Writing a Conclusion

I'm sure you've noticed, if you do any significant amount of writing (and maybe even if you don't), it's much easier to write a decent beginning than a satisfying ending. Here, I'm talking about short-form nonfiction: blogs, essays, book reports, campaign speeches, and the like. (Wait. Did I say "nonfiction"? Delete campaign speeches.)

Notice I did not say beginnings are easy. If they were, my earlier piece on "How to Write an Opening Sentence" probably wouldn't have gotten 50,000+ page-views. No, my friend, beginnings are tough. But a good ending is harder. Usually. Most always.

Why is that? Why should an ending be any harder than a beginning? Maybe it's because of how the brain works. Thoughts about a subject don't just sudddenly, neatly end. More often than not, you go on rehashing and rethinking things with no clear end. "The end" happens when something else, some more pressing set of thoughts, intercedes. Our lives, our thoughts, are not full of neat resolutions.

G.K. Chesterton had a charming way of
inverting logic to prove the absurdity of things.

The easiest kind of writing to wrestle to the ground is the argumentative essay. Here, you can sum up, recap, return to the beginning, restate the thesis, or say something like "In the end, it all comes down to X. Either we accept X, or we don't. But if we reject X we have to be willing to accept Y. And that's something most people aren't ready to swallow." Or some such nonsense.

It is sometimes (though not as often as you'd think) profitable to begin a piece of nonfiction writing with a famous quotation. In reality, quotations work much better in a conclusion. You could, for example, invoke G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton once said of Christianity, "It is not that Christianity has been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and left untried." After quoting Chesterton, you can say: "And so it is with X. For all the well-meaning talk about X, it has yet to be tried." (Or: "Perhaps it is time X is tried in earnest.") Follow with: "If it fails, we'll know soon enough." Or: "If it fails, we will at least have tried something reasonable before going back to business as usual, which we already know doesn't work."

One of the most satisfying endings of all times occurs in the final sentence of Nora Ephron's classic Esquire essay, "A Few Words about Breasts." (Also available in PDF form here.) The essay ends this way:

     After I went into therapy, a process that made it possible for me to tell total strangers at cocktail parties that breasts were the hang-up of my life, I was often told that I was insane to have been bothered by my condition. I was also frequently told, by close friends, that I was extremely boring on the subject. And my girl friends, the ones with nice big breasts, would go on endlessly about how their lives had been far more miserable than mine. Their bra straps were snapped in class. They couldn’t sleep on their stomachs. They were stared at whenever the word “mountain” cropped up in geography. And Evangeline, good God what they went through every time someone had to stand up and recite the Prologue to Longfellow’s Evangeline: “... stand like druids of eld... / With beards that rest on their bosoms.” It was much worse for them, they tell me. They had a terrible time of it, they assure me. I don’t know how lucky I was, they say.
      I have thought about their remarks, tried to put myself in their place, considered their point of view. I think they are full of shit.

What I like about this ending is not just that it's personal, direct, and honest, but that it tapers down to a single, short, final statement, ending in a hot-button word: shit.

I saw a fine college admission essay recently in which the entire essay read like one of those Dos Equis commercials (The Most Interesting Man in the World), which is to say, it was chock full of self-aggrandizing hyperbole, outrageous stuff like "I once caught a meteor in my bare hand. I taught a unicorn to use the Obamacare website. When I met Chuck Norris, I taught him to curtsy. I have actually identified UFOs.") I've done this ridiculous thing, I've done that ridiculous thing. The final sentence of the essay was: "But I have not yet gone to college."

He got in.

If you're writing something right now and are struggling for an ending, try this: Keep just what you've got, but add a short "knock-out punch" statement, either at the end of the final paragraph, or as its own paragraph. (Note, by the way, that Nora Ephron's final sentence would have worked quite well as its own one-line paragraph.)

It's much harder to find a tidy ending for an open-ended discussion: for example, a book review (or other piece of writing that's not inherently argumentative). One possible strategy is to juxtapose the subject's strengths and weaknesses. "In Death of a Platypus, Frumpenheimer reveals himself to be a master of irony and an erudite student of the history of mime. What he lacks in humility, he makes up for in logic, and charm. He weds the wit of Thurber with the iconoclasm of Stein. The overall effect is arresting, mesmerizing, and sublime." Or "The overall effect is not to be found in any other writer of the late twentieth century," optionally followed up with: "which is why Frumpenheimer will be studied for decades, maybe centuries, to come." (Notice how breaking a sentence with commas near the very end causes the pace to slow, then stop. Compare the effect of ending the Frumpenheimer sentence at "decades.")

Commas are small pauses; they're like tapping the brakes. As you get to the end of your essay, start tapping the brakes.

I have often found it useful, when trying to bring a discussion to a close, to employ the multi-stage retro-rocket approach. This calls for a medium-length paragraph that sets up a short next-to-last paragraph, which in turn sets up a one-sentence final paragraph. It's like the retro-rocket that precedes the parachute that precedes the bouncy-balls on the Martian lander.

MARTIAN LANDER PATTERN:

Paragraph X (retro-rocket): It's not enough to consider A or to argue B. A and B make for powerful arguments, until you consider Q and R; and then they don't have the same impact.

Paragraph Y (parachute): The fact is, A needs to be reconsidered in the light of S. Then we may find out T.

Paragraph Z (bouncy-ball): The alternative, U, is unthinkable.

Another pattern is to end with an anecdote, then tie it back into the discussion.

Or you can speculate. "History doesn't record whether so-and-so ever thought about the consequences of such-and-such. He/she/they certainly couldn't have foreseen ABC. But here we are, still trying to grapple with the problem of XYZ. No doubt, future generations of experts will continue to grapple with it, for years to come." Optionally: "One can hope the next generation of PQR will [find the progress that has eluded the current generation of PQR] or [see the problem in a new, and more profitable, light] or [not encounter the same stumbling blocks that make ABC such a impasse today] or [whatever]."

Listen to the Rhythm
Learn to recognize when the ball hasn't rolled to a complete stop. Quite often, what you've written, thinking or wishing you've nailed the last sentence, isn't really the last sentence. In my recent essay on The New Weird (The New Weird being an emerging—but fundamentally stillborn, IMHO—literary genre), I had written, toward the end:

It's not enough for fiction to permutate and pervert the past and serve it up again in shocking colors. Serve us up something new.

I so wanted to be able to end it right there. But I could tell, from the cadence, that the ball had not yet stopped rolling. More needed to be said. I could have added: "Something tasty. Something memorable." But it still wouldn't have felt finished. I could have added more: "I want to sup for hours, and be filled for days. As it is now, I feel malnourished." Not working. The ball's still rolling.

I decided to add yet another short paragraph. (Try to make paragraphs shorter, near the end. Sentences too. Claues within sentences, also. Give the reader subverbal cues that momentum is—in fact—gradually, gradually, slowing.)

I'm still not 100% happy with the final additional paragraph I came up with:

As a reader of fiction, I want to move beyond Tolkien-in-a-party-dress. I want the next New Weird to come without a rearview mirror. The current New Weird isn't doing it for me.

Arguably, the final sentence could have worked better as its own standalone paragraph. (Possible rewrite: "Call me Old Normal, but the New Weird isn't doing it for me.")

Possibly, I could have added yet another additional final sentence, as its own paragraph:

Then again, maybe I'm just being weird.

I could've used the circle-back technique. How? Add a new starting sentence (as its own paragraph) to the top of the essay: "If I had to sum myself up in one word, as a reader of fiction, I'm fussy." Then end the essay with a one-sentence paragraph (after all the previous bellyaching): "Like I said at the beginning. I'm fussy."

In Short
Some possible ways to end a piece of writing (by no means an all-inclusive list!):

• Make a statement at the beginning of the piece, with an explicit aim of returning to it at the end. The ending revisits the beginning.
• End with a question. Make a statement of how things should be, and then ask: Isn't that what most people mean by XYZ? Perhaps add: The question isn't whether we can afford to do XYZ, but whether we can afford not to.
• End with a warning. "If we don't do XYZ, maybe we deserve what we get." (Or "maybe the so-and-sos will win out after all, and then Archie Bunker will be King, and we'll all be happy and live forever." New paragraph: "Probably not, though.")
• Suggest a reason for hope. Tell how a situation can be improved, then: "Maybe then we'll have a free society worthy of the name. With liberty and justice for all."
• Use a quotation, either as the final statement or the beginning of the final paragraph (after which, you explain why it sums up the subject in question).
• Issue a call for action. "There's no reason the biggest retail corporations in the world should pay less than a subsistence wage. Minimum-wage workers of the world, unite!"
• Restate the thesis in the light of everything that's been disussed. "Given the fact that XYZ, the question isn't A, but B." Optionally follow up with "And that's a choice that might not sit well with the majority of [people; Americans; voters; politicians; puppeteers]."
• Use retro-rockets. Instead of a concluding paragraph, write three paragraphs, each one successively shorter. 
• Tap the brakes. Make your final few sentences short, or (if it's a long sentence) break it up with commas.

When in doubt, write half a dozen endings. Keep the one that deserves to live.

Then come back a day later, club that one to death, and write the real conclusion.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

A History Lesson for Scotland

In Guan's recent post on this blog, "Scotland, sterling and the debt," he notes that Scotland will hold a referendum on independence from the United Kingdom in September 2014. The Scottish Government suggests that an independent Scotland should be in a currency union with the UK. Guan writes:

"There are probably some sound arguments for that: it could take years to join the euro, and much of Scotland’s trade is with rest-of-UK, and vice versa.  

On the other hand, events of recent years have kind of cooled the enthusiasm for currency unions in Europe. It’s not at all clear that it would be a good idea for Scotland to adopt sterling. The UK Government’s position is, sensibly enough, that a currency union would be unworkable without a fiscal and political union, which is kind of absurd when the goal is Scottish independence."

For historical perspective on a potential Sterling Area, we should look back to the Austria-Hungary monetary union of 1867-1918. The monetary union began following the Habsburgs' defeat by Prussia. In "The Logic of Compromise," Marc Flandreau explains that:

"The Austro-Hungarian monetary union was not the result of a monetary marriage but the by-product of a fiscal divorce. Austria and Hungary became in 1867 two sovereign budgetary entities. In the process, they retained a common bank of issue and thus formed a defacto monetary union that would operate until its post-World War I collapse."

A Sterling Area currency union with an independent Scotland would likewise be a product of divorce, not of marriage. An annex to the Scottish Fiscal Commission Working Group's First Report assessing possible currency options for an independent Scotland notes that there are two ways to retain Sterling: through a formal monetary union or through an informal arrangement ("Sterlingisation.") The Scottish Parliament is in favor of the formal monetary union, in which the Bank of England would make monetary policy decisions in consideration of conditions in both Scotland and the rest of the UK.

Scotland's proposed formal monetary union would resemble the set-up in the Austria-Hungary monetary union. At the start of the Compromise, the Austrian National Bank was the sole bank of issue for Austria and Hungary. As Flandreau details, Hungary gained increasing control over the central bank over the years. In 1878 the Bank became the Austro-Hungarian Bank. The Austro-Hungarian Bank inherited its predecessor's balance sheet and became a federal institution, with Managements in both Vienna and Budapest. At least two of the twelve Councillors had to be Hungarian. Over the pre-WWI years, there was "a definite trend in Hungary's formal influence within the common Bank. This trend was also reflected in substantive policies of the Bank...The Austro-Hungarian National Bank transformed itself from being a predominantly Austrian institution in 1867 into being a truly binational institution."

Flandreau explains the political economy behind the transformation at the Austro-Hungarian National Bank:

"Consider a monetary union comprising two parts, a 'large' (Austria) and a 'small' (Hungary) country. The common central bank delivers a range of services that are valuable to both parts, but not equally... If power is proportional to size, the small country has very little control over common decisions. It is bound by the discipline of the union without being able to influence decision-making in a way that would address its own specific interests. Co-operation (that is, participation in the union) is sub-optimal and the small country prefers to quit. Sustained co-operation requires that the large country accepts a decision-making process in which the small country receives a greater voting share than size alone would predict... 

However, it is not clear why the large country should accept this dilution of power. The normal outcome should therefore be secession...[Casella (1992)] shows that if co-operation delivers a number of public goods that are useful to all parts, then the large country may nonetheless accept a reduction of its relative ability to set decisions, since the additional output may compensate for the initial loss."

Flandreau's logic is relevant for a possible Sterling Area. The Fiscal Commission notes that "Over the medium term it may well be in Scotland’s interests to move to an alternative arrangement, should either the performance of the Scottish economy change or the preferences of the people of Scotland change." A "Sterling Area Bank" would have to be acceptable enough to both parts of the Sterling Area to be maintained. In the Austria-Hungary arrangement, Austria had to provide Hungary with considerable incentives to stay on board. Austria was willing to make the necessary concessions because the benefits to Austria of keeping Hungary in the union were sufficiently great. These benefits may have included dynastic and imperial considerations, maintenance of the crown as an international currency, and maintenance of bilateral trade.

According to Flandreau, then, monetary compromises are determined by bargaining power.  It is not clear to me whether the bargaining power dynamics between Scotland and the rest of the UK would be suitable for sustained cooperation. As commenter Absalon says in response to Guan's post, "Scotland would not need the permission of England to continue to use sterling any more than Panama and Ecuador need American permission to use the dollar. Of course, Panama and Ecuador have no say in setting the policies of the Fed." If an independent Scotland wanted some amount of power in a supranational or joint shareholder central bank, it would need enough bargaining power. Bilateral trade is one consideration. Guan describes another attempt to assert bargaining power:

"The argument of the Scottish National Party-led government is that the British pound and the Bank of England (name notwithstanding) are “assets” of the United Kingdom. Assets and liabilities of the United Kingdom should be split up among the constituent countries, and if rest-of-UK refuses to divide the sterling 'asset', then Scotland would refuse to assume its share of the liabilities—the UK national debt."

In Austria-Hungary, Austria was directly responsible for the pre-1867 common debt. Hungary paid an annuity corresponding to a one-third share. (Unlike in the Eurozone, no "stability pact" was signed.) But it took more than just the desire for Hungary to pay its share of the common debt to hold the currency union together. Times were very different during the Austria-Hungary currency union, so there are limits to the lessons that can be drawn. But the union did manage to exist without a formal fiscal union. In many ways, it was beneficial for Hungary. Scotland would like to enjoy similar benefits, but it may not have the necessary bargaining power that Hungary had.

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This is my last post on Not Quite Noahpinion before it reverts to Noahpinion. I really appreciate the opportunity to post here for the past few months and thank you all for reading and commenting. I'll be working on my dissertation and (at least occasionally) posting on my own blog. Keep in touch. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

The 2100-Word Paragraph

And so, having just spent 850 words (see previous post) discussing the need for, or at least the usefulness of, verticality in writing (most particularly, screenwriting), I thought I might trot out an example of horizontality: writing that forces the reader to parse word by word by word (never paragraph by paragraph or stanza by stanza) through an extended piece of descriptive text.

The follow 2,107-word paragraph (which you can also find here) occurs in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, a book that won the 1974 National Book Award for Fiction (and would have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction that year, except for a passage that was deemed coprophilic). Widely considered a postmodern classic, Pynchon's idiosyncratic tribute to wartime paranoia has found a place on more than one list of 100 all-time greatest novels.

The setup: Two characters, Roger and Jessica, have come upon a church in the countryside outside Kent, England on a Sunday evening. World War II is in its final year. During a hymn, Jessica lapses into a dreamlike fugue state. 

Advent blows from the sea, which at sunset tonight shone green and smooth as iron-rich glass: blows daily upon us, all the sky above pregnant with saints and slender heralds' trumpets. Another year of wedding dresses abandoned in the heart of winter, never called for, hanging in quiet satin ranks now, their white-crumpled veils begun to yellow, rippling slightly only at your passing, spectator . . . visitor to the city at all the dead ends . . . Glimpsing in the gowns your own reflection once or twice, halfway from shadow, only blurred flesh-colors across the peau de soie, urging you in to where you can smell the mildew's first horrible touch, which was really the idea—covering all trace of her own smell, middleclass bride-to-be perspiring, genteel soap and powder. But virgin in her heart, in her hopes. None of your bright-Swiss or crystalline sea son here, but darkly billowed in the day with cloud and the snow falling like gowns in the country, gowns of the winter, gentle at night, a nearly windless breathing around you. In the stations of the city the prisoners are back from Indo-China, wandering their poor visible bones, light as dreamers or men on the moon, among chrome-sprung prams of black hide resonant as drumheads, blonde wood high-chairs pink and blue with scraped and mush-spattered floral decals, folding-cots and bears with red felt tongues, baby-blankets making bright pastel clouds in the coal and steam smells, the metal spaces, among the queued, the drifting, the warily asleep, come by their hundreds in for the holidays, despite the warnings, the gravity of Mr. Morrison, the tube under the river a German rocket may pierce now, even now as the words are set down, the absences that may be waiting them, the city addresses that surely can no longer exist. The eyes from Burma, from Tonkin, watch these women at their hundred perseverances—stare out of blued orbits, through headaches no Alasils can ease. Italian P/Ws curse underneath the mail sacks that are puffing, echo-clanking in now each hour, in seasonal swell, clogging the snowy trainloads like mushrooms, as if the trains have been all night underground, passing through the country of the dead. If these Eyeties sing now and then you can bet it's not "Giovinezza" but something probably from Rigoletto or La Boheme—indeed the Post Office is considering issuing a list of Nonacceptable Songs, with ukulele chords as an aid to ready identification. Their cheer and songfulness, this lot, is genuine up to a point—but as the days pile up, as this orgy of Christmas greeting grows daily beyond healthy limits, with no containment in sight before Boxing Day, they settle, themselves, for being more professionally Italian, rolling the odd eye at the lady evacuees, finding techniques of balancing the sack with one hand whilst the other goes playing "dead"—cioé, conditionally alive—where the crowds thicken most feminine, directionless . . . well, most promising. Life has to go on. Both kinds of prisoner recognize that, but there's no mano morto for the Englishmen back from CBI, no leap from dead to living at mere permission from a likely haunch or thigh—no play, for God's sake, about life-and-death! They want no more adventures: only the old dutch fussing over the old stove or warming the old bed, cricketers in the wintertime, they want the semi-detached Sunday dead-leaf somnolence of a dried garden. If the brave new world should also come about, a kind of windfall, why there'll be time to adjust certainly to that . . . But they want the nearly postwar luxury this week of buying an electric train set for the kid, trying that way each to light his own set of sleek little faces here, calibrating his strangeness, well-known photographs all, brought to life now, oohs and aahs but not yet, not here in the station, any of the moves most necessary: the War has shunted them, earthed them, those heedless destroying signalings of love. The children have unfolded last year's toys and found reincarnated Spam tins, they're hep this may be the other and, who knows, unavoidable side to the Christmas game. In the months between—country springs and summers—they played with real Spam tins—tanks, tank-destroyers, pillboxes, dreadnoughts deploying meat-pink, yellow and blue about the dusty floors of lumber-rooms or butteries, under the cots or couches of their exile. Now it's time again. The plaster baby, the oxen frosted with gold leaf and the human-eyed sheep are turning real again, paint quickens to flesh. To believe is not a price they pay—it happens all by itself. He is the New Baby. On the magic night before, the animals will talk, and the sky will be milk. The grandparents, who've waited each week for the Radio Doctor asking, What Are Piles? What Is Emphysema? What Is A Heart Attack? will wait up beyond insomnia, watching again for the yearly impossible not to occur, but with some mean residue—this is the hillside, the sky can show us a light—like a thrill, a good time you wanted too much, not a complete loss but still too far short of a miracle . . . keeping their sweatered and shawled vigils, theatrically bitter, but with the residue inside going through a new winter fermentation every year, each time a bit less, but always good for a revival at this season. . . . All but naked now, the shiny suits and gowns of their pubcrawling primes long torn to strips for lagging the hot-water pipes and heaters of landlords, strangers, for holding the houses' identities against the winter. The War needs coal. They have taken the next-to-last steps, attended the Radio Doctor's certifications of what they knew in their bodies, and at Christmas they are naked as geese under this woolen, murky, cheap old-people's swaddling. Their electric clocks run fast, even Big Ben will be fast now until the new spring's run in, all fast, and no one else seems to understand or to care. The War needs electricity. It's a lively game, Electric Monopoly, among the power companies, the Central Electricity Board, and other War agencies, to keep Grid Time synchronized with Greenwich Mean Time. In the night, the deepest concrete wells of night, dynamos whose locations are classified spin faster, and so, responding, the clock-hands next to all the old, sleepless eyes—gathering in their minutes whining, pitching higher toward the vertigo of a siren. It is the Night's Mad Carnival. There is merriment under the shadows of the minute-hands. Hysteria in the pale faces between the numerals. The power companies speak of loads, war-drains so vast the clocks will slow again unless this nighttime march is stolen, but the loads expected daily do not occur, and the Grid runs inching ever faster, and the old faces turn to the clock faces, thinking plot, and the numbers go whirling toward the Nativity, a violence, a nova of heart that will turn us all, change us forever to the very forgotten roots of who we are. But over the sea the fog tonight still is quietly scalloped pearl. Up in the city the arc-lamps crackle, furious, in smothered blaze up the center-lines of the streets, too ice-colored for candles, too chill-dropleted for holocaust . . . the tall red busses sway, all the headlamps by regulation newly unmasked now parry, cross, traverse and blind, torn great fistfuls of wetness blow by, desolate as the beaches beneath the nacre fog, whose barbed wire that never knew the inward sting of current, that only lay passive, oxidizing in the night, now weaves like underwater grass, looped, bitter cold, sharp as the scorpion, all the printless sand miles past cruisers abandoned in the last summers of peacetime that once holidayed the old world away, wine and olive-grove and pipe-smoke evenings away the other side of the War, stripped now to rust axles and brackets and smelling inside of the same brine as this beach you cannot really walk, because of the War. Up across the downs, past the spotlights where the migrant birds in autumn choked the beams night after night, fatally held till they dropped exhausted out of the sky, a shower of dead birds, the compline worshipers sit in the unheated church, shivering, voiceless as the choir asks: where are the joys? Where else but there where the Angels sing new songs and the bells ring out in the court of the King. Eia—strange thousand-year sigh—eia, warn wir da! were we but there . . . The tired men and their black bellwether reaching as far as they can, as far from their sheeps' clothing as the year will let them stray. Come then. Leave your war awhile, paper or iron war, petrol or flesh, come in with your love, your fear of losing, your exhaustion with it. All day it's been at you, coercing, jiving, claiming your belief in so much that isn't true. Is that who you are, that vaguely criminal face on your ID card, its soul snatched by the government camera as the guillotine shutter fell—or maybe just left behind with your heart, at the Stage Door Canteen, where they're counting the night's take, the NAAFI girls, the girls named Eileen, carefully sorting into refrigerated compartments the rubbery maroon organs with their yellow garnishes of fat—oh Linda come here feel this one, put your finger down in the ventricle here, isn't it swoony, it's still going . . . Everybody you don't suspect is in on this, everybody but you: the chaplain, the doctor, your mother hoping to hang that Gold Star, the vapid soprano last night on the Home Service programme, let's not forget Mr. Noel Coward so stylish and cute about death and the afterlife, packing them into the Duchess for the fourth year running, the lads in Hollywood telling us how grand it all is over here, how much fun, Walt Disney causing Dumbo the elephant to clutch to that feather like how many carcasses under the snow tonight among the white-painted tanks, how many hands each frozen around a Miraculous Medal, lucky piece of worn bone, half-dollar with the grinning sun peering up under Liberty's wispy gown, clutching, dumb, when the 88 fell—what do you think, it's a children's story? There aren't any. The children are away dreaming, but the Empire has no place for dreams and it's Adults Only in here tonight, here in this refuge with the lamps burning deep, in pre-Cambrian exhalation, savory as food cooking, heavy as soot. And 60 miles up the rockets hanging the measureless instant over the black North Sea before the fall, ever faster, to orange heat, Christmas star, in helpless plunge to Earth. Lower in the sky the flying bombs are out too, roaring like the Adversary, seeking whom they may devour. It's a long walk home tonight. Listen to this mock-angel singing, let your communion be at least in listening, even if they are not spokesmen for your exact hopes, your exact, darkest terror, listen. There must have been evensong here long before the news of Christ. Surely for as long as there have been nights bad as this one—something to raise the possibility of another night that could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night, leaving only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw, almost too frail, there's too much shit in these streets, camels and other beasts stir heavily outside, each hoof a chance to wipe him out, make him only another Messiah, and sure somebody's around already taking bets on that one, while here in this town the Jewish collaborators are selling useful gossip to Imperial Intelligence, and the local hookers are keeping the foreskinned invaders happy, charging whatever the traffic will bear, just like the innkeepers who're naturally delighted with this registration thing, and up in the capital they're wondering should they, maybe, give everybody a number, yeah, something to help SPQR Record-keeping . . . and Herod or Hitler, fellas (the chaplains out in the Bulge are manly, haggard, hard drinkers), what kind of a world is it ("You forgot Roosevelt, padre," come the voices from the back, the good father can never see them, they harass him, these tempters, even into his dreams: "Wendell Willkie!" "How about Churchill?" "'Arry Pollitt!") for a baby to come in tippin' those Toledos at 7 pounds 8 ounces thinkin' he's gonna redeem it, why, he oughta have his head examined . . .

It's hard to know what a modern-day literary agent (or one of their interns) would make of such a passage, so "wordy" by modern standards, so unapologetically given to the use of acronyms, obscure references, bits of Italian. (Note: Unless you're Italian, you probably didn't spot the rare Pynchon slip-up: He said cioé —immediately before "conditionally alive"—when he meant cioè, which in Italian means "that is to say," akin to the Latin neologism videlicet, usually shortened to viz.) And the book itself: so steadfastly storyless, interspersed with obtuse bits of half-dialog and soliloquy, characters wandering lazily in and out of flashbacks and reality, no discernible plot per se (other than the implied one of WWII itself), much less any "reversals," twists, or last-minute reveals . . . 300,000 words of meandering—and mostly horizontal—prose.

In any case. Not all verticality is good; not all horizontality is bad. Prose can and should go in whichever direction(s) it needs to go. Only, have a regard for the reader. If the road is bumpy, be sure the reader is strapped in tight. Make it impossible for him or her to be left behind. 

Then let it rip.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Scotland, sterling and the debt

Does your separatist movement have an infographic?

Scotland will hold a referendum on independence from the United Kingdom in September 2014, and the Scottish Government has just released a 670 page white paper on Scottish independence (conveniently available in both Kindle and ePub formats for nice bedtime reading). The white paper presents the government’s case that Scotland can and should be in a currency union with the rest of the UK.

There are probably some sound arguments for that: it could take years to join the euro, and much of Scotland’s trade is with rest-of-UK, and vice versa.

On the other hand, events of recent years have kind of cooled the enthusiasm for currency unions in Europe. It’s not at all clear that it would be a good idea for Scotland to adopt sterling. The UK Government’s position is, sensibly enough, that a currency union would be unworkable without a fiscal and political union, which is kind of absurd when the goal is Scottish independence.

But let’s read between the lines. The argument of the Scottish National Party-led government is that the British pound and the Bank of England (name notwithstanding) are “assets” of the United Kingdom. Assets and liabilities of the United Kingdom should be split up among the constituent countries, and if rest-of-UK refuses to divide the sterling “asset”, then Scotland would refuse to assume its share of the liabilities—the UK national debt.

(By the way, did you notice the reference to “the most optimistic scenario … by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, would be to cut public spending by £3bn more than the UK government plans by 2021”? Emphasis added, of course.)

This is a brilliant strategy and a win-win for the pro-independence campaign, given Scots’ apparent sentimental attachment to a currency issued by a bank that is named for their erstwhile enemy. They either get to keep sterling, or they get a huge chunk of debt relief. Given the quality of economic decision-making in London, it’s seems likely that rest-of-UK will go for the latter.

I think this is the endgame, assuming the referendum passes (which doesn’t seem so likely right now): an independent Scotland with its own currency, a geographic share of hydrocarbon reserves and no debt. Great way to start a country.

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New Quartz article: A battle for the soul of macroeconomics

Miles and I have a new article in Quartz, about the shakeup at the Minneapolis Fed, the ongoing battle between Freshwater and Saltwater macro (which Saltwater appears to be winning), and the history of modern (read: DSGE) macro.

It was very tricky to write this column, since A) we really don't know if the Minneapolis thing is part of the Saltwater/Freshwater battle, or whether it was just a personality conflict, and B) we wanted to take sides in the Saltwater/Freshwater battle without either endorsing or criticizing Kocherlakota's personnel decision. That is a tricky tightrope to walk, but I think we did a decent job.

Excerpts from the article:

Two of the Minneapolis Fed’s most eminent and long-serving economists, Patrick Kehoe and Ellen McGrattan, have been fired...[A]lthough the Minneapolis Fed shakeup could be due to any number of reasons—a personality conflict, a disagreement over the Fed bank’s mission, etc.–one possibility is that the personnel changes are related to Fed officials’ changing attitude toward business cycles... 

Patrick Kehoe, one of the economists dismissed from the Fed, is a key figure in a school of economics called “Freshwater Macroeconomics” (the other, Ellen McGrattan, is his frequent co-author)...If the Fed prints money to try to stimulate demand, [the Freshwater people] say, it will only succeed in creating inflation rather than reviving the economy... 

The Freshwater school gained enormous clout in the ‘80s. But in the ‘90s, there was a counterattack from the coast. The Saltwater macroeconomists believed that recessions were economic failures, and that monetary policy was important in fighting them...But one bastion of hard-line freshwater thinking held firm: “Minnesota macro.” The researchers at the University of Minnesota and the Minneapolis Fed have largely hung onto the belief that monetary policy can affect inflation, but can’t fight recessions. 

But there is good reason to think that this view is losing credibility at the Fed. 

Narayana Kocherlakota is...an important bellwether of Fed thinking. His views have shifted decisively toward believing that monetary policy can stabilize the economy. What changed his mind? The answer is obvious: the Great Recession, and the failure of large purchases of long-term government bonds and mortgage-backed assets—QE—to create inflation. It makes all the difference in the world when the No. 1 event shaping the questions macroeconomists ask is no longer the Great Inflation of the 1970s, but the Great Recession that still casts its shadow over the world. 

Nor is Kocherlakota the only Fed official to change his mind. So even if the Minneapolis Fed shakeup wasn’t caused by a clash of ideas, the Fed’s shift toward Saltwater macro is a real phenomenon... 

As QE ramped up, disputes broke out among Fed economists. Some, like Philadelphia Fed president Charles Plosser (himself a noted Freshwater researcher) and Minneapolis Fed president Narayana Kocherlakota, argued that QE would put us in danger of inflation. But as the Fed’s printing presses rattled on and inflation failed to materialize, some “hard money” advocates had second thoughts. Last year, Kocherlakota declared that he had changed his mind, and now supported QE... 

Kehoe and McGrattan’s dismissal drew loud protests from other members of the Freshwater school...Steve Williamson, a Freshwater economist at Washington University, blogged that Kocherlakota “seems intent on destroying the [Minneapolis Fed] as a research institution.” So whether or not the firings had anything to do with economic theories, Freshwater folks are concerned, and with good reason. A key part of the genesis of Freshwater macro was a desire to say something about monetary policy (i.e., why not to use it). If the Fed refuses to listen to leading Freshwater voices, then a big chunk of the real-world influence of this school of thought will be gone.

There's much more in the article (Miles' first draft was over 3000 words!), so read it all here.

Another difficult thing about writing this column was that it comes off sounding like we're critical of Kehoe's ideas, but I personally really like both of the Kehoe papers I've read! And one of those two papers is the paper where he criticizes New Keynesian (Saltwater) economics! In that paper, Kehoe acts as the "microfoundation police," pulling micro evidence to show that some of the assumptions in the most popular New Keynesian models don't add up. Since bad microfoundations really annoy me, I enjoyed that paper quite a lot, and it's one reason I'm a lot less sanguine about New Keynesian models than Miles!

(FYI, the other Kehoe paper I've read is this excellent paper on herd behavior.)

So the article ended up containing more pro-Saltwater boosterism than I would have included had I written it alone, but that's fine with me, because most of the Freshwater RBC-type models I've seen just assume away any role for monetary policy, so it doesn't make a lot of sense for the Fed to be using these. (Note that the "New Monetarist" models made by people like Steve Williamson don't make this assumption, and they're considered Freshwater too, so there's a distinction between "Minnesota macro" and "St. Louis macro" that was too subtle to put in the column.) Plus Freshwater microfoundations are probably even less realistic than Saltwater ones.

But anyway, I think the article turned out OK. I'd love to hear any feedback that people have.

Updates:

Mark Thoma thinks the shakeup was probably due to personality conflicts, not differences in economic theory. Brad DeLong also suspects this is the case.

Nick Rowe, on his blog and in the comment section, has some very harsh and disapproving things to say about both Narayana Kocherlakota and his erstwhile advisors. He might want to take this up by Steve Williamson, who has some equally harsh things to say on the opposite side of the issue.

Paul Krugman takes the opportunity to criticize Minnesota macro.

Philly Fed economist Makoto Nakajima tweets (in Japanese!) that Miles and my analysis is "shallow", and suggests we have better ways to spend our time.

A couple people have written to me with thoughts about the Fed firings. One alternative hypothesis I had not considered: It's all about money. Economists who hold university professorships and also do work at the Fed are paid full-time salaries by their universities and full-time salaries by the Fed (I had not known this fact). But working at the Fed probably doesn't make those joint economists put out much more research than they would if they just worked at their university. So the $$$ that the Fed is paying to those economists might be mostly waste, especially if the researchers in question are not doing much in the way of direct advising on policy matters. So it could be all about budget cuts.

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Verticality

In studying screenwriting, I'm struck time and again by how many tricks of good screenwriting can be carried over to traditional fiction writing (stories, novels, novellas), often to the great benefit of the latter.

A common complaint about bad screenplays is that they're a lot of work to read, because the author spends too much time in flowery descriptive narrative. You can tell when you're reading one of these scripts: It takes you two minutes—instead of 30 or 40 seconds—to get through a page. (Once you've read some really fine scripts, and felt their rhythm, you can sense the snail-like rhythm of a "stinker" script instantly.)

Page 2 of the Alien script (shooting version).

In the screenwriting world, we say that bogged-down scripts often lack verticality. (Charles Deemer gives an excellent summary in his post on "Making Scripts Vertical.") The idea comes down to this: Your eye spends an awful lot of time, in a slow-moving piece of writing, simply going from left to right (LTR), parsing word by word through one sentence after another after another. (Obviously I'm talking about English and other alphabetic/LTR languages.) This is what one might call horizontality; it's the basis of all alphabetic-LTR writing, because letters and words occur sequentially. But every once in a while, your eye gets to drop down vertically on the page—when there's a new paragraph, a subhead, a section break, a new chapter heading, an inserted block quote, a bulleted list, etc. Anything that makes your eye drop down is verticality.

Your brain keeps track of the ratio of verticality to horizontality. It begins to ache after a while if there's not enough verticality.

Horizontality is tiring. Why? Because it's linear, and that's not how cognition works. Processing linear text requires a highly specialized area of the brain. Perception (involving the senses of the body in conjunction with the whole brain) results from experiences taken in episodically, not always in a particular order, as a collage of disjoint bits that may include memories, ideas, emotions, smells, sounds, what have you.

Many of the great art movements of the early twentieth century can be understood in the context of an escape from the shackles of linearity. A photo, like a reaistic painting, maps one area of light or dark (in the photo) to a similar area in the subject; in fact the verb "map" implies linearity of just this sort. Impressionism attempts to break from linearity so as to allow the brain to do what it does best: assemble meaning from disjoint bits. Likewise, a common stylistic trope of postmodern fiction is the telling of a tale as a pastiche of disconnected and not always time-ordered pieces. This sort of storytelling (think The English Patient) engages the brain in a different way than straight narrative, often to stunning effect, since nonlinear processing centers of the brain are enlisted in the attempt to render the overall meaning.

If you have any doubt as to how hard (cognitively speaking) linear, horizontal writing is for the brain, try reading the scroll version of Kerouac's On the Road (available in the 50th anniversary edition from Viking/Penguin), the version that reflects Kerouac's original rendering of the story as a single long paragraph. Somewhere around ten pages into the 300-page-long paragraph, you'll be wishing for an indent, a section break, or some other "break" from linearity. The single-long-paragraph device takes getting used to.

Screenplays are intrinsically highly verticalized. They're broken up into short pieces that vary a great deal in terms of indents and margins. Thus they tend to be much easier to read quickly than a novel. But (as I said earlier) even among screenplays, there are those that read easily and those that feel like work.

Take, for example, the following bit of narrative, adapted from Alien:

Dallas, Kane and Lambert, each wearing gloves, boots, and jackets, enter the air lock. All three are carrying laser pistols. As Kane touches a button, a servo begins to whine and the inner door quietly slides shut; then the trio pull on their helmets.

That's not how the scene appears in the final version of the script (written by Walter Hill and David Giler, based on an earlier screenplay by Dan O'Bannon). Here's how the script was written:

Dallas, Kane and Lambert enter the lock.
All wear gloves, boots, jackets.
Carry laser pistols.
Kane touches a button.
Servo-whine.
Then the inner door slides quietly shut.
The trio pull on their helmets.

Telegraphic; staccato; almost poem-like. The "before" version is what you'd read in a novel (or a not-so-great screenplay). The second version, from the Hill-Giler script, is experiential, sensory in its telling. Two entirely different ways of handling the same content; two ways for the brain to process the information.

In your novel (you know, that one you've been working on all month?), before you get too tied up in Proustian 900-word sentences and Pynchonesque paragraphs that ramble on for pages, have a regard for the cognitive load imposed by linearity. Consider introducing a little more verticality.

Lighten the load.

Your reader will thank you.

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The New Weird

Last night I was looking at The New Weird, a collection of fiction, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, and after reading a couple of stories (and some essays in the book) on the New Weird, a variety of thoughts came to me about the state of fiction today (not that anyone can claim to know the "state of fiction today," of course, but that's partly the point). I should mention that my thoughts were also, in part, moved along by a Huffpost review I happened to read last night—by U. Wisc. Green Bay Professor Harvey J. Kaye—of Josef Joffe's The Myth of America's Decline. Professor Kaye, who follows me on Twitter, pointed me to the review. It's an excellent review, although I respectfully disagree with many assumptions in it; and because the review was so excellent, I won't be reading Joffe's book now that I know how absurdly outmoded its assumptions are. (More of which, in a minute.)

What all this got me to thinking about is: Where is fiction headed? Where is it now? Where should new writers of fiction consider going?

My first route to prying the lid off these questions was to try to get to the core of New Weird. Which is an adventure in itself.

What is New Weird? Why does it exist? What audience-need does it serve? This turns out to be a difficult set of questions. There is no New Weird Manifesto, no elevator pitch that reduces it to a neat logline, but the VanderMeers say it's "a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy." In terms of signature works, China Tom Miéville's Perdido Street Station is oft-cited as prototypically New Weird, along with works by M. John Harrison and even Clive Barker.

In terms of common elements, New Weird seems to involve, more often than not, an alternate reality or alternate society (optionally on an alternate planet) with new rules of behavior (optionally magical, but more often than not simply cultural and/or state-imposed), with characters that may or may not have special abilities or powers, special body modifications (a la Clive Barker), special quests. Elaborate world-building is thus a mainstay, a la Tolkien. In terms of basic storytelling, all the usual Joseph Campbell tropes (hero's quest, etc.) apply, along with common-sense storytelling best practices.

As I survey the New Weird landscape, I don't see a whole lot new, honestly, so much as a tedious (if admirably elaborate) reskinning of the Old Weird, going back to Poe and Lovecraft, with heavy debts, also, to Aldous Huxley, Kafka (The Metamorphosis), Orwell, Ellison, Dick, and others. The cultural reorganization of society along NewWeirdian lines that one sees in things like Perdido Street Station (or Miéville's story Jack, in The New Weird) feels, on some level, instantly stale to me. But that only makes me more anxious to understand why it feels fresh to others.

The New Weird is clearly an attempt to break out of the thematic tropes of mid-twentieth-century fiction, but it already feels stillborn in its quest to take Tolkien in more phantasmagoric directions, precisely because of its slavish insistence on making characters behave in accordance with elaborate (and supposedly fresh) systems of rules (cultural or state-imposed; less frequently self-imposed) in their "new worlds." The early and mid-twentieth century fascination with the apparatus of bureacracy (Kafka, Orwell, Heller, Pynchon) seems to trudge on, in different clothing and in deeper mud, in The New Weird. In terms of success in breaking away from conventional thematic tropes and techniques, it strikes me that bizarro fiction—with its frequent recourse to absurdism, surrealism, and proto-Dada grotesquerie—comes much closer to missing the dart board (where missing the dartboard is, in fact, the aim).

Earlier I mentioned Professor Kaye and his incisive review, "Whither America," which speaks to the themes of grotesque nationalism (my term, not his) explored in Josef Joffe's The Myth of America's Decline. The out-of-date sociological metrics by which Joffe analyzes America's "Policeman of the World" and "Default Culture" (my term) status evoke in me the same frustration (and, at times, abhorrence) I feel with NewWeirdian fiction vis-à-vis its slavish dependence on externally supplied (and sometimes quite archaic and baroque) sociological rule-systems. Apparently the Policeman of the World meme (brutally and dangerously archaic as it is) still resonates with certain nonfiction audiences the way Kafka still resonates with fiction audiences, the latter being (from my point of view) far more comprehensible. But in both domains (fiction and soiological nonfiction), readers still harbor the hangover of nationalism, heard in the ever-reverberating echoes of Orwell; and I think it serves modern audiences—and the common literary weal—ill to continue to pay homage to the dead bronze statues that so gravenly mark our progress in literature.

The story of the last thousand years in human history is largely the story of nationalism—the aggregation of peoples and ideologies under "state" banners with messy borders crudely drawn in blood. It's thus in no way surprising that the vagaries of militarism—and (in peacetime) the apparatus of control—have so preoccupied the literary mind over this timeframe, with some of the most famous signposts in all of western literature having names like War and Peace and Gravity's Rainbow (the latter denoting the parabolic arc of the V-2 missile in WWII). To be sure, fiction has also during this time produced significant tonnage of highly personal and psychological works, novels having more to do with issues of character and interpersonal dynamics; and such works will always be relevant, because they cut quickly to the bare-naked core of human existence, stripped of its geopolitical underwear, as it were. But the question is why we cling so lovingly to the cold stiff corpse of State and/or External Authority as the controlling factor in characters' everyday worlds; more particularly, why do we seek refuge in archaic-feeling representations (no matter how lovingly and elaborately permutated) of externally validated rule systems? (Externalism of this kind arguably reached its apotheosis in The Matrix.) How many flavors of Tolkien or Frank Herbert (or Kafka or Orwell) do we need, going forward?

Systems of Control are still relevant, but not (IMHO) as represented in the "world-building" narratives of NewWeirdism or OldWeirdism. The current world is, in fact, much weirder than any of that already. The Systems of Control of today are not explicit manifestations of state nor ideology. They are far more subtle (and dangerous), obtaining legitimacy directly from the suppressed and exploited (that's you, that's me) through their passive assent. No law, no explicit form of coercion, makes you eat at McDonalds (or order, with your Happy Meal, more soda than the human stomach can reasonably process). And yet America the Superpower, America as Default Nation, along with most constitutional democracies in the world (most countries templated on American politics), is happy to allow its citizenry to be obese, diabetic, sclerotic, and cancer-prone. No law explicitly requires you to buy Chinese goods at Walmart (or for that matter to take a minimum-wage job at Walmart). And yet your host nation has you wearing cheap foreign-made clothing, and using foreign-made electronics, while the underlying jobs (not just grunt-labor jobs but "good" jobs in technology) are shipped out of the country. No law requires you to go hungry in the greatest food-exporting nation on earth, yet one in six Americans requires Food Stamps.

To see more clearly the desolate bus stop on history's joyride that we've come to, it might help to roll back the tape and put your mind inside the head of a Thomas Paine, say, or a Rousseau or Voltaire. Suppose, in 1770, as Paine, you were to read a "speculative fiction" novel (supposing such a thing existed at the time) about a future nation-state, the Greatest Country on Earth, in which printing presses have largely disappeared (recall that as late as 1975, printing was the most prolific business type in America), "pamphleteering" has become obsolete, and citizens consume the majority of their reading matter by means of magical devices coupled to the Great Interconnector. Further suppose that although literacy has become universal, citizens of this strange future country spend a good time watching "visual replicas of plays" (films, videos) instead of reading, and the majority of citizens who choose to spend any time writing (hundreds of millions worldwide) are reduced to filing dispatches of only a few hundred characters at a time (Twitter and Facebook updates). Now imagine that in this strange future-world, people live to be 80 instead of 50, and yet a third of the citizenry is sick with obesity-related illnesses (not just diabetes but heart disease and cancer). Fully a quarter of the population takes daily pills for "high blood pressure," diabetes, or melancholia. People are required by Tithe Laws to give a tenth of their income to the state, which spends a good deal of the money on foreign wars devoted to dubious goals (goals that would not have been compehensible in Paine's day). Meanwhile, average citizens incur crushing debt to obtain an education, then are not hired for their knowledge or skills; they obtain degrees in "political science" or philosophy or literature, but go to work for inconcceivably large corporations, doing incredibly menial things; many of the jobs paying an unconscionably low "minimum wage" that has one in six persons dependent on public munificence for food.

These sorts of "future-world" facts would have seemed absurd to anyone of Paine's generation. What would have seemed most preposterous of all to Paine, in particular, is the notion that huge masses of people would not be marching on their governments in revolt!

Paine would have considered deeply troubling the geopolitical yardsticks by which a Josef Joffe measures a nation's stature: military budget, GNP, hegemonic domination of world politics, etc. He would have identified strongly with measures of infant mortality, wellness, general happiness, opportunity (he would have loathed the term "upward mobility," however), poverty rates, hunger, incarceration rate—all areas where America consistently ranks poorly.

To the extent that writers of fiction are envisioners of the future, or at least envisioners of alternate worlds, it seems to me we fail our readers if we tether our worldview to the soggy mire of militarism or nationalism (in any of its guises). Given that the social milieu is an Unseen Main Character in novels that build new worlds, it would seem appropriate to take stock of current Control Structures and build worlds that resonate with the issues that pertain to the modern inhabitants of those structures, many of whom have been brainwashed that slavery is freedom (or vice versa), ignorance is strength, war is peace, etc. By the old measures, America is still the greatest country on earth. By any rational measure it's arguably the most broken country on earth. By buying into old notions we break fiction itself and render it a self-parody. Society is evolving. Nationalism as a concept is fading. The Control Structure conventions of yesteryear are like a once-magnificent cake that's been sitting all day in the rain. Why must we continue to eat from it?

It's not enough for fiction to permutate and pervert the past and serve it up again in shocking colors. Serve us up something new. If weirdness is a necessary ingredient, just look around.

As a reader of fiction, I want to move beyond Tolkien-in-a-party-dress. I want the next New Weird to come without a rearview mirror. The current New Weird isn't doing it for me.

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New article: BS jobs in BS industries

I have a new article out in The Week, discussing the phenomenon of "bullshit jobs", as postulated by David Graeber. Excerpts:

Back in August, the anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber wrote an article for Strike!Magazine entitled "Bullshit Jobs." Graeber asked why we were still working so hard, despite being so much richer than in ages past. Where was the utopia of leisure that we were promised?...As you might expect, Graeber's article was thoroughly panned by most of the economists who even paid attention. But Graeber is on to something. Though I heavily doubt that many of our jobs represent a diabolic plot by our overlords to keep us in chains, it seems clear that many Americans no longer understand how their work creates value... 

According to Econ 101, people are supposed to get paid for the exact value they create....[But w]hat if your employer itself isn't adding value?...I suspect that many Americans these days wonder how much of their paycheck comes from value-added work, and how much comes from "rent."... 

Finance takes up fully 8 percent of our economy, up from less than 3 percent in 1950. But is our finance industry giving us anything now that it wasn't back then?... 

If finance is big, health care is gargantuan. The health-care sector takes up nearly one-fifth of our entire economy — far more than in other countries — and this share is climbing fast, as costs continue to rise. But despite this orgy of spending, we have little to show in the way of actual health... 

Finally, we have the education sector, which at 5.7 percent of GDP is also a big deal...Does college really train students with the skills and life experiences they need to be productive? Or is it just a hideously expensive way of proving to potential employers that you're smart and hard-working?... 

Together, just these three industries — finance, health care, and education — represent almost a third of America's economy... 

Obviously, we need all of them in some form: Without a finance industry, businesses couldn't launch or expand; without a health-care industry, we'd live horrible lives; and without education, we'd be unsuited for modern work. But the question is whether these industries, as a whole, create enough value to justify the huge amounts we spend on them. Because if they don't, then every American who works in finance or health care or education has to wonder whether his or her job is a "BS job."

Read the whole thing here!

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Money for Nothing: The Negatives of a Negative Income Tax

After a long political hibernation, basic income is back. Switzerland is set to vote on a referendum under which each Swiss citizen would receive approximately $2800 a month from the government as a minimum income. While it's unclear whether this proposal will actually pass (I suspect not), it has provoked a great deal of conversation on the topic. As Annie Lowry puts it, "[g]o to a cocktail party in Berlin, and there is always someone spouting off about the benefits of a basic income." I confess I haven't been to many cocktail parties in Berlin recently, but the idea has been all over the place in the wonkier parts of American media (see here, here, here, and here). 

Compared to the messy, kludgy reality of existing social serviced, the pristine simplicity of the basic income idea has obvious appeal. Unfortunately, much of the discussion of basic income seems to be focused on the wrong things, or is based on misapprehensions. For example, Lowrey says that one of the big advantages of having a basic income is that '[p]overty would disappear."  That may or may not be true, but if it is true, this would have less to do with the actual effects of the basic income program than with how the poverty rate is calculated. As Tim Worstall recently noted, the poverty rate (at least in the U.S.) is calculated based on a person's income pre-taxes and transfers:

[T]he four major poverty reduction programs are Medicaid, SNAP, EITC and Section 8 vouchers. And we include none of them, not one single groat of that money spent, in our current estimates of poverty.

So, while our definition of poverty has not changed (three times a low-cost food budget for a household in the early 1960s upgraded for inflation) what we’re actually measuring is now completely different. The US poverty numbers today do not measure the number of people still in poverty after the aid given: they measure the number of people in poverty before aid is given.

If one were to take account of the effect of current anti-poverty programs, the poverty rate would be nearly zero. Similarly, if we were to replace existing anti-poverty programs with a basic income and didn't include that income in calculating the poverty rate, then the direct effect on poverty of enacting a basic income would be minimal.
  
The real difference between a basic income and the status quo is not how it would effect the poor, but how it would effect the middle class. Medicaid, SNAP, EITC, and Section 8 are all means tested programs, meaning that they aren't available to people who make over a certain income. By contrast, whether billed as a replacement for existing welfare programs or as an add on to it, basic income plans are typically not means tested. If you are a doctor making $200,000, you get the same government stipend as if you are making $10,000 working part time at Wal-Mart.

The fact that the basic income isn't means tested has its advantages. It means, for example, that low income workers don't face the high implicit marginal tax rates that can come from means tested programs. But it also means that any disincentive to work based on the extra income provided by the government will apply across the whole of society.

Which brings us to another issue with the current coverage of the basic income idea. As is typically noted in the recent coverage, back in the 1960s and early 1970s, basic income plans were all the rage. Martin Luther King, Jr. was supportive, as was Milton Friedman. Richard Nixon and George McGovern both put forward basic income proposals. And then, nothing. The idea kind of just faded out of existence. At least, that's the impression one gets from reading some of the recent accounts.

While I'm sure there were many reasons basic income lost its luster, one big factor was the results of a series of experimental implementations of the idea. Between 1968 and 1982, the government sponsored four separate randomized trials, providing $63 million in basic income to more than ten thousand individuals. These studies concluded that a basic income set at the current poverty rate significantly reduced the average amount of time worked by recipients by the equivalent of 2-4 weeks of full time employment, as compared to the existing welfare system. The experiments also seemed to suggest that providing a basic income increased the likelihood of family breakup. While there have been a few smaller studies since then that are more encouraging, it's not surprising that many policymakers reacted to these studies by concluding, in the words of Jim Manzi, of basic income that it "is a fascinating and useful thought experiment, but it's not useful public policy." 
Personally, I remain a fan of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which, unlike basic income proposals, is tied to work (and, unlike such proposals, has been successfully implemented and expanded for decades). But while I admire the simplicity of the basic income idea, I'm afraid I'm with Jim Manzi. 

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God and SuperGod

Every Sunday, Miles Kimball does a post about religion. This week, it's a guest post by none other than Yours Truly. Head over to Miles' place to find out why God can't ever be certain that He's really God, and why this tells us what we humans ought to be doing with our lives!

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Tapping Your Inner Puppet

Lately I've been reading a terrific book called Now Write! Screenwriting (2010, Tarcher/Penguin), edited by Sherry Ellis and Laurie Lamson. It's a collection of short (one to four pages long) tips from various successful screenwriters, presented in the form of exercises. In addition to practical advice on story construction, the tips and exercises are meant to help with ideation; hence the book is potentially of great help to any writer, in any form or genre.

I won't (can't) attempt to recap the book's tips here. If you're a fiction writer, go seek out the book, either at a bookstore or the library. You'll thank me later.

After reading a few of the essays in Now Write! Screenwriting, I started ideating. Here (below) is one idea that came to me. Warning: Not fully baked. Intake of half-baked ideas may lead to intestinal and/or intracranial distress. Consume at your own risk.

[ begin weird idea ]

A twenty-something cubicle drone from Cupertino whom we'll call Tyler Schremp, having fallen into a deep existential depression triggered by the sudden passing of Cordelia, his pet chinchilla, decides to seek psychotherapy. He has had depression, episodically, all his life. In terms of therapies and meds, he's been through the mill. Nothing works. It's all palliative, at best.

Schremp gets a tip from a trusted friend of the family, a retired therapist, who recommends the "ultimate last resort," a therapy known as Bosonic Avatar Therapy, or BATTY, practiced by its developer, Dr. Egon Pringle. ("I understand BAT. But what does the 'TY' stand for?" Answer: "It stands for Thank Your lucky stars." "But in that case shouldn't it be BATTYLS?" "Look, do you want the therapy or not? It's just a goddam mnemonic.")

Schremp seeks Pringle out and finds him to be (how shall we say) a tad eccentric. But he comes highly recommended. Diplomas, publications, awards, etc. Pringle hands Schremp a puppet. "This is your starter avatar. It's rough, I know. It'll have to do for now. We'll get you a proper avatar, one that looks like you, soon enough."

Pringle explains that for proper disjunction of the subconscious anti-self, it is crucial that all therapy be conducted via the avatar. In other words, Schremp sits on a rug on the floor next to a couch, and he has to lay the puppet down on the couch and speak through the puppet. Pringle, in turn, produces a Freud puppet (with cigar) and speaks only through the Freud avatar.

"Back me up a second," Schremp says . "What does it mean, this 'Bosonic Avatar' stuff --"

The Freud puppet moves its mouth: "Please state your question through your avatar."

Schremp moves his puppet's mouth: "Okay, sorry. What does Bosonic mean?"

Freud-puppet: "My God, man, did you not take elementary physics in school? What the hell college did you go to? Surely you know that the universe is constructed, broadly speaking, of only two types of particles: leptons and bosons. Light and heavy. Electronics are leptons. That's what makes your brain work, electricity. Bosons are protons and other heavy forms of matter. Solid stuff. That chair. The rug you're sitting on. The air you breathe."

Schremp-puppet: "Air isn't a solid."

Freud-puppet: "This is why you need my help! You're not perceiving reality correctly."

Fast-forward a couple weeks. Schremp is now (under doctor's orders) carrying around with him, 24/7, a Schremp-puppet, 100% Schremp-like down to the Sad-Sacky sunken eyes, complete with a miniature iPhone in its pocket. Coworkers give him odd looks. When he needs to express his true feelings, Schremp has to use the puppet (avatar). The avatar mouths off to people. Schremp's supervisor at work is increasingly annoyed.

Schremp finds himself at a bar after work, wanting to drown his sorrows.

Schremp-avatar: "Do you serve ventriloquists here?"

Bartender: "Yeah, sure."

"Well, I'll have a vodka martini, and my big dummy friend here will have a root beer."

"Sorry, we don't serve root beer."

"Make it a black Russian then."

A short distance away, at the bar, is a sullen-looking, nerdly young woman, sipping a pina colada. Next to her is a puppet replica of her, with a shot glass in front of it containing tequila and a rubber worm.

Schremp-puppet to nerdgirl-avatar: "Does your friend come here often?"

Nerd-girl avatar to Schremp-puppet: "One woodpecker joke and I'm outa here."

Schremp-puppet: "How's the Bosonic Avatar thing working out for you two?"

"We're fucking shit-faced, how do you think it's working out?"

And so on.

When Dr. Pringle has decided individual therapy has gone far enough, he insists that Schremp and his avatar progress to the next phase: group.

Ten patients sit in a circle, each one holding a puppet-clone of him/herself. One of the patients is a Muslim woman with full-body burka. Her puppet also wears a full-body burka.

And so it goes, until months later, Schremp (who has made little progress with his depression except that he has begun to write comedy routines in his spare time; but meanwhile he's increasingly suicidal) hears from Pringle, during a session, that his avatar is deeply disturbed and needs special therapy.

"Wait," Schremp-puppet says. "What are you saying? I'm just speaking through my partner..."

Dr. Pringle's Freud-puppet, to the Schremp-puppet: "Partner schmartner. YOU are now the patient here, your partner is fine. YOU, I'm deeply concerned about. You need intensive therapy, immediamente. ¿Comprende? Don't make me Baker-Act you."

"The Baker Act is only in Florida."

"Nonsense! I can commit you both to an instutition, right now, if that's what you want."

"All right, all right. What are you suggesting, exactly?"

Dr. Pringle, through his puppet, hands Schremp a card.

"I want you to see this man. He's an eminent puppetologist, the best in the city."

"You mean --"

"Yes, your avatar is in serious need of deep Contrabosonic Therapy, CBT. I'll make the appointment for you right now."

Dr. Pringle tries to dial a number with the Freud-puppet. When it doesn't work, he tosses the Freud puppet aside and the puppet's lit cigar starts a fire on the desk.

Eventually, Schremp ends up in the office of a Dr. Yung, who operates a Jung puppet. This time, the Schremp puppet sits on a rug while Schremp lies on a couch. Schremp must pretend that the rug puppet is a ventriloquist making him speak.

[ end of ideation ]

Now obviously, the story needs a lot of work. The nerdy-girl has to figure into Schremp's life in a big way and there need to be additional minor characters (a best friend, someone in the office who's a friend, maybe an ex-) who can help steer Schremp through the madness that's become his life. Maybe at the end, the bartender whips out his bartender puppet and offers some poignant advice, the kind you can only get from a bartender-puppet.

I'll see how far I can take it. For therapy's sake.

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Everything you need to know about Saliva Drug Test Kits (Robin Leonardo)

Saliva drug testing kits are devices that are used to detect the abuse of illicit drugs using saliva as a test sample. Saliva test kits are easy to use, reliable and accurate. In this article, we briefly discuss these kits.

Like these teams?

* A saliva test kit consists of a saliva sample collecting part and a part of the test. The sample is collected in the collecting part. A piece of sponge in this part has to be full with saliva.

* Make sure that the person who is subjected to this test does not have any food or drink in the mouth.

* Color change occurs in part of the test kit if there are small amounts of drugs in saliva.

Drugs detected using saliva drug testing kits

You can use these devices to detect drugs in Group of SAMHSA-5, namely amphetamines (amphetamine, methamphetamine, speed), cannabinoids (marijuana, hashish), cocaine (cocaine, crack, benzoylecognine), opiates (heroin, opium, codeine, morphine) and phencyclidine (PCP).

How is the saliva drug test given?

* Saliva is collected by scrubbing or spitting person. The saliva sample allows the testing administrator to carry out the test several times.

* The saliva test can be administered at home (using a starter kit), place of work or in a clinic. If it is done in a clinic, a swab is maintained in the mouth (under the tongue or between cheek and gum).

* The length of time may be a few minutes until the swab collects enough saliva. The swab is then sent to clinical examination.

Who uses saliva tests?

Certain groups of users such as employers, law enforcement agencies, insurance companies and parents. Each discussed briefly.

* Employment screening

Employers use saliva drug testing as a pre-employment. It is important to note that under the Federal Government, employers need to each detected by drug testing drug saliva prior to placing the job-seeker.

* Law

Police carry out tests on suspected drug addicts. Saliva tests are simple and convenient for the authorities to carry out. This helps prevent accidents and fatalities resulting from it.

* Health insurance check

For insurers, it is important to know the State of health of their prospects. They charge a premium for drug users higher because these people are a high risk group. Saliva tests help insurance companies to determine the premium.

* Parents

Drug test kits House saliva are useful for parents who suspect their children are under the influence of illicit substances. These kits of discarded the need to go to a professional or a hospital. Parents can use these kits in the privacy of your home.

Pros and cons of the saliva test kits

Pros

* Drug test Kits saliva are non-invasive and convenient. They are easy to use and reliable and does not require professional help.

* A single sample is sufficient to prove the main drugs mentioned in a previous paragraph.

* These kits shows quick results - in a few minutes and are accurate.

* These kits are cheap. Therefore, useful for use on a large scale as the workplace are carried out by employer drug testing.

Cons

* These kits may not detect the presence of drugs in a person, if the time is more than 24 hours of use of the drug.

Saliva drug testing kits are made according to the rules of court, SAMHSA and benefit everyone - employees, employers, parents and educational institution.

DrugTestStrips.com is an online store that offers reliable, accurate, easy to use and FDA-approved test kits at affordable prices of the drug. Kits for saliva sample simple and easy to use drugs can prove the presence of drugs instantly, accurately and without the use of additional instrument. For more information, please visit - http://www.drugteststrips.com/

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