Laugh and the world laughs with you...

Things have been bad for reasons I won't go into. I am now at the MacDowell Colony (every cloud has a silver lining). Very sporadic internet access, good. But today I am doing laundry.

I go online and search for "Michael Lewis" to see what he's up to - and what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a review of John Lanchester's Capital by Michael Lewis!  At the NYRB!

I have not yet got to the meat of the review; I have only just come to Lewis's account of Britain in the early 80s:

And the most extraordinary anticommercial attitudes could be found, in places that existed for no purpose other than commerce. There was a small grocery store around the corner from my flat, which carried a rare enjoyable British foodstuff, McVities’ biscuits. One morning the biscuits were gone. “Oh, we used to sell those,” said the very sweet woman who ran the place, “but we kept running out, so we don’t bother anymore.”

This is lovely.  Yes, this is recognizably Britain (O Britain, Britain, Britain).  But if there is one thing lovelier than sheer unadulterated British wrongheaded woollymindedness, it is seeing this through the eye of the young Michael Lewis.  The genius of Lewis is to enable the reader to appreciate the ingenuity of persons capable of spotting a market inefficiency and exploiting it - Bill Walsh developing the passing game in football, Billy Beane using statistics to get the most out of the cashstrapped Oakland A's. And with this genius comes incredulous outrage: incredulity, outrage, at those who have institutionalized sheer lumpen stupidity. (O Michael Lewis, Michael Lewis.)  Here we find the young Lewis, long before he has made a career out of incredulous outrage, confronted with the dear dim cluelenessness of the typical British corner shop.  And showing a keen eye for one of the pleasures of foggy island life: McVitie's Digestives! Heaven.

(The review can only go downhill after this, but those unable to resist diminishing returns can find the rest here.)

odds

But the debate has completely changed these numbers. The Tories aren’t the money favourites any more. They and the hung Parliament have effectively changed places. That £100 would now earn £172 if the Tories win, £73 for no overall control, and £2700 for Labour. Even the Tory-favouring spread betting is suggesting 307-312 seats, ie a Tory minority of 36-26. The polls suggest a hung Parliament with Labour the biggest party, 39 seats short of a majority.

Wow! Inside the two big parties, quite a few people are going to be doing a lot of Told You So – remember, one of the big parties’ main reasons for not having these debates was the advantage it would give the Lib Dems.

John Lanchester on betting sites and the British election

ahem

Andrew Gelman casts a critical eye on John Lanchester's analysis of UK electoral districts and supposed advantage to Labour of these as currently drawn up. (Er, we at paperpools blithely linked to the post on the theory, to which we are still partial, that we can never get too much of John Lanchester.)

Theophrastus & electioneering

John Lanchester has been writing regularly on the LRB Blog in the run-up to the UK election; today he describes Mosaic, a package used by the Tories to get insight into the electorate:

Mosaic is well worth a look, and is very striking for its mixture of first hand research and thundering clichés. The population of the UK is represented by 15 groups, broken down into 67 household categories – one of which will be applied to you, whoever you are, by Mosaic’s all-knowing postcode-centred database. The categories are accompanied by little character sketches. So who are you? At the top is ‘Alpha Territory’ consisting of groups such as ‘Global Power Brokers’, ‘Voices of Authority’, ‘Business Class’ and ‘Serious Money’; its members include Piers and Imogen: ‘If not found on their own private yacht, then they are most likely to be seen in the business or first class cabins of airlines, to holiday in their own foreign property and to enjoy the service of exclusive hotels and restaurants.’ They sound lovely. Group C for ‘Rural Solitude’ consists of five subgroups: ‘Squires among Locals, Country Loving Elders, Modern Agribusiness, Farming Today, Upland Struggle’.

The whole thing here.

town and country

The Tories won’t have forgotten one of the most amazing facts about the 2005 election. In England they actually beat Labour by 57,000 votes – but ended up with 93 fewer seats. That isn’t especially fair, but it should make things interesting.

John Lanchester, LRB blog, on constituency distribution, 'votes in the country worth less than votes in the city', the rest here.

talking points

This kind of interviewing, in my view, is broken. Apart from the pointless rudeness, Kinnock can’t possibly answer the question by saying a. proposed tax rises did me in (because Labour today are offering tax rises), b. 1992 was a long time ago, so who cares? and c. I was perceived as a Welsh windbag, which is a different thing from a Scottish miserabilist. Because he can’t say those things – which would immediately take on a life of their own and derail the election launch – he has to cling to his talking points. Utility and informativeness of the exchange: zero.

John Lanchester on John Humphrys' interviewing style, on the LRB blog, the rest here.

John Lanchester

I don't think I have the right temperament for a blogger. My assumption, always, is that everyone knows everything I know AND MORE. Rephrase. Everyone who is interested in the kinds of thing that interest me knows everything I know AND MORE. If they're not interested they don't know but don't want to. So there's no point in mentioning things that strike me as interesting, unless a) these are events in the last, say, 5 minutes (so those disposed to be interested might not be au fait or b) I'm up for proselytizing (those not disposed to be interested might be with enough encouragement).

I don't think this is rational. I think the assumptions are false. But these beliefs seem to have no influence on whatever it is that pushes one into writing a blog post.

I thought of this again after reading yet another piece by John Lanchester in the LRB. I first heard of Lanchester on an ill-fated fellowship at the Cullman Center at the NYPL: Patrick Keefe talked about the brilliance of JL's The Debt to Pleasure, which I had not read, so I bought the book and sure enough this anatomy of a lunacy is a brilliant book. Have I ever mentioned it in a post? No, because naturally everyone disposed to be dazzled already knows about it.

Since then I've read many of Lanchester's columns in the LRB - he specialises in pieces on the financial industry, though he does tackle other topics. The way it works is, I pick up the LRB at a newsagent, or go to the website; think: OH, they've got a piece by JOHN LANCHESTER, how FABULOUS! Buy LRB / read LRB online, depending on circumstances. Never bother to link to them on the blog (this is not the stuff of which great bloggers are made) because everyone disposed to be interested is already, obviously, keeping an eye out for new Lanchester sightings in the LRB.

Lanchester has a new piece in the LRB, anyway, on the Scottish banking system, here. Before reading the piece, I had no idea why this particularly mattered; thanks to JL, I now know that the Royal Bank of Scotland is, by asset size, the biggest company in the world; that RBS got an injection of capital of £20 billion from the British government after the weekend of October 11-12 last year, giving the British taxpayer a 60% ownership of the company; that it has since realised it needs more, the 'more' bringing taxpayer ownership to 95% - and there is, of course, much more, and, what can I say? It's great. By 'great' I mean something like, this restores my faith in reviews, there actually are reviewers who are not afraid to get their feet wet, Lanchester goes on to give an explanation of why mergers and takeovers tend to destroy value yet are attractive to the stock market, spreading, if not sweetness, then light. (If you know your LRB, you'll know that the website makes it easy to check out previous pieces by an author, so you can read Lanchester on video games, Wal-Mart and much much more.)

It would be better, of course, to write a proper review of The Debt to Pleasure, but the book is in an apartment which has been sublet till the end of July, and I writing from a cafe, and what with one thing and another circumstances are not propitious. My conscience does bother me, but not as much as it would bother me if I went on holding out for the perfect moment.

CDO to Pleasure

Interesting essay by John Lanchester in the LRB on the recent Northern Rock debacle and the largely unchallenged role of the City in the UK; if you've never really understood how derivatives work or why they matter, or what a Collateralised Debt Obligation actually is, this is a good overview. Lanchester is one of the most intelligent critics writing in English today (as well as author of the viciously clever Debt to Pleasure); his earlier pieces for the LRB are also available on their website for those new to his work.