerry, and I think it’ll do the trick for me, too. That said, I’m not giving up on politics and punditry altogether. Grad students don’t exactly live like royalty, so I plan to keep up the pro-blogging and write the occasional op-ed or review. I’ll do less of it, though, and less of it will be about politics. In a year or two, I may disappear altogether, into fiction.

I think the most important thing I took away from all that time with my nose in happiness research and behavioral econ is that we overestimate the value of what we already have and so underestimate the upside of taking a chance, leaving something behind, and making a big change. Most of us end up where we are through a sort of drift. Sometimes that works out splendidly. And drift hasn’t not worked out for me. I really like what I do. But, alas, I don’t really love it. I never wanted to be a pundit or a “public intellectual.” I always wanted to be an artist of some sort and I still want that. I want to make awesome shit people love. It’s my new motto: make awesome shit people love. So here we go!