Archives Are Awesome (and a Brief Complaint about Economic History)

I received approximately the coolest piece of mail ever today: the collection guide for the archive of Simon Kuznets’ papers at Harvard. It’s like a preview of coming/very old attractions. For example, Box 1 contains “Corresp. w/J.M. Keynes 1936; Corresp. w/Prof. Don Patinkin re-Keynes [Reprints]“. I do not know what this means or what the correspondence concerns (though I can make some educated guesses). At some point – summer of 2010? – I am going to go find out.

On an almost unrelated note, this article in the NYTimes about FDR’s economic policy rings a little false to me. Here’s a section:

Roosevelt’s New Deal is often portrayed as an embrace of Keynesian economics, which advocates increased government spending to combat economic downturns and generate jobs.

Yet despite New Deal programs and some aid to the states, total government spending — federal, state and local — as a share of the economy throughout the 1930s remained at just under 20 percent. (Today, total government spending is more than 35 percent, a larger buffer against weakness in the private sector.)

Here’s the thing: Keynes didn’t even publish the General Theory until 1936. What Keynes believed in 1930 was different from what he settled on by 1936 (for example, if I understand correctly, his emphasis on fiscal policy over monetary grows in that time period). So, the New Deal may be portrayed as an embrace of Keynesianism, but it wasn’t, at least not until around 1937. Alan Brinkley documents this story excellently in The End of Reform. In the 1933-1936 period, Roosevelt and his economic team were focused on managing separate crises with separate interventions. Jobs programs were conceptualized as just that – ways to help unemployed people make a living while doing something moderately socially useful. The Keynesian notion of aggregate demand, and its importance in the economy, enters into New Deal thinking relatively late, with the sudden downturn in 1937 following Roosevelt’s attempt to balance the budget. So, Roosevelt’s early actions (1933-1936) were not anything close to Keynesian, in intention anyway.

Add to that the fact that there wasn’t really a firm conception of “the economy”, specifically “the macroeconomy”, until the end of this period and the whole story makes even more so. Early New Deal policy was concerned with individual crises – declining agricultural prices, rising unemployment, the collapse of banks, and rising budget deficits (one of the acts FDR passed in 1933 was the “Economy Act” to reduce government spending. Economy didn’t yet mean what we now mean by it). These problems were tackled, albeit only partially, by a series of somewhat unrelated measures. The point of the WPA, TVA, etc. was not to stimulate aggregate demand but simply give people jobs who would otherwise be at loose ends and unable to make ends meet. Only as the concept of the macroeconomy becomes firmer, measured by official government statistics like the National Income figures produced by Simon Kuznets at the Department of Commerce in 1934, along with better national unemployment data, do Keynesian ways of acting on the economy become possible. A macro-level, above the individual market, becomes available as a site of intervention. Once unemployment is seen not just as a problem of people not being able to make a living, but rather as the source for a decline in aggregate demand which in turn affects private investment, etc. can “Keynesian” or even “macroeconomic” policies be implemented, rather than a host of microeconomic initiatives (interacting with single markets or problems at a time). So, yeah, the early New Deal wasn’t very good at being Keynesian.. but it wasn’t trying to be, nor could it have been.
Every time a historian writes about how pre-1930s economists were trying to understand “the economy”, or about whether or not some policy was “Keynesian” substantially before the General Theory, I get confused and annoyed*. So, to paraphrase Foucault, stop writing the history of the past in terms of the present, and start writing the history of the present!

* And yes, I know the article mentions Keynes visiting FDR to try and give him advice on what to do in 1934. But certainly the first 100 days stuff in 1933 can’t be judged against Keynesianism. No? Am I even coherent this late at night?

A Teachable Moment: Austin and the Inauguration Edition

So, apparently there is some hubbub about whether or not Obama’s oath counted because Roberts flubbed the delivery and Obama echoed his words, and not the text as written. I imagine nothing will come of this, and that Obama’s oath will not be seriously questioned (although it may well give conspiracy-minded types something else to go on about, in case they were low on ammo). I wonder, though, if the oath and its flubbing might be a good example of Austin’s notion of “felicity conditions”* for performative utterances. In “How To Do Things Words”, Austin argues that same sayings are also doings. So, when you say “I solemnly swear…” you are not just saying something, you are performing an oath. But not every utterance of a set of words (“I do”) has the same meaning – the performance only works if certain felicity conditions are fulfilled (otherwise the performance is “infelicitous”). So, reframing, we can ask, was Obama’s oath a performative utterance or was one of the felicity conditions violated? Obama seems to be president right now, so it looks like changing the word order did not violate anything important, given that everything else was right (having been certified by the House, voted on by the electors and before that the populace, no legal opposition, proper date, time and place, chief justice swearing him in, hand on a bible, etc.). But it’s a nice example of how something we might not have thought was flexible – the words of the oath themselves – might have a bit of give.

* I really like this phrase, and think it could be used in other sociological contexts as well. I’ve been trying to come up with a short list of other such phrases that either are currently used in Sociology and I enjoy, or that are not used but I would like to popularize. Here’s a sampling:
Archimedean Point
Unanticipated Consequences
Establishing (characterizing) the phenomenon
Always already
God-Trick (and the rejection of)
DiFranco Problem (“If you don’t ask the right questions, every answer seems wrong.”)
Mirowski Problem (“[B]ehind every measurement controversy lies a deep problem of metaphoric interpretation.”)

We can has.

4 More Definitions of Agency

Faithful readers of this blog will already know that almost nothing in sociology frustrates me more than the “structure vs. agency” debate. The main reason for this frustration, I think, is the radical underdefinition of both terms (and probably the vs. connecting them too). Today, while reading for my comparative/historical methods class, I was faced with five articles and chapters that talked at great length about structure and agency and their relative importance in historical explanations. I was not elated, to put it mildly. What did each author mean by structure and agency? I won’t offer an analysis of each piece (or even mention them, as they often offered no definition of either term) but I want to lay out four things they could have meant by the word agency, each of which might make sense in some context, then offer a few examples:

Agency as free-will.

Agency as the explanatory residual of structure.

Agency as a mode of action (way of affecting the world).

Agency as an analytic counterfactual and (perhaps) site of future intervention.

Curiouser and Curiouser.

On page 190 of the 2007 New Directions edition of Borges’ Labyrinths you will find page 188 of the 2007 New Directions edition of Borges’ Labyrinths. More precisely, on page 188 you will find a version of page 190 lacking a number and with a font slightly larger and darker than the rest of the book, but in the proper* location (terminating the excellent essay “The Wall and the Books” about the Chinese emperor who both ordered the construction of the Great Wall and the destruction of all books. The two acts are linked, for Borges, but he is not sure of the precise nature of the connection.).

Inserted between pages 190 and 191 is a brief note apologizing for the error and promising to correct it in future editions, with the ‘proper’ page 190 printed on the reverse of the note (an unimportant middle page to “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal”, a piece used extensively in Mirowski’s commentary and critique of economic metaphors More Heat Than Light). I stumbled upon this error (a term I use hesitatingly, for it assumes more than I am willing to) while recovering from last night’s excesses and re-reading some of the essays in Labyrinths. I have read most of the stories in the book dozens of times, but only a few of the essays. For example, I had forgotten how “Kafka and His Precursors” draws on the same themes as “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (a story I used to frame a recent paper on Foucault’s notion of discourse in his early work, which itself was framed in terms of a fictional Chinese encyclopedia featured in Borges’ “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”). Similarly, I had forgotten this lovely passage from “Avatars of the Tortoise”, my favorite essay growing up** and what likely led me to study mathematics in undergrad:

“The greatest magician (Novalis has memorably written) would be the one who would cast over himself a spell so complete that he would take his own phantasmagorias as autonomous appearances. Would not this be our case?” I conjecture that this is so. We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false.

What a wonderful description of that set of sociological doctrines broadly termed “social constructionism”, and also of the constructionist project itself – the uncovering of crevices of unreason which let us see how we dreamt the world as firm, visible and durable in time. Or perhaps we cover crevices of reason imposed on an unreasonable world. I cannot say.

In undergrad, I majored in both Math and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. In spite of being a LACS major, I only really studied two topics under its jurisdiction (leaving me knowing nothing of, say, the history of South America): immigration and magical realism***. My senior year I had to write a mini-thesis in LACS. I was outside the door of the only Borges’ scholar on campus, waiting for him to arrive for office hours to pitch him my ideas for a thesis on Borges when something in me moved. I left the building and never returned to speak with him. I ended up writing a senior thesis on farm labor organizations and immigration from Latin America, which led me down the path to sociology where I find myself happily reunited with my dear friend, the trickster saint of libraries, Borges.

* Knowing Borges, and fellow fans of Borges, the idea of a “proper” location is somewhat misleading. For example, Chibka (1996) analyzes the significance of the discrepancies in various editions and translations of Borges’ “The Garden of the Forking Paths”. Specifically, the opening line: “On page 252 of Liddell Hart’s History of World War I…” (in my edition anyway) has as many as 5 different page numbers in different versions (22, 212, 252, etc.). The passage Borges appears to be referencing appears in two books (one an update of the other) by Liddell Hart, neither of which has the name given in the Spanish version of the story (“La historia de la guerra europea”, or “The History of the European War”. Notably, Hart was never translated into Spanish, but this translation would not be faithful to the original English title.). So, different editions of Borges’ work reference different page numbers of a book by an inaccurate name – and none of which correspond to the page on which the paragraphs appear (which itself is two different pages, depending on the edition). For the details, and Chibka’s interpretations of all of this, I highly recommend The Library of Forking Paths (1996, Representations). Chibka argues that while no single version of the story “The Garden of the Forking Paths” resembles the book of the same name featured in that story (a book in which many different, contradictory narratives simultaneously co-exist, as in the theory of multiple universes), the set of all versions of the story complicates the linearity of time and narrative. I conjecture (how could I not conjecture?) that Borges must have left instructions with his conspirators to subtly alter his works over time. What gift could be greater to the scholars as yet unborn than the promise of an ever-shifting set of texts, sacred yet malleable?

** It occurs to me that if you wanted to raise children to be sympathetic to post-structuralism and post-modernism, giving them Borges to read before they hit age 10 would probably do the trick. It did for me anyway.

*** In giving me comments on a recent paper, another sociology graduate student suggested that I work to eliminate many of my asides and footnotes. He attributed the excess to the term-paper style of writing we are socialized into as graduate students. I have another, simpler explanation: I have been writing, inconsistently, Borges fan-fiction since the age of 10. Some of this writing takes the form of brief stories, or blog-posts. Other pieces take the form of essays, much as many of Borges’ greatest works of fiction were themselves essays, and vice-versa. I remember realizing as I read The Name of the Rose that Eco was himself an author of Borges fan-fiction. The line “The library is a labyrinth!” kind of gave it a way (plus the “Jorge de Burgos” blind librarian character. I mean, c’mon. That’s not even subtle).

The First Transport is Away*: ASA Edition

So, I submitted an essay to ASA late last night. This is my first submission to any kind of real conference. I spent the last week or so writing the essay (titled “The Emergence of the Macroeconomy: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the GDP”), although it only really came together this weekend. As always, I wish I had more time and knew about ten times more than I do about the history of economic policy and economics and a host of other topics. Oh well. I’ll also be presenting a (hopefully updated, edited) version of this in the economic sociology workshop here at Michigan in March. Wish me luck on both accounts!

It’s strange to start the term off with a bout of finals-like paper writing. Between late night paper writing, the first full week of classes and the freakishly cold and snowy weather, this week has been exhausting. I think I need to take a break this coming week so that I don’t burn out before February break**.

Perhaps tomorrow I will update a new financial crisis bibliography. Everything else I’ve had to say recently is in the paper.

* Ok, so, a lot of this weekend was spent alternating between writing my paper and watching Episodes 4-6 of Star Wars that were playing in some sort of continuous loop on cable. These things happen.
** Michigan has very accurate names in its academic calendar. For example, our January-April term is called “Winter” not “Spring” and our end of February break is usually called “February break” and not “Spring break”.

Bailout – Rated E for Everyone? No, M for Mature.

If you are interested in following the financial crisis and the government’s response and you are not yet reading LOLFed, start now. It’s hilarious, timely and insightful. Today’s post really takes the cake though:

We were actually kidding all those times we suggested everyone should go to Washington and beg for bailout money. Unfortunately, sarcasm is quite beyond Hustler’s Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild’s Joe Francis, who are doing just that. God willing, this will be the last time this blog ever links to TMZ.

The two of them are hitting up the new Congress for $5b in bailout money for the adult industry. Francis in particular has apparently found it quite expensive to visit college parties and trade drunken coeds a string of shiny beads and a waiver form for a brief glimpse of nipple or, if he is especially lucky, momentary lapses of heterosexuality.

Clearly, Flynt and Francis need to convert their respective companies into bank holding companies. Everybody’s doing it. Insert your own joke in the comments.

Performativity(ish) and Krugman’s Nobel Lecture

A second brief thought from the coffee shop: Krugman’s Nobel Lecture (which I finally got around to watching while “playing Violet“*) is, in some ways, a story about performativity. Let me briefly summarize his final point and then explain what I mean. Krugman argues that old trade theory, based on competitive advantage between nations with unequal factor endowments, and old economic geography could not explain the intra-nation trade observed in the 1960s, where rich nations traded with each other, nor the concentrations of industries observed within nations (auto in Detroit, glass in Toledo, whatever). Krugman and co-author’s new trade theory and economic geography helped explain those things by invoking the pin factory of Adam Smith and the idea of increasing returns (see Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations for a great analysis of the history of the idea of increasing returns). Krugman then ends his talk by showing how his story has started falling apart – the world is looking more like the one of classical trade theory, where rich countries are trading with poor ones again and forces creating concentrations of industries are somewhat ameliorated.

What happened? Well, in part because of all those old economic ideas, trade barriers have been dramatically reduced, and technologies have been created to eliminate the transaction costs that were getting in the way of the models working. Lower transaction costs is connected to fewer economies of scale for concentration, and thus less rationale for concentration. So, the old economic theory helped make a world in which it was more true.

Uh oh, coffee shop is closing early. That’s all for now.

* This is my new euphemism for not working on a paper I need to finish, with apologies to Jeremy, K.O.A.S.B.

Change is Delicious

I wonder what proportion of coffee shop tip jars across the United States have some variation of “change we can believe in” as their witty plea for tips. I also wonder whether this proportion varies directly, inversely, or not at all with the strength of the Democratic party in the area (or amongst coffee goers in the area). But how do I get data to test this?

Posted from my Obama-loving Ann Arbor Coffee Shoppe.

Oh, also, Happy New Year!