Political Economy is Depressing

I don’t want to turn the overall tone of this blog more conservative, especially as I’m detecting a slow but certain leftward trend in my political views, but I’m afraid this is going to be another conservative post. This is not, however, an anti-Occupy-Wall-Street post, just an anti-Marxism one.

Partly due to Occupy Wall Street, I was reading some Marxist theory-distilled, condensed, simplified, etc, but in book form, and it seems to cover the basics- and it’s really startling to see how so many of the arguments have remained essentially unchanged. Post-scarcity economics has always been a contradiction in terms but at least it is something that can be considered in a science-fictional setting; however, a similar optimism about the abundance of the industrial age and the bounty of the coming era seems to me to be woven into much of Marxist theory.

The basic idea that wealth becomes ever more concentrated and that this is the inevitable product of the system and so on is something that I have a certain amount of sympathy with, but on the other hand, the clear failure of Marx‘s theory that wages will always be pushed down to subsistence levels and that productivity gains will always be captured by capital and not labour do not seem to be sufficiently impressed in the minds of those who continue to call themselves Marxists. Even more, the simple fact that Marx’s theory of human nature- human nature having always been the largest and most obvious impediment to the success of practically every alternative to plain old capitalism that has ever been suggested or implemented- was wrong doesn’t seem to be fazing anyone in the slightest. Clearly, though, the less-than-necessarily-pliant selfishness of man is a fact that most people grow up to accept (I have always thought this rather than a decreasing sympathy for unfortunates was at the core of that old joke: “if you’re not a socialist before 20, you have no heart; if you are a socialist after 20, you have no head.”)

This, then, is why the “why don’t these people have any actual demands?” question is worth asking, all rhetoric about pushing “the idea” and “maintaining unity” and “not allowing ourselves to be boxed in” aside. (I feel fairly comfortable calling it rhetoric because after all the focus on rhetoric is precisely what “momentum” and “the idea” are all about.) I can accept their premises in the narrowest sense: inequality is widening, and this is bad. I can’t accept their details because the details vary with every telling*, and I can’t accept their solutions because there aren’t any**. Capitalism-as-she-is-practised may well be a system nobody wants, but neither an alternative workable system nor a feasible transition to it (the bigger hurdle, in my opinion) seem to be on offer.

PS: This isn’t to say there’s nowhere to go from here, of course. The system could use more than a few tweaks, and a fair bit of re-shaping. It’s not going to change it’s essential incentive-based structure, that’s all.

PS2: And, of course, burning books is bad.

* I mean, of course crony capitalism is bad, of course banks shouldn’t be given bailouts and then turn around and hand their executives huge bonuses, of course we should avoid moral hazards and try for a more stable, better balanced financial system- but yet again, these aren’t details, those are practically tautologies!

**Some solutions that have been proposed by some people, like a well-targeted debt jubilee, I actually think make sense. (I will, however, wager a small sum of money that no broad-based debt jubilee will happen in the United States for the next 5 years.) The same goes for a reasonable tax increase, although I have a better sense for the numbers than to suggest that it can be restricted to the top 1% and still be sufficient to reduce the deficit.

Ooh, and here’s an inkling of the sort of crap I’m talking about.

The Undue Simplification of Political Discourse

Image via Wikipedia

Maybe you don’t want to get as complex as that title, but you could do with being a teensy bit more complex than this:

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever. No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Who’s saying otherwise?[1] Rush Limbaugh isn’t even saying otherwise, he’s just ranting at perceived tonal issues and liberals and Marxists. Most minarchists still think you need a state for providing security and some subset of those think you need one for public infrastructure. This isn’t really news. This isn’t something that anyone but the odd anarchist needs convincing about. Of course you set aside a certain amount of your earnings for public goods. The problem isn’t to convince people that they need some sort of a state. The problem is to convince people that this state should do all the things it does today, and that they have to pay for it.

PS: Of course Elizabeth Warren isn’t the only one “unduly simplifying” the debate. She isn’t even on the list of prime offenders. But this is the sort of simplification that even otherwise intelligent people feel the need to produce as a manifesto, hence the post.

[1]Aside from objecting to “the rest of us”-what, factory owners don’t pay taxes- and “paying it forward” framing vs “paying back”, at least.

Via pol sifter on flickr

The sharpest pain is the loss of hope,

The dissolution of a fantasy.

The snatching away of what might have been,

Not the fading away of what once was.

The dying sun,

No mere wilting flower.

I am wearing blue swallow-tail coats

and canary yellow pants.

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Flash Reviews

Limitless:

Never watch this film sober. Not because it’s a bad film, but because a certain level of disorientation greatly enhances your ability to appreciate the basic premise of this movie (Bradley Cooper gets hold of a “super-intelligence” drug that lets him do a series of implausible things that he couldn’t do before, but with a catch: it only lasts a day and you die if you stop taking it.) Otherwise, a perfectly serviceable if not all that realistic (which is?) thriller.

Midnight in Paris:

I don’t know why people like Woody Allen‘s characters, because none of them have the faintest bit of subtlety (at least in this movie). It is, however, an absolutely wonderful film despite that, and I’m not sure if it even counts as a flaw when you consider that the extraordinary characters that inhabited 1920s Paris are the major draw of the film. Although the ones I found irritatingly stereotyped were all from the present day- even “anybody want to FIGHT?” Hemingway is handled with a certain respect. And now I really want to finally read something by Scott Fitzgerald.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner:

I cried! Which is possibly because I was a teeny bit drunk and because I’m just that sort of person, because this is actually very much a feel-good film. Given the premise- white girl wants to marry a black guy- the movie is set up in such a way as to ensure that going ahead with it is the most obvious decision ever (wiki tells me that this was very much intentional: “the young Sidney Poitier, was purposely created idealistically perfect, so that the only possible objection to his marrying Joanna would be his race, or the fact she had only known him for ten days: the character has thus graduated from a top school, begun innovative medical initiatives in Africa, refused to have premarital sex with his fiancée despite her willingness, and leaves money on his future father-in-law’s desk in payment for a long distance phone call he has made.”) In any case, it’s a very enjoyable film and is heartily recommended.

Shit My Dad Says (pilot episode):

It’s not like it’s any worse-definitely no better- than a lot of sitcoms, but I can certainly understand why it didn’t gain a major audience. There’s a certain shock at finding, well, shocking things in your twitter feed that makes the original medium far more conducive to this sort of humour than a sitcom, where it’s actually a very conventional sort of premise- Shatner might as well be Frasier‘s dad!

I’m pretty sure there was at least one other movie that I watched recently, but I can’t seem to remember it, so I’ll just assume that it can’t have been very good.

I’m going to the UK!

Stonehenge

And yes, I realize it’s terrifically bad timing to go to London. Which is ironic because I was feeling rather lucky to be going at what I thought was rather good timing, before these riots started. And now people are talking about curfews and even the upscale neighbourhoods are getting torched, and… argh. I will now proceed to ignore it for the rest of this post.

Edinburgh

 

I’m going to England! To London and Cambridge and Oxford and Bath and Stonehenge and Brighton! I’m going to Edinburgh, and the Festival (and the Fringe) is on! I won’t have a laptop, so I won’t be online that much, although I am taking my new iPhone 4, so I should hopefully be able to check in every now and then. This time, at least, I hope I’ll be able to write up something about the trip.

Reluctant Apple Fanboy: iPhone 4 vs Galaxy S2

You'll find this image in every single post comparing the two, but who am I to break ranks?

I’ve had an iPhone 3G for about a year and a half now, and while I have been less than happy with a LOT of things about it[1], it’s certainly been enough of a positive influence that I’m sure I wouldn’t willingly go back to using a mediocre-phone, for lack of a better term. So now that it’s time to switch- and it really is, I bought the phone second-hand, it fell into the sea, it has scratches on the screen and I can feel some sort of buzzing sound in the background when I use it sometimes, which can’t possibly be a good sign for continued use- I was pretty sure that I’d want to get either the iPhone 4 or, more preferably, one of the better Android-based models. My choice up until an hour back was the Samsung Galaxy S2. It has far better specs- faster dual core processor, more RAM, a nicer camera, a better form factor, you can increase the memory relatively cheaply by using micro-SD cards, and so on. But when you actually use it, as my uncle exhaustively showed me, the story’s a little more nuanced.

For starters, very strangely, Samsung has insisted on fitting this phone with some sort of colour display enhancement, which means that everything you see in this is quite noticeably different from most standard displays or from “life”, as you can see if you compare photos. This would have been OK because it really does look quite nice in most cases, except for one thing: you can’t turn it off. There ARE 3 display modes which apply various levels of enhancement but all of them give you substantially different images from what you would see on a “normal” screen. This won’t be a problem for a lot of people and I’m still deciding if this is an issue for me, but for anyone who really cares about the “true” colours of something as opposed to how crisp a movie looks- and it definitely looks crisper, if much darker, even with the brightness turned all the way up- this might be a dealbreaker.

Then, the battery life. The battery theoretically has a greater capacity than the iPhone but possibly because of the better specs it does not, in fact, last as long. This might not be a major issue because it does last 6-8 hours of “active” usage, but it’s certainly less than ideal, and I can think of lots of situations where I would want more than 10 hours between charges.

Third, there’s the fact that it really isn’t as quickly responsive as the iPhone. I’m sure loading times for games and so on will be faster- that dual core processor and extra RAM must show up somewhere- but the basic touch sensitivity is just a teeny bit less. Not necessarily very irritating, but certainly noticeable, even when you’re not looking for it.

Fourth, there’s the screen resolution, which is quite a bit less. This is as advertised, but that doesn’t help the fact that if you’re going to be reading something on it, you’d have to scroll much longer on the galaxy s2 than on the iPhone 4, even with the bigger screen. The iPhone does look positively puny if you set them next to each other, though.

Now, all of these are minor points, and it’s entirely possible that I’m overweighing the small inconveniences and underweighing the substantially greater power of the Galaxy S2, and that awesomely large 4.3″ screen. A lot of these bugs like the colour enhancement are meant to be features, or are inevitable side effects of features, and they probably are features for some people in some contexts. My initial plan was to get a decent Android phone for the present and see how the iPhone 5 will be when it comes out, which probably will not be very long. But at least for now, despite my initial bias, I think I’m going to stick with Apple.

Footnotes:

[1]Where do I start? The biggest issues:

1. Apple blatantly screws over people with older phones, as evidenced by the iOS 4.0 update rigmarole for the iPhone 3G. This update is by far my biggest reason for hating Apple.
2. You need to resort to some extremely inconvenient workarounds to do anything to this phone without using iTunes every step of the way. I don’t really hate iTunes, I just hate being forced to rely on it.
3. They… well, let’s just say they don’t have the cleanest corporate image.
4. I really, really don’t want to be yet another Apple fanboy. Oh, but look…

A Prediction on Greece

Image by UggBoy♥UggGirl

I’ll just make it here, for the record: no matter what happens in the Greece/EU situation- whether the ECB keep feeding them short-term, expensive money, whether the Germans suddenly decide that the Greeks are just dandy folks and give them all the money they need at the low interest rates they need, whether the Greeks decide that they shouldn’t cheat on their taxes and they should totally work really hard and cut their public sector in half and sell off government assets and pay back all the money they owe as soon as possible, whether they default without pulling out of the Euro, whether they pull out and do some sort of restructuring or soft default, whether they pull out and cut themselves off from the world- no matter which of various unlikely, utopian or too-horrible-to-comprehend scenarios take place, there are going to be tremendous opportunities for arbitrage somewhere in the system.

Yes, some of these might only be feasible on a small scale, some only on a large scale, some if you know the right people in various Greek/EU organizations, many in ways that legitimate global financial entities cannot employ, but they’ll be there.

(Inspired in part by this.)

Random

I barely started on and am (more or less) giving up on the slow-carb diet, mostly because my mother keeps nagging me to eat something else and partly because it’s just not very easy to do here. I’m still going to drink my coffee black and skip sweets and eat fewer carbs, but there’s just no way to live in this town and cut carbs completely. And screw it, I’m going to eat fruits, at least. I need something sweet after a meal.

The car I use, the old Honda City, has some sort of problem with the starter. Since I’ve managed to scrape 2 of the 4 corners in the month that I’ve been here (1 more than once) they really don’t trust me to take out another car, meaning that I need to walk or use autos (or buses, but that’s ridiculously hard and not even possible for most places I want to go) if I want to get anywhere, which makes things a little inconvenient. And there aren’t that many places to go, anyway, and no one to visit.

Speaking of which, I’ve been home for a whole MONTH! 10 days of which was spent in Mumbai, Delhi and Leh (I’ll put up a short post and maybe some pictures soon- some are being uploaded on facebook as I write this) but even so, that’s just far too long. And, I wil be jobless until mid-August, at the very least. The HR people tell me that they don’t have a posting for me yet, which means that not only do I not know when I’ll join, I don’t even know where or in what precise segment. There are trips planned- Chennai for my convocation in 2 more weeks, and maybe a much shorter version of the Europe tour that I had hoped I could do earlier, mostly with family- but this is really a huge wait. I suppose I should enjoy the time off while I can, though.

I remember seeing the trailers for Transformers 3, thinking it would probably be crappy, and knowing that I still would end up watching it. And I did. And oh, fuck me, but was it.