Freedoms Constrain, Structures Enable: The Onion Edition

One of my perennial complaints about the terms “structure” and “agency” is the implicit or explicit linkage between structure and constraint on the one hand, and agency and freedom on the other. Structures are the things that stand in the way of us exercising our agentic free-will, etc, etc. There are some excellent exceptions, especially those works that look at how agencies are constructed (and thus structured), and thus how structures are productive as well as constraining (e.g. Foucault’s work on power, Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, the ANT tradition and their whacky but lovable take on agency, even Jepperson’s nuanced discussion of institutions in the orange book).

Another set of exceptions, which I’ve not talked as much about here, are those works that look at how ‘freedoms’ constrain us. A paradigmatic example would be Barry Schwartz’s book, The Paradox of Choice (Schwartz also gave a fantastic TED talk about the same subject, available here). Schwartz’s basic argument is that more choices does not always lead to more satisfaction, happiness, utility or whatever you want to call it. The necessity of weighing so many more choices, and the constant sense of possibly being able to do better, detract from the enjoyment of the choice made. Daniel Gilbert makes some of the same points in his book, Stumbling on Happiness.

The Onion, as always, has a pithier take on the subject in a recent hilarious piece entitled: “What The Hell Am I Supposed To Do With All These Constitutional Rights?”
Here’s a brief excerpt:

I’ve got rights coming out my ass. Seriously, have you looked at the Constitution lately? It’s like a giant to-do list of all these annoying, super-specific rights we’re all “entitled” to. And right there at the top is the right to free speech. Great, so now I got to think of something to say? Thanks but no thanks. When I want to say something, I’ll let you know. I don’t need a right to tell me.

Enjoy.

Class Reproduction, Cultural Capital, Etc.

Sometimes I forget how bold-faced and unsubtle class can be. Sometimes, the world isn’t very nuanced. Another way of putting it, sometimes I forget how much of sociology I have absorbed (especially on topics not central to my own work). For example, take this NYT interview with Delta CEO Richard Anderson. When asked about what he asks job candidates in interviews (for top positions), Anderson responds:

You want to know about their family. Where they grew up. What their parents did. Where they went to high school. What their avocations were. How many kids they had in their family. You know, what their whole background and history is.

I learned that from a C.E.O. I worked for. The C.E.O. wouldn’t really spend that much time on the résumé, but spent most of the time wanting to know everything about the person’s life, family, what they liked, where they liked to go on vacation, what their kids were like. And it gave you a really good perspective about who they were as people.

You spend more of your waking time with your colleagues at the office than you do with your family and when you bring someone into that family — we have 50 senior leaders at our company and 70,000 employees — you need to make sure that they’re a fit to the culture. And that they’re going to be part of that group of people in a healthy functioning way.

Nothing that interesting, I know, but I was just surprised by how upfront it was. Lengthier posts to follow the end of the term today, odds are.

Mr. Tambourine Man: Enchanting Song or Warning of the Return of the Old Ones? A Textual Analysis

It is a little-known fact that Bob Dylan is a huge devotee of the prophetic works of the author H.P. Lovecraft. Knowledge of this esoteric trivia* led me to a surprising conclusion: Mr. Tambourine Man is not a song memorializing a long-dead musician, but rather a warning of the impending apocalyptic rise of the Old One Cthulhu. Before you say, Dan, clearly you have spent too much time reading fragments of the Necronomicon while avoiding memorizing the asymptotic variances of censored regression models**, let me explain using a close textual analysis of some key lyrics.

A caveat: A full analysis would require a deeper reading of Lovecraft’s work, as well as later followers, to be able to capture the subtleties of Dylan’s allegories. For example, it is unclear at several points if Mr. Tambourine Man is a cultist attempting to orchestrate Cthulhu’s return or merely a prophet, driven mad by visions of the Elder God and attempting to warn us through allegory. Or, perhaps most radically, is the Tambourine Man another name for the dreaded Cthulhu himself? I favor the middle interpretation, but welcome alternative interpretations.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. To the text!

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to.
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you.

Dylan’s tune is notable for beginning with the chorus, rather than the verse. This signals the listener to note how the chorus serves as a chorus, that is, a ritualized, repeated invocation. This reminds the alert listener of the Black Chorus and their chant, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” The closest English translation is, of course, “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” (cf. “Call of Cthulhu”, Chapter II). Adding weight to this interpretation, the chorus appears to be sung by a cult member (“…I’ll come followin’ you”), and one who is waiting for the appropriate moment, e.g. the stars aligning (“In the jingle jangle morning…”).

Having primed us to look for further explanations of the cult, Dylan goes on to make a most explicit reference to Cthulhu and his predicament:

Though I know that evenin’s empire has returned into sand,
Vanished from my hand,
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping.
My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet,
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming.

In light of the first verse, the first and last lines become obvious: “Evenin’s empire” is the ancient empire of the Old Ones, which has “returned into sand” and is now buried beneath the sea. The “ancient empty street’s” of R’yleh are “too dead for dreaming”, which is, paradoxically, precisely what C’thulhu is doing (“…dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”) The middle part of the verse may be a reference to Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” more explicitly, or another story telling of an encounter between a weary traveler, lost at sea, struck paralyzed with awe upon seeing the massive gates of R’yleh. The blindness may be metaphorical or physical, the text is ambiguous.

Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship,
My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip,
My toes too numb to step, wait only for my boot heels
To be wanderin’.
I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade
Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way,
I promise to go under it.

The first line continues the reference to the fateful voyage of Gustaf Johansen, while the rest of the verse refers to the narrator’s own experiences with Cthulhu and his minions. Having been exposed (“My senses have been stripped..”), the narrator is now ready to follow Mr. Tambourine Man – but to what end? To bring about the return of Cthulhu? Or to prevent it, and thus prolong humanity’s existence?

Though you might hear laughin’, spinnin’, swingin’ madly across the sun,
It’s not aimed at anyone, it’s just escapin’ on the run
And but for the sky there are no fences facin’.
And if you hear vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time, it’s just a ragged clown behind,
I wouldn’t pay it any mind, it’s just a shadow you’re
Seein’ that he’s chasing.

The madness of those who have seen Cthulhu’s visage is not directed at any Earthly entity (“It’s not aimed at anyone…”). The narrator then explains the purpose of the Tambourine Man, who is chasing a shadow (the same shadow that the narrator, and the presumptive audience, has seen, the shadow cast by the Elder Gods on the world of the living). But why does he chase this shadow? To resurrect it, or to keep it in its prison?

Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

Finally, the narrator hopes for a peaceful slumber. Driven mad by visions (“Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves/ The haunted frightened trees…”), no longer in full possession of his faculty after his encounter with Cthulhu (“With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves”) the narrator hopes only to “forget about today until tomorrow”. This verse is sung in a carefree style, as if the narrator were speaking of an innocent desire to forget his worries, sing and dance to the tune of a carefree wandered. As this analysis has shown, nothing could be further from the truth. The narrator is living a life of madness punctuated by intermittent moments of clarity. Only the peace of death, or giving in to the mindless ravings that often overtake him, will allow him to be free of his chtonic burdens.

Thoughts?

* It is likely that this fact’s obscurity is related to me having just made it up.
** A true but irrelevant statement.

What’s the Opposite of Social Capital?

The NYT magazine has a short piece that should be of interest to social capitalists and network-heads alike: Let Them Eat Tweets. The story ostensibly discusses Twitter, a relatively new and growing bit of networking technology where you can follow everyone from the Washington Post’s political reporter TheFix to OrgTheory’s FabioRojas. Twitter promotes a kind of “ambient awareness”, and adds a new medium for our connectivity. So far so good, right?

According to science fiction author Bruce Sterling, not so much. Here’s an extended quote from the article discussing a speech by Sterling:

“Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.

Nice, right? The implications of Sterling’s idea are painful for Twitter types. The connections that feel like wealth to many of us — call us the impoverished, we who treasure our smartphones and tally our Facebook friends — are in fact meager, more meager even than inflated dollars. What’s worse, these connections are liabilities that we pretend are assets. We live on the Web in these hideous conditions of overcrowding only because — it suddenly seems so obvious — we can’t afford privacy. And then, lest we confront our horror, we call this cramped ghetto our happy home!

“Connectivity is poverty.” Given the literature on the value of networks for individuals and organizations, what do you make of a claim like that? Is there nothing to it? Or can we read Sterling as arguing that the obsession with a certain kind of connectivity reinforces, rather than reduces, inequities in the distribution of resources? That is, we think by following our friends and colleagues on Facebook and Twitter and RSS we are building better, faster, stronger networks that will enable us to get ahead, but we’re really just cementing ourselves in the same place we already were: in the middle, too poor to afford real privacy and luxury, but rich enough to stay connected.

Or, cheekily (and very inaccurately), are networks performative or counterperformative?

On the Relative Success of Economics and Sociology

While rummaging through the papers of Simon Kuznets*, I came across several references in his lectures notes and in drafts of speeches to a claim about the most important contribution of economics. Kuznets argued that economics’ most important finding was the existence of an economic system itself. That is, the fact of economic interdependence, or the existence of the economy**. It seems to me that Sociology’s single most important contribution could be framed similarly: the existence of social interdependence (“society”). That is, economists argue that individual economic behaviors, relationships, etc. cannot be understood in isolation. Similarly, but more broadly, sociologists argue that the actions of individuals in general cannot be understood in isolation from their relationships to larger groups of people, ideas, things, etc.

What’s interesting is that economics seems to have been quite successful in pushing its notion of economic interdependence while sociology has had less success in pushing its basic premise of social interdependence. Indeed, economics has pushed the former in rejection of the later – working up from some sort of ontologically prior individual and building things up into an economy. So, we take for granted the existence of the economy*** but the existence of society is still in question (e.g. Thatcher’s “There’s no such thing as society.”)****. More concretely, the existence of explanations for behavior that focus solely on individuals and their ability to choose are still very prominent.

I don’t want to ascribe too much causality to this process, but I wonder if in the current moment, economists have an easier time making some of their more radical arguments than sociologists because of the differential acceptance of the basic contributions of the fields. It also adds another reason to really fight hard for Polanyi’s thesis that the economy is not, and never can be, disembedded from society except in ideology. Cf. Krippner (2002):

But every transaction, no matter how instantaneous, is social in the broader sense of the term: congealed into every market exchange is a history of struggle and contestation that has produced actors with certain understandings of themselves and the world that predispose them to exchange under a certain set of social rules and not another. In this sense, the state, culture, and politics are contained in every market act; they do not variably exert their influence on some kinds of markets more than others.

The existence and acceptance of an economic system, and thus economic interdependence, could be the basis for an argument about the existence of deeper forms of interdependence.

Ok, this post is a bit rambly and incoherent. Just needed to get an idea on paper, so to speak. Apologies if it’s hard to follow.

* My photocopies have still not arrived, so forgive the lack of specific quotes. I believe the reference I am thinking of is from 1954.
** Alas, Kuznets did not phrase it quite that way.
*** And we better keep doing so until I finish my dissertation, or I’ll have little to say!
**** And I don’t mean “in question” in a Latour, Reassembling the Social, sort of way. That book has to follow the sociologist’s understanding of society as being ontologically prior (or equal) to the individual. I don’t know if we can skip a step and jump straight to it.

Liquidity and the Sociology of Knowledge: “How To Value” Toxic Assets

How do we know what an asset is worth? I want to argue that, societally, we have decided that there is one best answer to this question: the market price*. Unfortunately for us, the market price can only work as measure of value when certain felicity conditions are met. Namely, the market must be functioning ’smoothly’ or ‘normally’ or with sufficient liquidity (I am being a bit vague here on purpose). Carruthers and Stinchcombe (1999) wrote an article arguing that liquidity is “an issue in the sociology of knowledge”. Carruthers and Stinchcombe argue that we can only think about markets and liquidity once goods have been standardized – that is, there cannot be a market for truly heterogeneous goods, because the price of one gives us no information about the value of the others**.

Why this little digression on markets and felicity conditions? I was watching last Thursday’s Daily Show when the guest, the author of a recent book on the collapse of Bear Stearns, made a common enough argument: that we no longer know “how to value” toxic assets. What interested me was the difference between knowing the value of something and knowing “how to” value it (a difference the guest did not discuss much). As a society, we still know how to value anything: just look at its current market price. The problem with toxic assets is that the felicity conditions for the market no longer hold. That is, we no longer see the market for such assets (which exists, even if there are relatively few trades) as sufficient. It’s not simply that fewer people are trading, but rather, we’ve lost faith in the tools that we used to make such assets “hold together” (cf. Desrosieres). The bond rating agencies and the quantitative magicians that successfully built homogeneous assets no longer can do so, and thus purchases of specific assets no longer constitute a market.

So, to return to my earlier point, do we not know how to value these assets or do we simply not know their value? I think, perhaps, we do not even know what these assets are. That is, we have a failure in our practical ontology. Things that were treated as the same, that held together, have since fallen apart. If there were simply a decline in the number of transactions, a government agency could step in and start buying up assets (as has been attempted or proposed several times since the middle of 2008, e.g. the original TARP proposal). But if the problem is not just one of # of transactions, but rather liquidity in the Carruthers and Stinchcombe sense of information from one transaction being useful to understand the value of another potential transaction because the two goods are commensurable/homogeneous, then simply upping the number of transactions cannot help. If we want to rebuild our knowledge about the value of currently toxic assets, we first have to rebuild the homogeneity of those assets. But I’m not sure we actually want to do that – these assets failed to hold together (counterperformed?) in a spectacular way once already. Does that make sense?

There’s a larger issue here that I’m having trouble nailing down into words, but I’ll give it a go. There are some preconditions about stability over time that we need to make our current economic arrangements functional. For example, we often discuss inflation expectations and (related) expectations about interest rates. If bankers believe that there will be large shifts in inflation rates or interest rates, they may become incredibly reticent to loan out money. This can, in turn, create some of the conditions they feared***. But I wonder if the same kind of reasoning (although not necessarily the same kind of self-fulfilling loop) holds for other aspects of our economic system. For example, if 20 years ago you began to work at Ford, thinking that your skills as a factory worker would be sufficient to get you through life, and today you are laid off, what do you do? How do teenagers or young adults right now decide what skills to invest in, given the rapid pace of change witnessed in their lifetimes? When change (another semi-purposefully vague term here) happens at a pace significantly faster than generational, how do we adapt? It’s one thing for a company to close down because it made a bad bet as to how technology and society were going to move (in terms of capacities or preferences), but how do you deal with entire segments of the population who made similarly reasonable, but ultimately infelicitous, bets about the future?

For starters, we’re going to need a bigger welfare state…

* I think of this as constituting a “market epistemology”, a term I think I coined, though apparently Da Costa uses the term “market episteme” in a 2007 article sitting on my desk waiting to be read. I want the term to capture stories like the one Porter (1995) tells about how the Army Corps of Engineers in the US always uses a market price for an input whenever one can be found, because those numbers seem somehow less arbitrary or more valid. I am working on telling a similar story with regards to the national income accounts and debates over how to value non-market labor. [EDIT: An alert reader reminds me that GFE. According to google scholar, about a dozen articles have used the term in one way or another. Oh well, just another story of academic convergent evolution.

** I am reminded here of Peter Levin’s interesting discussion of “Markets 2.0″ in a vaguely recent blog post, incidentally written on my birthday last year.

*** This post was also inspired in part by the recent post on SocFinance about performativity, self-fulfilling prophecies and the idea of “economic fundamentals”. The whole idea of economic fundamentals is fascinating to me – why do choose to enshrine certain arrangements as “fundamental” while others are more contingent or risky? There has to be some idea of ‘fixed-ness’ across time to those things we name as fundamental. But, at a deeper level, those fundamentals are built on things like preferences and technology, which are very malleable over the short and long term. But, in order to make the whole system work right now, we seem to want to recast some of the malleable, social underpinnings of the economy as fundamental. That works well enough if the timespan of changes is long enough, and gradual enough, as it has mostly been. But that need not continue. So, I think we need to inquire into what makes something an “economic fundamental” and whether our current set of fundamentals will work well into the future as foundations for an economic system.

The Real and the Financial: Baseline Scenario Updated

If you aren’t reading The Baseline Scenario, I highly recommend it. In addition to detailed posts explaining economic and financial concepts both simple and arcane, the Baseline Scenario (TBS) also produces an actual baseline scenario – an expected financial forecast against which to compare future events. The newest update to that scenario came out on Tuesday, here, and includes an excellent summary of all the recent updates in political action to try and combat the coming depression. Some highlights:

The global economy remains weak across the board, with no significant signs of improvement since our last baseline. The one positive sign is that some forecasters are beginning to recognize that growth in 2010 is not a foregone conclusion. The OECD, for example, now forecasts contraction of 4.3% in 2009 for the OECD area as a whole – and 0.1% contraction in 2010. This is broadly with our previous ”L-shaped” recovery view.

Nothing too surprising here. More interesting to me is the way that they divide up the administration’s actions. I think this division is fairly conventional, but still fascinating to me:

The Obama administration’s responses to date can be grouped into three broad areas: the financial sector, the real economy, and monetary policy. In each case, the administration has made great efforts that either are yet to pay off or will not pay off.

The main recent interventions in the financial sector are the stress tests (no longer credible, according to TBS), and the new “Public-Private Investment Partnership”, which they read as the administration trying to leverage the last few dollars they can get without having to go back to a congress with bailout fatigue. What I find most interesting is the way we divide out the “financial sector” from the “real economy” only to talk about how interdependent they are. We might shout, “Save the financial sector, save the real economy!” But where is the stark division coming from in the first place? Don’t people who work for banks still.. work? Don’t they produce valuable goods and services, just like autoworkers, professors, cooks and babysitters? What makes the financial not real?

I’m reminded of a recent quote I read from this article by Nikolas Rose about the silliness of distinguishing ideas and their contexts:

“[It] is certainly as unsatisfactory to seek to explain new modes of cognition by pointing to “social conditions” as it is to point to “economic needs” or “political functions”. But even to pose the question in this way is to become locked in the interminable debates about the relations between “ideas” and their “social context”. Social conditions are never active in human affairs as raw experiences but only in and through certain systems of meaning and value. Ideas are constitutively social in that they are formed and circulated within very material apparatuses for the production, delimitation and authorization of truth. It is perhaps time, once and for all, to cease to distinguish the intellectual from the social only to ask how they are related.” (681)

While I am convinced of Rose’s argument, I’m not sure when it comes to the financial sector. What do we get from keeping and reinforcing this distinction? What does it obscure?