Michael:

I’ve been working on a posting about the art history of the Gilded Age. In doing so, however, I wandered into the history of American 19th Century religion, which is chiefly the history of the Second Great Awakening. I don't recall any of my U.S. history classes really coming to grips with this (maybe it was mentioned, in passing) but it was obviously a huge deal for American culture—and it clearly remains a major influence on our culture to this day. As Ian Frederick Finseth (whose essay you can read here) remarks:

Where traditional Calvinism had taught that divine grace, or election into heaven, depended on the arbitrary will of a severe God, the evangelical Protestants preached that the regeneration and salvation of the soul depended on one's inner faith. As the belief in unalterable reprobation faded, the notion of free will was correspondingly elevated. Reconciliation with God still required the continued practice of moral living -- free will was understood to mean the freedom to do good -- but salvation had been effectively democratized…It is not surprising that this religious philosophy found such a receptive audience in the United States, where the Calvinist doctrine of "inability" seemed out of touch with a culture steeped in the ideology of universal equality and political and economic mobility. It also corresponded nicely with many Americans' self-image as creators of a new Eden; just as the individual soul could be redeemed through the exercise of free will, a national redemption could also follow from collective efforts toward social improvement….In its social aspects, the Awakening had as profound an impact on American culture as the Constitution on American government and the Hamiltonian system on American economics.

Or, as Terry Matthews mentions in his analysis of the movement (which you can read here), the movement emphasized that:

Faith is to be expressed in action, and a growing stress on perfectionism comes to mark the preaching of the Second Great Awakening. Again, the Revival is seen in terms of the end of time. God is remaking society in anticipation of the coming Kingdom. As a result, voluntary organizations form to bring about the necessary reform, among them being the American Bible Society, the American Colonization Society, and the American Anti-Slavery society. This is a period when countless numbers of educational institutions are established (including Wake Forest) and overseas missions are launched. The goal is to purify American society and make it ready for the coming Kingdom.

In addition to hugely boosting church attendance across the country and virtually remaking the American experience of religion, the Second Great Awakening threw off numerous social reforms, including feminism, abolitionism, the temperance movement and more. In addition, a whole series of new religious movements came out of all this that had a significant impact on American society: the Latter Day Saints, the Shakers, the Disciples of Christ, the Transcendentalists, etc., etc.

Obviously, the Second Great Awakening was among other things, a (successful) attempt to use religion to deal with life on the frontier and to give structure and meaning to a new, democratic world where all the rules weren't being made for people by the powers-that-were. In short, the whole thing seems to have been a wild, crazy, American-style experiment, combining everything from popular music—to all-day preaching—to education (literacy was relatively scarce in, say, Kentucky)—to the literature of Thoreau and Emerson. Yee-ha! What a combination: religious creativity, human uplift, and—best of all—the use of private persuasion rather than governmental coercion to achieve a new social order!

Okay, I grant you, all this was the doing of a bunch of dead white male Protestants--oops, wait a minute, the Protestant part is correct, but the movement was remarkable for addressing and incorporating marginalized groups like blacks, Asians, women, you name it. Ah, heck, let's cut the irony: speaking explicitly as a non-Christian, I must say that stuff like the Second Great Awakening makes me darn proud to be an American. We could use more weirdness like this in our daily lives.

Cheers,

Friedrich

P.S. Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but I must ask: why didn’t our Lousy Ivy University teach us anything—or at least anything inspirational or even useful—about our own national heritage? (All the best parts of which are exceedingly odd and goofy, I might add.) What were they trying to do--teach us to be Americans and have decorum, too? What fools these educators be!

at April 10, 2004 | perma-link | (6) comments

Dear Friedrich --

As long as I'm in thinking-over-past-decades mode ...

Were you as taken aback by the vehemence and absolutism of '70s feminism as I was? Feminism hit when we were in college and it hit hard, god knows. All the protests, the obsession with rape and oppression, the unshaven armpits, the accusing looks, the professorial fury and theories ...

Not a great time to be (ahem) starting a sex life, for one thing. But the arguments seemed to make a kind of intellectual sense -- at least when I was at college. Back home was another matter altogether. For one obvious thing, my mom worked. (And, like nearly every other woman in the neighborhood, she was also clearly the boss around the house.) My mom had worked before marrying my dad, and she went back to work as soon as the kids were in grammar school. The lady across from us worked, and so did one of the wives down the street. Not a big deal.

For another thing: where was all the hostility between the sexes that the feminists claimed was fundamental to American life? To my eye, most of the couples in the town where I grew up consisted of a guy and a gal who respected and liked each other, and who were helping each other make it through this challenging thing we call life. I tried, I really did -- but for the life of me, I couldn't find the seething underbelly of thwarted ambition, resentment and anger that the feminists back at school were insisting was the raw, plain truth of it all.

So I hope I can be excused for having spent a few decades wondering about two things. The first is whether '70s feminism wasn't largely a movement of upper-middle-class gals. I'm not sure how many of the women from my small-town, middle-class background ever got enthusiastic about the movement. Besides, the ambitions the moneyed gals at our absurd Ivy college talked about didn't seem to have anything to do with jobs in any sense I found comprehensible. People where I grew up had jobs, dammit; they sold gasoline, were schoolteachers, drove buses, fixed things, worked in insurance offices. In my mind, a bigshot was someone with a white-collar job at Kodak. But the gals at school, profs and students both, seemed to be talking about another universe entirely, one where people naturally, and to my mind magically, went about "fulfilling themselves" by "pursuing careers." Ya mean, like bein' a lawyer, is that what you're sayin'?

The other thing I hope to be forgiven for wondering about was whether the town I came from was the only place in America where A) the sexes got along and appreciated each other pretty well, and B) where it wasn't a big, stop-the-presses thing for a woman to have a job. I suppose I'm committing Ultimate Heresy in saying this, but -- gasp -- as far as I could tell, the women in my neighborhood who didn't have jobs weren't remotely envious of their husbands and their 40-hour weeks. These women seemed to appreciate their guys' efforts, and also seemed delighted to be able to stay at home with the kids. A job was something you got only if your family needed the money. Otherwise, why would you bother? My people couldn't conceive of such a thing as a fun job, let alone a fulfilling career. Instead, our type put in the hours only when necessary, and only in order to drag home a paycheck.

The ping-ponging I did between home and college left my head spinning: was I alone in having a mother who had a job? How many women went to jobs (and careers) pre-'70s-feminism anyway? I suppose I could have, and should have, looked the figures up for myself, but it never occurred to me to try. Timothy Taylor to the rescue!

• In 1900, 18% of the work force was female.

• In 1940, 25% of the work force was female. (Wow: my mom was already working by this time.)

• In 1960, 33% of the workforce was female.

• And in 1970, more or less the year '70s feminism kicked off, and at a time when feminists were shrieking about, er, telling us how closed the working world was to women, 37% of the workforce was female.

I once asked a very successful, much-older-than-Boomer woman why she wasn't celebrated by the feminists. Here she was, accomplished and brilliant, and having made it all on her own -- wasn't she a perfect heroine for them? Her response, given without bitterness: "They don't like me because they don't want women to think that any woman could ever be successful without their help."

Hey, did I ever tell you about that one Salon article I read in which the young woman writer claimed -- with complete, breezy confidence -- that women didn't enjoy sex, let alone have orgasms, until '70s feminism set them free to do so?

An un-PC thought? I wonder how much my experience of all this was a consequence of the mongrel-northern-Euro, small-town, semi-Waspiness of my background. In other words, how big a role did ethnicity play in '70s feminism? Could it be that, while the stresses feminism addressed weren't a big deal for my vanilla people, they in fact were a big deal for people from different backgrounds? Women friends of Jewish and Italian descent, for example, have told me that there really was a lot of bitterness between the sexes in their families, that their families really were all about serving the male, and that '70s feminism really was needed in order to break those patterns up. And I'm not the first person to have noticed how many of the stars of '70s feminism were Jewish. But if so, then where in the feminist movement were the Italian women?

Your thoughts, memories, and reflections? Stories, insights and musings from visitors?

Best,

Michael

at April 10, 2004 | perma-link | (13) comments

Dear Friedrich --

Technically speaking, you and I are Boomers. Yet have you ever really felt like a Boomer? I haven't. We may have watched the TV shows, listened to the music, and grown the hair. But we came along five to ten years after the kids who established the standard Boomer image.

The media-cartoon Boomer, of course, got high at Woodstock; occupied the Dean's office; spent a few years on a commune while using Mom and Dad's credit card to pay the bills; snagged a fabulous job -- and ever since, he/she has been waxing nostalgic about the great old days while bleeding the country dry. According to the conventional wisdom of young people today, it's thanks to the Boomers that the country has a huge debt burden; that Social Security and health care are looming disasters; that AIDS occurred and families disintegrated; that the country is saddled with identity politics, and with a tangle of social programs that continue to backfire ...

OK, sure: there's a lot of truth to that image. My complaint is simply that you and I (and our friends and classmates) weren't those Boomers. We might have been -- god knows we were idiots in our own right. But we were different Boomers; we simply didn't have the chance to be that kind of idiot. Even at the time, we were aware of being the younger siblings of a bunch of grandstanding showoffs. I remember that cracking irreverent jokes about puffed-up older Boomers was one of our Boomer crowd's standard pasttimes.

By the time you and I got to college, the party was already over. We'd arrived!!! -- only to be stuck cleaning up the debris that had been left behind. The older Boomers had had the fun of setting off bombs. They'd destroyed, among other things, education -- and we had to make what we could out of the rubble.

When we arrived at college, the last of the hippies were seniors; when we left college, the first of the Charlie Sheen/Emilio Estevez "Wall Street" crowd were freshmen. And when we emerged into the work world -- I was about to type "were spat out into the work world" -- the American economy was in the worst shape it had been in since the Great Depression. (It was in far worse shape than it is today.) Our cohort may have had its own little pop-cult glory moment with punk, but we quickly receded back into the shadows, never to be heard from again.

No one will pay attention to my complaint -- and why should they? The media image of the self-satisfied, ponytailed Boomer is too satisfying. A few times, when I've been among young people who were bitching about what a hash the Boomers have made of the country, I've pointed out that you and I were making those very same complaints back in '74 -- and that what the older Boomers had wrought wasn't a big mystery even then. Needless to say, the younger people merely looked at me in annoyance. I'd interrupted their fun. I'd disrupted a narrative they love re-telling -- about their discovery of the awfulness of "the Boomers" -- and they wanted to get back to the fun of re-telling it.

The reason the hash the older Boomers had made of the country was so apparent to us was that we were living in it -- it was called "the '70s." What a dismal, flattened-out, dreary decade. So I've been mystified too by the nostalgia some young people have for "the '70s." (What do they actually know about the '70s? And where and how did they form their ideas about it? They seem, in any case, to love their image of the '70s.) Many young people seem convinced that the '70s were one long blast -- a campy, coked-up package a-brim with silly fashions, silly music, and casual sex. What a hoot!!!

Well, there was all that, sure. But but but ... There was a lot else too, and much of it was kinda depressing.

I've been moved to go to the trouble of typing these musings out because I've just been through the '60s and the '70s sections of Timothy Taylor's economic history of America in the 20th century. Boy, do the facts Taylor lines up bring those decades back.

I scribbled down a few of Taylor's facts about the '70s:

• America lost in Vietnam.

• There was a dramatic productivity and wage growth slowdown. From WWII until 1973, wage and productivity growth averaged 2.8% per year. After '73, it averaged between .5% and 1%.

• During the '70s, there were not just one but two major recessions.

• OPEC hiked oil prices, and the oil shock occurred.

• Detroit produced its most awful cars ever, got whipsawed by the oil shock, and lost a huge amount of market share to Japan.

• "Stagflation" arrived. What was stagflation? Well, until the '70s economists assumed that if unemployment went up, inflation came down, and vice versa -- it just had to happen that way. But in the '70s, unemploment and inflation rose together; no one could figure out how to fix this, let alone how it was possible. By the early 1980s, inflation and unemployment were both over 10%.

• Nixon -- a conservative Republican -- imposed price controls.

• The country was full of angry, political women; divorce became much more common.

• Cities continued to crumble. In 1975, New York City declared bankruptcy. (A personal note: I moved to the city in the late '70s. The place was in terrible shape. It had a "Blade Runner"-ish, eve-of-destruction glamor that could thrill a young person. But it was clear even to idiot me that respectable people and money were fleeing the city. And for good reason: I remember one garbage strike when trash was piled waist-high along the curb for entire blocks. Crime and poverty were awful. In my first five years here, I was attacked, I was mugged, and I was pickpocketed twice.)

• The '70s brought the end of stable exchange rates, and made the country much more vulnerable to the world economy.

• There was a general sense that the U.S. was losing control of its destiny.

• There was serious talk around about how the country simply had no choice but to accept a third-rate status. America's time was said to be past.

Ah, how I yearn for the glorious days of our idealistic youth ... Oh, wait, no: that's the older Boomers who got to be glorious and idealistic, etc. You and I? The street sweepers who followed the parade.

IMHO, this Timothy Taylor lecture series is, like all his others, essential reading. Er, listening. You can buy it, or any of Taylor's other lecture series, here.

Best,

Michael

at April 10, 2004 | perma-link | (14) comments

Dear Friedrich --

As you may remember from our college film-buddy days, I've got only the tiniest of appetites for the "spectacle" element of movies. Happy to acknowledge the pleasure lots get from spectacle ("LOTR," anyone?), and happy to doff my hat to the historical importance of it. But my own system, for some no doubt oddball reason, doesn't crave pageantry. Give me comedy, character, eroticism, satire, sociology, mood, and suspense any day.

Well, almost any day. I do adore the films of Cecil B. DeMille. Are you a fan? They throw me into a state few other movies do. I'm giggly, yet I'm also in a trance; they're camp pleasures, yet at the same time they reach me on some genuine plane. The absurd historical and religious superproductions DeMille's best known for (early on he also made a fair number of intimately-scaled things, believe it or not) hit me like primitive epic poetry. They're fabulous combos of earnestness, hypocrisy, exploitation, beauty, sex and moralizing ... What many people take as reasons to dismiss DeMille's films is exactly what puts a spell on me.

DeMille by Karsh

Hard to pull it all apart, if great fun to try. I had a wonderful time last week catching up with a couple of DeMille's films on Turner Classic Movies, and watching a new documentary about DeMille by the great film historian Kevin Brownlow. It turns out that DeMille's life was as interesting as his films -- vulgar, showy, screwy, even a little touching. In fact, his life story is in many ways a good metaphor for the story of Hollywood itself. "The Squaw Man," DeMille's very first movie, was the first feature to be made in Hollywood, and his last film, a version of "The Ten Commandments," was released in 1956. Now that was a career.

And, hurrah, I notice that TCM is running the documentary again, super-early Sunday morning.

* Cecil B. DeMille: American Epic (TCM; 4/11, 2-4 a.m.). One of DeMille's favorites from among his own films, his silent King of Kings, precedes the documentary, and will start at midnight.

God bless TCM, eh? Gentleguys (and Gentlegals), set your Tivos.

Best,

Michael

at April 9, 2004 | perma-link | (3) comments

Dear Friedrich --

When it comes to the views about books and book publishing that I've presented at the blog, I've gotten the impression that some visitors think I'm a bit ... well, eccentric. Morbidly defeatist and pessimistic. Sick and twisted, perhaps.

In my mind, of course, I've simply been having a good time telling people what I've observed. In fact, I'm one of the cheerier people you'll ever meet; I may even someday publish a book of my own. I just see no reason to fool myself about what the process is likely to entail.

Still, it's fun to find backup. (Don't girls call this "validation"?) I recently ran across a couple of items that visitors interested in writing and publishing may find interesting. Not so coincidentally, these two pieces confirm every damn thing I've ever written here about book publishing.

Ahem. Doubt a Blowhard at your peril.

• Here's a piece by the distinguished journalist Anne Applebaum about the mutual hostility between high-cult people and pop-cult people. "Popular culture now hates high culture so much that it campaigns aggressively against it," she writes. "High culture now fears popular culture so much that it insulates itself deliberately from it. As for the rest of us -- we're inundated with the former, often alienated from the latter." (Link thanks to Terry Teachout, here.)

• Here's a pseudonymously-written Salon piece about what it's like to try to make a go of it as a writer of midlist books. (You'll have to accept a Salon "day pass" to read the piece, but all that means is clicking through some ads.) Moral: why not shoot yourself now instead?

And a couple of bonus tracks:

• Here's a super-amusing q&a; that Craig McDonald did with the wonderful English mystery writer Peter Lovesey.

• Here's a decently-done animated BBC history of books.

You now know virtually everything about book publishing that it took me 15 on-the-job years to figure out. Ain't the web great?

Best,

Michael

at April 8, 2004 | perma-link | (10) comments

Michael:

What’s the deal with happiness, anyway? ‘Happiness’ science seems to keep popping up wherever I go these days.

I checked out the link you provided to the talk/essay by Harvard Professor Daniel Gilbert (which can be read here) on why people are not very good at predicting what will make them happy. It contained the following remarks:

If you actually looked at the correlates of happiness across the human population, you learn a few important things. First of all, wealth is a poor predictor of happiness. It's not a useless predictor, but it is quite limited. The first $40,000 or so buys you almost all of the happiness you can get from wealth. The difference between earning nothing and earning $20,000 is enormous—that's the difference between having shelter and food and being homeless and hungry…

On the [one] hand, once basic needs are met, further wealth doesn't seem to predict further happiness. So the relationship between money and happiness is complicated, and definitely not linear. If it were linear, then billionaires would be a thousand times happier than millionaires, who would be a hundred times happier than professors. That clearly isn't the case. On the other hand, social relationships are a powerful predictor of happiness—much more so than money is. Happy people have extensive social networks and good relationships with the people in those networks. What's interesting to me is that while money is weakly and complexly correlated with happiness, and social relationships are strongly and simply correlated with happiness, most of us spend most of our time trying to be happy by pursuing wealth. Why?

Why indeed? Well, one way of interpreting that apparently irrational behavior is to assume, as Professor Gilbert does, that people are happiness maximizers, but they are pretty inefficient at it: "Most of us spend most of our time trying to be happy by pursuing wealth. Why?" He suggests that people are either ignorant about what makes them happy or are unfortunately susceptible to deceptive stimuli (like advertising) that persuades them to make questionable lifestyle choices. Hence they waste their lives overworking and overspending, when they should be hanging out with their friends.

I really have to question this conclusion for several reasons.

First, the methodology of ‘happiness’ science seems more than a bit spotty. (Professor Gilbert doesn’t discuss the whole topic of methodology, but I assume for the following discussion that his approach is similar to that of other workers in the field—to wit, he’s measuring happiness by the extremely sophisticated approach of asking people how happy they are.)

How accurate is self-reported happiness as a measure of well, anything? How much credibility would you give to self-reported data on the quality of people’s sex lives? (Especially if the question were phrased this way: “Do you think your sex life is (1) poorer than that of an average member of your high school graduating class, (2) equal to that of an average member of your high school graduating class, or (3) better than that of an average member of your high school graduating class?” Do you really think you'd see a nice bell-shaped curve of responses centering on answer #2? Ha, ha.)

I noted in my recent posting on A Visit to the Land of the Optimists that Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Laureate, tried for years to devise a reliable and repeatable method of self-reporting happiness...and failed. One must ask: are all the lessons of ‘happiness research’ just an artifact of a questionable data-collecting methodology? (A small digression: with technology like functional magnetic resonance imaging machines hanging around, isn’t it possible today to come up with a more ‘objective’ measure of happiness than self-reporting? And if a brain scan for measuring happiness isn’t in the cards, then can’t we come up with something relating more to observable behavior? Like a bounce in the step? Singing in the rain? Swinging from lampposts like Gene Kelly?)

And even if self-reporting is an accurate methodology, I can imagine all sorts of other ‘technical’ issues that would seem to throw doubt on these so-called 'correlates of happiness across the human population.' What if people’s behavior isn’t aimed at maximizing their long-term ‘average’ happiness but is motivated by the desire to avoid transient-but-repeated moments of dissatisfaction? For example, what if you are intermittently but painfully bothered by your failure to accomplish your life-agenda? Could you convey such important but intermittent moments of unhappiness via a self-reported happiness survey? I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

Or, to put it mathematically, exactly what measurement of happiness is being 'correlated' by Professor Gilbert here? Average happiness? Mean happiness? Peak happiness? Minimum happiness? Marginal happiness? Trailing average happiness? Anticipated future happiness? The list can go on and on. Have all these variants really been thoroughly 'correlated'? Can Mr. Gilbert's measurement apparatus even distinguish between them?

Also, doesn’t our knowledge of the mechanisms of addictive behavior suggest strongly that people are motivated by far more specific stimuli than something super-general like ‘happiness’? I don’t know about you, but it doesn’t look to me as if alcoholics or drug addicts are aiming to maximize their long-term happiness level per se. And if they aren’t, what is that about? And what does it say about the motivational mechanisms of the rest of us, which probably differ more in degree than in kind from those of addicts?

And, finally, I question when anybody explains a wide-spread social trend (like how people spend their time between work and a social life) by saying, "Advertising makes us do it." I do a certain amount of advertising in my business, and I can assure you that noboby ever did anything they didn't want to do because they were advertised into it. If people are spending more time working and less time socializing than you think makes sense, it is because you don't understand their motives as well as you think you do.

Of course, to me all these questions suggest a different hypothesis. To wit, that people aren't, fundamentally, happiness-maximizers. I will grant that they try to maximize happiness around the margins, but it is by no means their central motivation and happiness maximization is constantly being overridden by other factors. Let's face it, such a hypothesis is an immensely better fit for the disjuncture between behavior and what ‘happiness research’ tells us than Professor Gilbert’s hypothesis that advertising and ineptitude make us incompetent happiness maximizers.

Just looking at life from a Darwinian point of view, I don’t see the centrality of happiness to the overall model. Nothing wrong with it, of course, but nothing central, either. If the goal, so to speak, is gene immortality, what is the importance of whether the ‘survival machines’ that encase the genes (i.e., you and me) are happy or not, as long as they do what their genes need them to? And it’s not only possible but likely that the imperatives of reproduction would mandate activity that doesn’t maximize the happiness of the individual links (i.e., you and me) in the chain of life. Your genes may well have wired your brain to encourage activity that serves their needs but that makes you tired, cranky, afraid or--heaven forbid--even gets you involved with a sexually attractive but high-maintenance reproductive partner.

Hey, I’ve seen many surveys that indicate that childless people are happier than people with kids. And not by a little bit, either. That comes as no surprise to me (as a parent). After all, the little rug-rats are quite a chore, soak up all sorts of money and free time, to say nothing of making you worry about who they're dating and what college they’ll get into. So why do a majority of people choose to have kids? This would seem to be another form of inexplicable behavior from a happiness-maximizing standpoint, but it is exactly what would be predicted from a Darwinian standpoint.

As for people's tendency to focus ‘irrationally’ on work, well that might not be so irrational--assuming that we have goals other than maximizing our happiness. If staying alive until one can not only reproduce personally but can also help one’s offspring successfully reproduce is a useful biological goal, then I can see that we might well be incentivized by our genes to imitate the ant rather than the grasshopper in the fable—and work, work, work until we drop. After all, what do we matter in the (hopefully) infinite chain of life?

Granted, in modern society, people might do better to spend less money ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ and put more effort into piling up savings to pass on to Junior, but throughout the vast majority of human existence such ‘banking’ arrangements were non-existent. Working extra hours to buy a Mercedes might seem wasteful, today, but working extra hours to ensure a more-than-barely adequate supply of food might have been a really useful way to spend your spare time in the Upper Palaeolithic era…particularly from the standpoint of your child. And who knows, maybe ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ has some kind of long-term survival benefit all its own—like making it more likely that your children will mate with the offspring of similar high-genetic-quality workaholics?

Again, I repeat the notion that I advanced some time ago—evo bio seems to mandate that we re-think a lot of our ideas about life, including the notion that humans are happiness- (or utility-) maximizing machines. And that has consequences for the social sciences that have so far not been widely accepted or thought through.

Cheers,

Friedrich

at April 8, 2004 | perma-link | (20) comments

Dear Friedrich --

Audiobooks, whose virtues and pleasures I've been touting on this blog for a while, continue to gain. Although sales of adult hardcover books dropped 2.4% in 2003 -- and I've been told that the figure would be close to 4% if you left out the "Harry Potter" books -- audiobook sales rose 12.4% in the same period, a rate of growth that has held steady since 1997.

I got these figures from the excellent inside-publishing newsletter Publishing Trends, whose website is here. Some more interesting facts and passages from the piece:

• "The average audiobook listener remains middle-aged to older, well educated, and relatively affluent. According to APA stats, audiobook listeners are 76% female, with an average age of 45 (the average male is 47). And, more telling than any other trait, the average listener does so while driving."

• "Publishers report that the sale of [books on] CDs has shifted into overdrive, and many say it's only a matter of time before cassettes go the way of the Edsel."

• Digital downloading of audiobooks is now possible -- more than 5000 audiobooks can now be downloaded via Apple's Itunes site, for instance.

• Digitification means that audiobooks will soon be popping up in all kinds of venues. "Daniel Waters, chair of the Public Library Association's Tech in Libraries Committee ... said it's only a matter of time -- say, 18-24 months -- before most libraries offer digital downloads of books."

• It's expected that audiobooks will soon be offered on airplanes, as one of the audio channels. Already, a digital-radio channel offers audiobooks 24/7.

Although I'll miss books-on-cassettes, I can't see any other downsides to these developments, can you? IMHO, audiobooks are a bandwagon well worth jumping on. Thanks to 'em, commuting time, exercise time, even time spent on housework can all go from being tedium-time to book-reading time.

Best,

Michael

UPDATE: Here's a link to Telltale Weekly, an interesting attempt to create a public-domain audiobook library.

at April 8, 2004 | perma-link | (13) comments

Dear Friedrich --

Have you ever run across the crime novelist Elizabeth George? To my shame, I've only read one of her novels, this one here. But I thought it was terrific, and I'll be reading more of them. I suppose the dismissive view of her work might be that it's nothing but PBS "Mystery!" fodder. And that's not inaccurate; in fact, some of her books have been made into "Mystery!"-ish TV series. But at the same time such a judgment misses the point of what's to be valued, admired and enjoyed in her books.

Like PD James and Ruth Rendell, Elizabeth George uses the crime-novel form to explore the traditional material of fiction -- psychology and character, sociology and politics. Readers looking for full-bodied novel-reading experiences from contemporary fiction would be well-advised, IMHO, to avoid most lit-fiction (especially the buzzed-about stuff) and pick up a crime novel by James, Rendell or George instead. All three are expert storytelling craftspeople; all three are also shrewd, observant and insightful, and have a lot on their minds.

Of the three, Rendell is the strangest, the most malicious and the most perverse. Many of her books (especially her non-series books) are wonderfully freaky reading experiences, and of the three she's my personal fave. James and George satisfy in more traditional ways. Their books are as much like old carved-from-oak, made-for-the-generations 19th-century novels as you can find (or at least as I've found) these days.

Attention, attention, attention: all of these writers are working in what today passes for non-"literary" modes. The central thing they're selling, so to speak, is story, sociology, and character; don't bother with them if what you're in the market for is pinwheeling, attitudinizing literary hijinks. All three are terrific writers in the (sigh) hyper-limited sense of being able to use words and sentences fluently, and of structuring a reading experience effectively. But they're a lot more interested in the human content of their subjects than they are in linguistic, let alone writing-school, games. This is non-egocentric writing, the equivalent in fiction of what Christopher Alexander, Leon Krier, and the New Urbanists fight for in architecture -- art that isn't about the the caperings of an artist-genius, but that puts technique at the service of subject matter, and that serves traditional human interests and needs. Needless to say, I think that's great, and I think the self-conscious "literary" world should bow down before these prolific and brilliant giants. But I vowed early this morning to not let myself get too worked up about these things today.

As a person, George is an interesting figure too, famous mainly because, although she's an American (born in the midwest; lived for ages in California; recently moved to Washington state), she writes novels set convincingly in Britain, and featuring British characters. When asked why she does this, she tends to say, Why not? And then that she does it because she likes England. (Good answer!) She has done a lot of teaching, and recently published a how-to-write-fiction book, which is buyable here. I wonder what it's like. In interviews, she speaks sensibly about how only craft (and not "art") can be taught, so her approach sounds modest, and it might well be interesting and helpful. Oh, what the hell: I just hit the Amazon one-click button -- kaboom! I'll let you know more about the book in a few days.

Here's a quote I enjoyed from an interview with Elizabeth George:

Novels were designed to entertain, and those of us who wish to keep the art form alive need to keep this in mind. To aim for lofty literature instead of aiming for a good story with real characters who grow and develop and a setting that’s brought to life is ... like putting the varnish on the canvas first. I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe.

Now that's a view of fiction writing I can get behind. You?

Best,

Michael

at April 8, 2004 | perma-link | (10) comments

Dear Friedrich --

It's important (IMHO, of course) to learn to defend ourselves against architects, many of whom share a taste-set that civilians find bizarre, even repulsive. High-toned architects like flat (or warped) planes, acute angles, razor-sharp lines, and things that glare and gleam; they like buildings that twist, swoop, torque, and fold in on themselves -- that stand out rather than fit in. My usual response to these whirling abstract structures is, "Hey, when I wanna look at TV graphics, I'll turn on the TV."

But most of all, architects like glass. In fact, many architects are such fanatics about shimmeriness and reflectiveness, openness and transparency that you'd almost think they don't like buildings at all, given the fact that the rest of us tend to look to buildings for such qualities as permanence, shelter, coziness, and security. Glass is something a building can definitely have too much of. Randy Minor, a Chicago Magazine writer who lives in a Mies van der Rohe-designed apartment building, once wrote this about what it's like to live surrounded by acres of Miesian glass:

My own living habits, however dull, are calculated and self-conscious the minute I walk into my modernist marvel. The only privacy I have is in a couple of corners in my tiny bathroom and kitchen, where I retreat when I want to be "alone."

The Rear Window effect already has some buyers backing out of the building."It's not very private," complains one uptown socialite whose new husband bought a Meier loft before they were engaged and has since put it on the market for $2.75 million.

Best,

Michael

at April 7, 2004 | perma-link | (10) comments

Dear Friedrich --

* I've been enjoying catching up with the newish blog Beatus Est, here, written by Eric. He's an anti-modernist architect, and although he claims to be a lousy writer, at regular intervals he turns a nifty phrase: "The academics of architecture would have people believe that it is complex and that they are the only ones able and fit to judge what is good and what is not," Eric writes. "It's time for the public to tell the emperor he has no clothes and call for more traditional views of art and architecture, time for the public to quit accepting what they're simply told." Hear, hear, bro'.

* James Howard Kunstler's short address to A Vision of Europe (here) is, characteristically, a scorcher. "We need an everyday world that is worthy of our affection," says Kunstler, and it's hard to put it better than that. Link thanks to John Massengale, whose posting here isn't to be missed either. "Modernism has done a terrible job of providing us with a usable past: it's produced a small number of great buildings, but few great places, and an overwhelming amount of crap. Over 80% of America has been built since World War II, and on the whole, it ain't pretty," writes John.

* Some treats for mystery fans: Sarah Weinman blogs about crime fiction here. (Link thanks to Terry Teachout, here.) Fenster Moop has written a fine posting about the brilliant Patricia Highsmith, here. And Sarah points out this nice Mystery Ink tribute by Fiona Walker to the great Ruth Rendell, here.

* Arts and Letters Daily's Denis Dutton is an entrepreneur, a web visionary, and a philosopher. He turns out to be a sharp film critic too -- which is to say, natch, that I agree with how he reacted to the "Lord of the Rings" (ie., with fatigue and without enthusiasm), and admire and enjoy how he's said it. Dutton also has some provocative and helpful thoughts in his piece (here) about what digital tech is doing to movies.

* Here's a NYTimes article by Erin Arvedlund about an innovative way the American film industry is fighting DVD piracy in Russia: by actually cutting prices. Imagine that.

* More on economics and happiness -- an Edge talk with Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, here. (Link thanks to Arnold Kling, here.) Gilbert -- sensibly, to my mind -- asks if we'd really want people to be rational in the economic sense, even if such a thing were possible.

* The Marginal Revolution duo have been as busy and brainy as ever. Here's Alex Taborrok's article for the Library of Economics and Liberty about how to cope with the organ shortage -- the shortage of human organs, that is. And here's Tyler Cowen on a question that's puzzled me for years: why can't I subscribe only to those cable-TV channels that I really want? Why do I have to buy the whole damn bundle?

* DesignObserver's Rick Poynor writes a posting here that's a good informal history of some of the last few decades' more important developments in graphic design. As always at DesignObserver, there's much to be learned from the comments on the posting too.

Best,

Michael

at April 7, 2004 | perma-link | (6) comments

Michael:

I spent last weekend in what we Angelenos call ‘the Desert’ with my in-laws celebrating Passover. At breakfast one day I stumbled across a mind-blowing story in the local paper, the Desert Sun. Apparently Cheeta, the chimpanzee star of the Johnny Weissmuller-Maureen O’Sullivan “Tarzan” movies is still alive and hanging out in retirement somewhere in the Palm Springs area. Of course, I wouldn't swear that there was only one Cheeta, but apparently this chimp is one of those who graced the silver screen with the King of the Jungle. (Although I couldn’t find that story on the Desert Sun’s website, you can read a 2003 story about Cheeta’s retirement here. You can also see Cheeta’s own website, here.)

World's Oldest Living Chimp and His Sidekick, Dan Westfall

Certified by Guinness as the oldest chimp in the world, at 72 Cheeta has nearly doubled the typical chimpanzee life-span. Admittedly, he hasn’t yet reached the duration of his co-stars (Weissmuller died in 1984 at the age of 80 and O’Sullivan died in 1998 at the age of 89) but the notion of a chimp being the last surviving actor of the series seems weirdly appropriate and poignant somehow. (A web-search on O’Sullivan revealed, somewhat amusingly, that she hated Cheeta because he apparently bit her on several occasions. Well, I guess he had the last laugh, so to speak.)

Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan:
Primordial Jungle Ancestors, 1930s-Style

As will probably come as no surprise, I watch a lot of kid-oriented fare with my nearly three-year-old son. I guess the news of Cheeta’s survival into the present hit me because at my son’s age I was watching scratchy black & white Tarzan movies on the tube. In contrast to modern products aimed primarily at children, the very decrepitude of the images, the struggle you had to engage in to decode what was going on—as well as the strikingly ugly-handsome face of Weissmuller himself and the not-quite-contemporary allure of O’Sullivan—all seemed part of the primordial atmosphere of those films. The Tarzan movies that flickered across my television seemed terribly foreign and moss encrusted, sort of a message from another continent, which was exactly appropriate for the subject matter. (Whenever I see a jungle setting obviously recreated on a sound stage it puts me into a dream-like state to this day. Check out "The Little Princess" sometime.) One reason I liked Tarzan movies was that my dad told me he had seen them as a child in theaters, so I guess I was trying to penetrate the mystery of what his life had been like as a kid, if even only in a small way.

I wonder if my son or children of his generation will have any veneration for old things just because they are old? Maybe there is a downside to what promises to be the ever-clear immortality of digital imagery.

Cheers,

Friedrich

P.S. I came across a great Johnny Weissmuller anecdote from a website you can check out here:

Many stories have been recounted of incidents befalling the Olympic athlete, some of them apocryphal, others true. And it becomes a tour de force to distinguish fact from fiction. One of my favourites tells of a celebrity golf tournament held in Havana, Cuba in 1959, during which the car in which he was driving was ambushed by Cuban rebels. According to the story, Weissmuller let out his Tarzan yell, and the rebel soldiers, after a stunned silence, recognized the movie hero, and gave him and his party safe conduct to the golf course.

Heck, if you had been a Cuban rebel in 1959, wouldn't you have let Johnny Weissmuller go--in return for a genuine Tarzan yell?

at April 7, 2004 | perma-link | (4) comments

Dear Friedrich --

1. I rent Borderline at the DVD store partly because I sometimes enjoy checking out thrillers that go straight-to-video, but mostly because it stars Gina Gershon, who I often love watching. That bad-girl chic and effrontery of hers amuses me no end. And I do love looking at her mouth.

2. The movie's credits go by, and I notice that the film was directed by Evelyn Purcell, who I remember was once married to Jonathan Demme. In the mid-'80s, Purcell had a filmworld reputation as an impressive woman, so people were expecting great things when she made her own first movie. It turned out to be "Nobody's Fool," an inconsequential piece of hippie whimsy, and people lost interest in her. How has Purcell spent her life since, I wonder.

3. The picture is OK -- an intelligently laid-out and executed ultra-low-budget cross between a neo-noir and a yuppie-under-siege thriller (like "Unlawful Entry"). Unfortunately, it's got no flair or wildness -- almost nothing to rescue it from something basically dull and worthy at its heart. Grumpy thoughts about women directing thrillers circulate in my brain.

4. But Gershon is terrific and fresh, if in a modest way. She and Purcell seem to have wanted to use the movie to show the multisidedness of women -- not just the familiar sexiness and competence, but the way a woman moves between a whole variety of roles and personas: anxious mother, tender lover, tough professional, fearful child, mischievous imp, doomed heroine ... As a thriller, the movie's a semi-anonymous snooze; as a vehicle for putting onscreen some observations about women, it's pretty enjoyable. Nonetheless, The Wife falls asleep halfway through the film.

5. Why isn't Gina Gershon a big star? She seems to have everything a star needs -- looks, talent, charisma, sexiness, distinctiveness ... Plus, she was so wonderful in "Bound" and "Showgirls" ... But both were cult pictures, not big hits ... Is Gershon not a big star just because she hasn't had the luck to be in a big hit?

6. I muse about actresses and stardom ... All those beautiful, talented actresses who are plausible star material yet who never do become stars ... Among fairly recent names, there's Kelly Lynch ... Madeleine Stowe ... Minnie Driver ... Annette O'Toole ... Diane Lane would be on this list if she hadn't gotten lucky and achieved stardom with "Unfaithful" ...

7. I'm still thinking about this when I watch the Ron Shelton cop-buddy picture Hollywood Homicide the next evening. The movie is slick, energized, and even kinda brilliant, but almost nothing about it clicks, IMHO. It's got a glittering, party-hearty mood, but watching it I felt like the guy down the hall who isn't in the mood for such a lot of loud carrying-on.

8. Stories that have an actual jock-like quality, though -- what a good idea for a list. Not literary stuff like Roger Angell or Malamud. Who needs more of that? But a list of rowdy, physical, extraverted stuff like "North Dallas 40," "Ball Four," "Semi-Tough," "Bull Durham," "Cobb" ... And I start coming up short. Are Dan Jenkins' other novels any good? I haven't read them. I've heard good things about a mystery novel called "The Shake," but haven't read it yet either. I liked that Bobby Roth movie about golf, the one that starred Randy Quaid. Hmm: should I include "Tin Cup," Ron Shelton's own golf movie, even though I wasn't crazy about it?

9. In a supporting role in "Hollywood Homicide," however, is another candidate for my previous list, the amusingly self-possessed vixen Lena Olin ...

10. So once again I'm thinking about actresses and stardom. And the actress whose name always surfaces in my brain when I'm thinking about this topic finally makes her appearance: Kate Nelligan. Do you remember her? She's about our age -- a beautiful dark-haired, dark-eyed Canadian who studied in Britain. At a very young age, she became a celebrated theater actress there, was the muse of the playwright David Hare, did Shakespeare for video ...

11. Unlike lots of actresses, Nelligan was actually given a fair and deliberate shot at stardom. She was wonderful opposite Donald Sutherland in an OK spy thriller called "Eye of the Needle"; came to America; did some amazing theater here (I saw most of it); got a ton of press coverage; and then starred in an awful feminist thriller called "Without a Trace." She was terrif, but the movie bombed.

12. Right after "Withouth a Trace," Nelligan seemed to drop out of the stardom game altogether. From what I've heard, she realized that she hated the wannabe-a-star fast lane, and decided to ditch it and lead a semi-sensible life instead. So ever since "Without a Trace," most of her acting work has been in small movie roles; she was in "Wolf," "Up Close and Personal," and "Prince of Tides," for instance.

13. Good for Nelligan -- but also too darn bad, at least from a loving-to-watch-talented-actresses p-o-v. Those early Nelligan performances had such beauty, such power, such dark erotic drive, such clarity of execution ... She had all that British technique, yet also a huge range of emotional and sensual resources; she was like a dark-haired, North American Helen Mirren ...

14. So it's over to Amazon. Nice to see that "Eye of the Needle" is still available. Too bad that Nelligan's "Measure for Measure" seems out of print ...

15. One of Nelligan's most astounding performances was in a British TV version of Zola's "Postman Always Rings Twice" precursor, Therese Raquin. Bold, tragic, impulsive, squalid, desperate, alone -- Nelligan really was fabulous; although she was never nude, she gave one of the sexiest performances I've ever seen. And, son of a gun, "Therese Raquin" is now available on DVD; it can be bought here. It costs $37 -- which is, gulp, not cheap. But, hey, the show is a good three hours long, if I recall right. And Nelligan's performance is the equal of just about anything you'll see in the theater, where chances are you'd pay a lot more for a lot less.

Best,

Michael

at April 6, 2004 | perma-link | (8) comments

Dear Friedrich --

I just finished watching the DVD of the documentary "Standing in the Shadows of Motown." Have you seen the film? I think you’d love it. I certainly did. Go now and rent.

The film's about the house musicians at Motown Records during its Detroit (ie., Hitsville, USA) heyday, from the late 1950s until the early 1970s, when the label moved to L.A. These guys, who called themselves The Funk Brothers, were the instrumentalists on such songs as "My Girl," "Mickey’s Monkey," "You Really Got a Hold on Me," "Do You Love Me?," "Heat Wave," and "Ain’t too Proud to Beg" -- as far as I’m concerned, a good percentage of the happiest music ever made. In fact, the documentary claims that The Funk Brothers played on more #1 hits than Elvis, the Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones and the Beatles put together. Yet as individuals they're barely known. Making them known, of course, is the documentary's purpose.

As a movie, it’s merely OK-to-pretty-good. It’s organized around a reunion concert, and it includes interviews, a handful of staged recreations, some archival footage, and the usual collection of stills and knickknacks. Some quibbles: the film gets a little dreary as it moves into the late 1960s -– but, heck, the late ‘60s were pretty dreary. The narration, co-written by (sigh) Ntozake Shange, is almost childishly overripe; I could have used a lot less rhetoric and lot more information. And while some of the singers who perform in front of the band in the reunion concert bring their own joy onto the stage (Chaka Khan, Bootsy Collins, Joan Osborne), a couple of the performers are earnest drags.

(Speaking of which, can anyone explain the appeal of Meshell N’Dego-what’s-her-name? I do my best to be generous to artists and performers, but for the life of me I can’t find a single good thing to say about Meshell. Well, OK: she’s got a better voice than I do. But aside from that, sheesh: her performing style is masked, introverted, superior -- it seems intended to deflate the material she’s performing. I can’t see how anything she does could appeal to anyone who isn’t a card-carrying member of the Women’s Studies division of the Rainbow Coalition.)

But why quibble when the material is as sweet and fascinating as it is here? I remember Camille Paglia once writing something like, the French and the academics can theorize away, but all you need to do to smash their intellectualizing to smithereens is walk past a gospel church on Sunday. That’s what watching this movie was like for me -– like walking past a gospel church on Sunday. If your heart doesn’t feel like bursting with gratitude, amazement and pleasure a half a dozen times while watching this movie, well, forget being my friend. Whatever my reservations about the filmmaking, hats off to Paul Justman (the director) and Allan Slutsky (the producer, as well as the writer on whose book the movie is based); they found the story, and they went ahead and made the film.

And, IMHO, it’s essential cultural history. (Especially for Detroit fanatics, of course.) Like almost everyone else in the world, I never gave the instrumentalists on the Motown records a second thought. I don’t know what I imagined, really; I don’t know that I ever spent any time wondering about the Motown instrumentalists. Yet what a big role The Funk Brothers played. As far as I can tell from the movie (I’ve got no independent knowledge here), the musicians would typically be handed rough charts for a song, or perhaps they’d be given a couple of chords and some hummed passages. Among themselves, they’d cobble together an arrangement; within a few hours, they’d lay down the track. Then they’d move on to the next song.

And that’s what the movie reveals: that The Funk Brothers were as active in the creation of the Motown sound as the songwriters, the star performers, and the producers were. Those six guitar notes at the beginning of “My Girl,” the ones that make everyone feel so lovey-dovey? One of the Funk Brothers came up with them. That driving beat under “Do You Love Me?,” the one that makes everyone want to jump up and dirty-dance? The Funk Brothers came up with that. The electric-piano bit that kicks off “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” the one that makes everyone want to settle in for some serious grindin’? Courtesy of The Funk Brothers. Postwar American culture without the contributions of The Funk Brothers would have been a poorer, and certainly a much less happy, thing.

The Funk Brothers include Pistol Allen, James Jamerson, Earl Van Dyke, Benny Benjamin, Uriel Jones, Joe Hunter, Joe Messina, Eddie Willis and others. They’re an exuberant, personable, and colorful bunch, bursting with talent, humor and soul. I notice that the DVD of the movie -– really a two-DVD package that includes the documentary and a disk of extras -– is on sale at Amazon for $12.98. That’s cheaper than many music CDs. And I notice that there’s a “Standing in the Shadows of Motown” website here.

Small M. Blowhard musing that I expect no one to pay any attention to:

I was struck by the fact that every one of these guys was a high-end, classy musician; most of them had played with the era's best jazz musicians. This Motown gig was their day job; at night, they were going out and playing at local clubs. They’d come back to Hitsville the next a.m., and bring some of what they’d discovered or had fun with back with them.

High and low not at war, but feeding each other -– that’s the dream, isn’t it? It certainly seems to be part of the formula behind such great eras in American art as the American Renaissance, ‘30s romantic comedies, big band jazz, and Motown. The Funk Brothers may have been paying the bills by helping churn out pop product, but they had real sophistication, as well as the time and the opportunity to keep their art alive and fresh. Technically, they’re playing ‘way beneath themselves on the Motown tracks -- but that’s OK, because they didn’t have to set aside their spirit and humor when they were on the job. They weren’t exploring the farthest reaches of their art, not by a long shot, but they weren’t condescending to what they were doing either. They dug a lot of the performers they were backing; they were having a good time, working hard and pitching in.

I’m struck by how very much this basic equation has changed. Back in the early days of pop, the people who put together the pop arts and the pop media were often pretty sophisticated. When they slapped together a TV show, or a song, or a magazine, they brought a larger culture to bear. They knew lit, or art, or music, or history. And even if what they were being paid for was to provide EZ product for the masses, that was OK. They didn’t have to pretend to be stupider than they were, they could have a pretty good time on the job, and nothing prevented them from exploring their brains, tastes and skills outside of work.

I don’t mean to paint a relentlessly cheery picture of this. There were a lot of problems with these arrangements. But it makes for quite a contrast with today’s pop media. These days, most people coming into the pop arts have grown up on little but pop, and they’ve been given impoverished educations. They’re often entirely creatures of the media, and many seem to have no idea that there might be such a thing as culture beyond electronic-media, pop culture.

What these people bring to the job instead of culture and sophistication is zip, pow, attitude, and youth. Their only goal, typically, is to pump up the pop thing -- that's all they can imagine doing. It’s not that some of them aren’t talented; David Fincher’s a very gifted filmmaker, for instance. And what some of these creatures manage to find and create within the electronic-pop-media universe is really striking. But it’s just as striking that so few of them seem to have any idea that a frame of reference might extend beyond the electronic-pop media.

Here's a snappier version of what I’m trying to say: some older film director (De Palma? Joel Schumacher?) was talking about the difference between the older Hollywood crowd and the new young things. He said something like, "We grew up loving Fellini and Truffaut and Welles, and when we got into a position to make movies, we wanted to bring some of that into our work. The kids coming along in the movie world today are arriving here because they grew up loving 'Top Gun'."

Once upon a time, pop was just one element in a larger cultural matrix; these days, pop culture is often feeding off nothing but pop culture. It’s funny, the way earlier pop often seems like happier pop, isn’t it?

Best,

Michael

at April 5, 2004 | perma-link | (21) comments

Michael:

I was intrigued by your posting on Timothy Taylor, especially by the list of how much things had changed for Americans since 1900. I did, however, note that at least one thing had not changed greatly, if at all. According to your post:

Most people lived within a mile of where they worked, and depended on their feet to get them around.

Okay, so most Americans have given up on the getting-around-on-foot thing, but their commute time hasn’t altered that much. By my reckoning, walking a mile would take people from roughly 20 to 30 minutes (at a rate of 3 or 2 mph, i.e., at either a brisk stride or a leisurely stroll.) According to a 2002 U.S. Census Bureau study of average travel time to work in 69 cities (which you can see here) in only 3 of those cities does the average worker take more than 30 minutes to get to work, and in only 9 of those cities can he or she make it in less than 20 minutes. In other words, most of us urbanites make it to work in roughly the same time as our grandparents or great grandparents. Granted, given that now we travel there via auto or mass transit at something more like 40 miles per hour, we may be traveling 13 or 20 miles instead of one, but the experience may not be so different.

I wonder how much impact such apparently arbitrary preferences have on how we organize ourselves? If we could travel by flying car or jetpack or bullet train at 100 miles per hour to work would we live 2.5 times as far from work as we do now? Kind of interesting to ponder the enduring power of things like 10-minute coffee breaks, an hour for lunch, the half-hour sitcom, no?

Cheers,

Friedrich

at April 3, 2004 | perma-link | (16) comments

Dear Friedrich –

The Wife and I are on vacation in Sedona, Arizona. Do you know the town? An amazingly gorgeous area, in the same (very general) neck of the woods as the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley, and full of what everyone fondly refers to as “Red Rocks” -- peaks, mesas, valleys and boulders of a deep rust color. Huge skies with three or four weather patterns visible simultaneously; snakes and cacti; surprisingly dense patches of desert greenery … No matter which direction you look in, you pretty much expect John Wayne to step into closeup.

The town itself doesn’t have much to recommend it unless you’re a seeker; it’s a New Age haven, full of rumbling tourist buses, pink Jeeps taking clutches of midWesterners for trips out to the Power Vortexes, and stores selling wind chimes and crystals.

Lolling around the great west, I find myself wondering about three questions.

• Are you as fascinated as I am by the way certain styles and personalities make it onto the semi-permanent cultural menu? Two that have become perennials are hippie-backpacker style, and punk-rock style -- who'd have thought? You and I were around during the early days of both styles; I don’t know about you, but at the time I’d never have guessed that either one had long-term potential. I also have no idea why they appeal to contempo kids. Do you?

• Are you as struck (and annoyed) as I am by the way video screens seem to be cropping up everywhere? For instance: above the entrance to the typical NYC subway stop is a rectangular, iron-encircled space that for years has been filled by an advertising poster. Slowly, these posters are being replaced by video screens. And, as video screens will, they flash, they glow, and they twitch -– they’re yet another grabby distraction you have to train yourself to ignore.

  And at airports ... Killing time at airports has become even more annoying ever since airports started filling waiting areas with TVs tuned to news, sports and financial channels. The TVs at New York’s LaGuardia are almost inescapable; it can be hard to find a gate-side seat that doesn’t face a TV, or at least put you within earshot of a TV. Is it written in the Constitution that every vacant square foot is fair game to sell as advertising space?

  New rule of American life: if a video screen can go there, it will.

• Are there categories of art whose members are all bad? (Not including such categories as “lousy art,” wiseguy.) As our recent conversation about light entertainment hinted, I’m inclined to think that non-lofty art categories have much to offer. I like some cowboy art, for instance -– enough, anyway, to feel ashamed that I don’t know the field better. And I’m prone to think that even such categories as “tourist art,” “t-shirt art,” and “greeting-card art” can be interesting; god knows I’ve run across handsome and attractive tourist art, nifty and funny t-shirts, and beautiful greeting cards. And for all I know, all three fields have spawned creative titans.

  But do all art categories generate at least some OK stuff? How about … “New Age visual art”? I’ve poked my head in a few Sedona stores and galleries, and the New Age stuff all seems bad: bare-breasted women feeling goddess-y; howling coyotes; iridescent rainbows; Native Americans looking hunkily shamanistic. I’ve taken enough yoga classes to know that even the New-Age-related category of “drone-y music to play during yoga class” has its better and its worse practitioners. But in my (admittedly tiny) experience, all New Age visual art stinks. Or am I as yet too uninformed and narrowminded about the category?

Your thoughts about these matters appreciated, as always.

Best,

Michael

at April 2, 2004 | perma-link | (30) comments

Michael:

A couple months ago I broke the remarkable story of Gil Elvgren's astonishing burst of painting in a 1938 sabbatical from his career as an illustrator. (My posting can be read here.) Over a few months in that year, Mr. Elvgren, ordinarily a creator of pretty-girl calendar paintings, cranked out a set of masterpieces which anticipated the formal concerns of artists many decades in the future like Frank Stella and Gerhardt Richter.

Shockingly, several more examples of his visionary work have appeared. As a result of my close relationship with the security guard currently watching over these paintings, and my willingness to make a large contribution to his favorite charity—him—I was allowed to take these photos, which have never before appeared anywhere.

G. Elvgren, Black Painting, 1938

The first painting appears to anticipate many of the concerns of noted abstract expressionist Ad Reinhardt, as well as the series of all-black canvases produced by a variety of artists in the 1970s. What is particularly uncanny is the use of Reinhardt’s patented square format for the painting, as well as the exploration of the aesthetic subtleties of black on black.

G. Elvgren, Springboard, 1938

The second painting appears to utilize much of Mark Rothko’s compositional apparatus, here making the link between abstraction and landscape painting particularly visible. Some commentators feel that a remarkably early commitment to raising the public’s awareness of the dangers of industrial pollution is also a factor in this unusual work.

How to account for Elvgren’s time-warping genius? I doubt it’s possible. Still, we’re going to keep on trying. The answers are out there, somewhere.

Cheers,

Friedrich

at April 1, 2004 | perma-link | (9) comments

Dear Friedrich --

The first time I ran across linguistic relativism -- the doctrine that language determines thought -- I reacted with utter disbelief, as I did the first time I ran across philosophers arguing that we don't speak languages, languages speak us. "Ya gotta be kiddin', right?" -- such was my super-sophisticated, instant response.

And yet, and yet ... I'd spent a teenaged year living in France, and it seemed clear to me even then that the French language had something to do with why the French love paradoxes; why they don't understand Anglo-style humor; and why they love logic-pirouettes ("wit"), highly-ornamented music, and haute couture. Language is embedded in, and an important part of, culture. And if culture doesn't dictate what you think and say, well, it certainly has an impact.

I was a young twit who was bad at languages, but even I could tell that my brain operated differently when it was in French mode than it did when in its usual American mode. I was dimly aware that speaking French seemed to lead me into new kinds of conversations; because I was speaking French, I was hearing, thinking and saying different things than I usually did. Or was this happening not because of the language but simply because I was in France?

I'd think about French, English and reality more generally, and I'd go around muttering things like "different combs; same head of hair." After some years, I settled on this way of thinking about language and culture: they don't determine much, but they certainly condition an awful lot. It seemed an accurate, and useful, way of summing up my experience.

So I enjoyed this Philip Ross article for Scientific American about the Berkeley linguistics prof Paul Kay, here. Kay has spent years looking into how various languages attend to matters of color; the larger question he's been probing is, To what extent does language determine thought? I find his answer tres sympat -- as I do the provisional way he tenders it.

Did I ever tell you about the college friend of mine who moved to Italy? She'd always been a charming, gabby woman in a stylized American-girl way. The first time I visited her in Italy, though, I was amazed. Speaking American-English, she was her usual self. But speaking Italian, she was something else entirely. Not only had she picked up Italian quickly and convincingly, she was waving her hands, moving the pitch of her voice up and down the musical staff, and making emotional faces that could be read from miles away ...

When I asked her about the creature she'd become, she responded this way: "In Italy, if you simply say the words, no one pays attention -- no one really hears you. Unless you wave your hands, singsong your voice and make exaggerated facial expressions, you aren't really speaking Italian, at least not as far as the Italians are concerned." The little lesson I took away from this exchange: "language" isn't something you simply speak, and it isn't simply a matter of knowing the grammar and reciting the correct words either. No, instead, it's a complex and ongoing activity you do your best to enter into and take part in. Language isn't just the rulebook; it's the whole damn ballgame.

Suits me for now, anyway. What's your reaction to the people who argue that language determines thought? And what's your reaction to the people who claim that the language they speak has no impact on what they think or what they say?

Best,

Michael

at April 1, 2004 | perma-link | (31) comments

Dear Friedrich --

I’ve raved before about the economics professor Timothy Taylor, whose lecture series for the Teaching Company I’m a huge fan of. (Here’s his page at the Teaching Company’s website.) I’ve been through a ton of intro-to-econ products, and if I were to recommend the best way for a non-math-y person to get started with econ, it would be with Taylor’s series. (And when they’re on sale, they’re fabulous bargains.)

Taylor’s about as good a teacher of intro-to-econ as I can imagine. He's clear; he's organized; he's likable and enthusiastic; and he has an amazing gift for turning this material into plain, vivid, even fun English.

I’ve been through all his series but one, his History of the U.S. Economy in the 20th Century. I’d been putting it off for the sheer retentive pleasure of anticipation. But the other day I caved and finally began listening. Very pleased to report it’s just as top-notch as the others.

Taylor kicks off the series with a review of what life was like in the U.S. in the year 1900. Here’s a sampler of some of the facts Taylor supplies:

• Total U.S. population in 1900 was 76 million people, less than a third the population we have now.

• The U.S. was the wealthiest economy in the world. Per capita income was on a level with Britain and Australia, was twice that of France and Germany, and was quadruple the standard of living in Japan and Mexico.

• Still, most Americans in 1900 were living in what we today would consider poverty. In present-day dollars, per capita American income in 1900 averaged around $5000, less than a fifth the current level. In other words, the typical American in 1900 had about the same income that a typical Mexican has today.

• Only three percent of American homes were lit by electricity.

• Only about a third of American homes had running water; only 15% had flush toilets; and half of farm households didn’t even have an outhouse.

• Most people lived within a mile of where they worked, and depended on their feet to get them around. Only one urban household in five owned a horse.

• Half of all people lived in spaces where they averaged more than one person per room. Taking in lodgers was common.

• Half the population drank alcohol; half didn’t. The half that did averaged two hard drinks and two beers a day; wine consumption was minimal. In Europe, by contrast, people drank twice as much beer, and averaged more than four glasses of wine a day.

• Life expectancy at birth was 47 years, and infant mortality rates were high. Of every 1000 babies born, 140 died in their first year. These days, fewer than 10 do.

• Flu, pneumonia, typhoid, gastritis, and whooping cough were common causes of death.

• 10% of the American population was completely illiterate, and the average adult had an 8th grade education. Only 7% of students would ever complete high school.

• A man’s typical on-the-job work week consisted of 60 hours of work spread over six days. Pensions were rare; men generally worked until they were too feeble to go on doing so. 2/3rds of men over 65 had fulltime jobs.

• Women were 18% of the paid work force. They mainly worked in fields like textiles, apparel, shoes, canning -– fields where you were paid according to how much you produced.

• At home, women spent around 40 hours a week on meal preparation and meal cleanup, seven hours on laundry, and another seven hours on housecleaning. The average housewife baked a half a ton of bread -- about 1400 loaves -- a year.

You can buy this terrific Timothy Taylor lecture series here. It's currently on sale for the really astounding price of $15.95.

Best,

Michael

at March 31, 2004 | perma-link | (23) comments

Dear Friedrich --

Last night, I watched the Wolfgang Petersen/Clint Eastwood thriller In the Line of Fire for the first time since it was released in 1993. Have you seen it? I think it's terrific. I can't say enough good about Jeff Maguire's brilliant script; about the slammin' (though calm) direction and filmmaking of Petersen and his crew; about the superduper, unanxious-seeming performances, even from Clint. And as the rogue-weirdo baddie, John Malkovich added a lot of spice; this was an early version of his virtuosically creepy thing, and it was still startling. Efficient big-budget suspense, but with enough room for character and color. (I notice, by the way, that Jeff Maguire's only produced screenplay since 1993 was last year's bomb, "Timeline." What a business, eh?)

Watching the movie got me thinking about how fond I can be of big squaresville movies … about how rare the good ones are … and finally about how odd it is that Hollywood creates so very few of them. These days, the industry seems to want most of its product to have attitude or edge, or to be conceptual, ironic or hip (in no matter how dippy, inessential or meaningless a way) -- to be anything but a square-shooting, dignified production that wears its straight-ahead competence proudly.

How strange it is that the moviebiz's establishment makes so few such movies. Curious about this, I started compiling a list of recent-ish movies that are solidly entertaining; have well-turned, 3-act scripts; that feature stars confidently deploying skills and charisma; that have convincing direction in a new yet classical style … Nothing rock video-ish, nothing indie or Lynch-esque, nothing "personal," no CGI spectacles or New Age romances, no new-style overproduced exploitation flicks, no computer animation … Just squaresville -- but rewarding! -- Hollywood.

OK: "In the Line of Fire." "The Fugitive." The Gillian Armstrong version of "Little Women." The first of the "Die Hard" movies.

And then I started coming up short. Do I include the first "Terminator"? How about the Jonathan Mostow movies, "U-571" and "Breakdown"? Or the fabulous "Mimic," or "Devil in a Blue Dress"? "My Best Friend's Wedding" struck me as the most original of the recent romantic comedies, and the Drew Barrymore dramedy "Home Fries" was pleasingly bittersweet …

But I wonder. The first of these are really B-movie pleasures, and the two chickflicks are hip, post-'70s-esque things. So I suspect that none of them really belong. This is obviously a far from complete list, and I'm eager for help here. Might the Coppola version of that Grisham novel qualify? How about "Falling Down"? Both were solid entertainments. I'm probably forgetting many other likely candidates.

In any case, thinking about all this led me to a Larger Thought, or at least a Larger Musing. It's about authority. Let's say that Hollywood is the movieworld's authority figure. That seems plausible -- in a world of foreign flicks and indieflicks, of this and thatflicks, Hollywood is everyone's mama and papa. Didn't Bertolucci once refer to the town as "the Big Nipple"?

How odd it is that such a creature so seldom creates authoritative entertainment, no? But isn't this part of a more general gestalt, an American cosmos in which many of our authority figures refuse to act like authority figures? Instead, they want to be taken as irreverent and friendly -- just like the rest of us, if infinitely more successful.

How do you feel about this? I'm a downtown guy with tons of avant-garde tastes and pleasures, but where authority figures are concerned, I'm happiest when they act like authority figures; I don't want my boss to act like my friend, for instance. Loose and informal, sure, but respectful -- that suits me. (I'm not making an argument here, or advocating it as a Good Thing, by the way; I'm just taking note of my own tastes and preferences.) And I find it annoying that one of the characteristics of the new-style standard-issue hierarchy is that so many of the people at the top refuse to assume direct responsibility for their positions and their power.

I haven't got kids and I'm no one's boss on the job, so I don't have many opportunities in life to play Authority Figure myself. I wonder how I'd do if I had the chance. You, on the other hand, have kids and are an on-the-job boss; you aren't just a pissed-off arty college student any longer. What style would you say you've evolved to express Authority?

Judging by my very peculiar NYC circles, there seem to be an awful lot of parents around who are determined not to play traditional parent, as in "take responsibility for guiding, training and raising the children." Did I tell you about the moment I witnessed the other day? There was a young-ish father with his just-older-than-toddler son. The son babbled something loud and incomprehensible. The father's response: "Say what, dude?" In NYC, come to think of it, there are a lot of families that are ruled, in fact bossed, by the children -- an awful sight.

Anyway. A few questions: any nominees for proud, well-done, enjoyable establishment-style movies? (Let's say from the mid-80s on.) And your thoughts about the new-style, non-authority authority figures?

Best,

Michael

at March 30, 2004 | perma-link | (35) comments

Michael:

I was intrigued by your recent posting, Prosperity and Immigration, (which can be read here). This discussed the oddly negative picture the media paint of the fortunes of Middle-America, as described in The Economist:

The economy, it is said, is being “hollowed out” by international competition and the connivance of business and political elites, creating “two Americas”, one rich, one poor. Median income of American households, commentators often say, has been stagnant, though census figures give a rise of one-fifth since 1980. Lou Dobbs, on CNN's “Lou Dobbs Tonight”, is just one media fabulist who makes his living by claiming that, as America is being “exported”, so the well-being of middle Americans is in a parlous state.

In truth, of course, most indications of the collapse of the middle-class are the result of statistical artifacts. America’s uniquely high immigration rate of the past twenty-five years, which has resulted in a large pool of very-low-income workers, has pulled numbers like the ‘median’ wage down. Once immigrants are factored out of the mix, median income—for the native-born—has shown the same growth that it did during the ‘golden age’ of the 1950s and 1960s.

Partly this resonated with me because I had been hearing stories of the decline-and-fall-of-the-middle-class for years and yet couldn’t find any real-life examples of modern middle-class Americans who didn’t have nicer cars, didn’t have far more toys (for both children and adults), didn’t take far better vacations and didn’t have far larger investment portfolios than my family did when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. (This last wasn’t hard to beat, as we had none.) I’ve also been aware that I ‘ve had to pay employees, junior and senior alike, significantly higher real salaries recent years than I did in 1986, the year I started my business. In short, this analysis confirmed a suspicion that I had nursed privately all along, that the prosperity of the 1980s and 1990s was quite a bit more widely shared than some class-warrior commentators had maintained. And who doesn’t like to be able to say: Ah, I thought so.)

But I was also intrigued by the larger question: why are people so willing to embrace negative views of the world, even to the point of disregarding the fairly evident positive evidence in front of their eyes? (I’m not pointing any finger here—I’m by nature a fairly extreme pessimist, far more inclined to see the glass as half empty than half full. As you can see, I really have no business being an entrepreneur.)

So when I saw that this analysis derived from a book by Greg Easterbrook with the title “The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse,” I just had to buy it. I wanted to see the world through the eyes of an optimist for a change—sort of like going on a vacation to a sun-and-sand resort to get away from my own wintry mental landscape.

Just Another Day in Easterbrook Land

Well, Mr. Easterbrook is nothing if not an optimist. The book starts off with a discussion of all the positive trends of the past 30 years, including improvements in the economy, the environment, private virtue, health care, even the international situation (okay, so here the good news, the ‘defeat’ of Communism and the greatly decreased odds of U.S.-Russian nuclear war is a bit dated, but hey, I said he was an optimist.)

Mr. Easterbrook then moves on to a rather once-over-lightly on the reasons why our world view tends to be darker than it probably has any good reason to be. He begins by noting that people’s evaluation of their financial situation focuses less on the where they are at the moment than where they think they’re going. He suggests that our progress has been so dramatic that few of us can imagine equivalent improvements in the future—hence, we evaluate our situation negatively. Mr. Easterbrook also tosses in the observation that people have a strange attachment to what he calls ‘collapse anxiety,’ worrying about disaster scenarios that will tank our entire society. He also makes a fist at the media’s preference for sensational doom and gloom over gradual improvement in life. Finally, he scowls at political activists on both the right and the left who spread ‘going to hell in a handbasket’ scenarios as fund-raising tools. Fair enough.

However, all of this is discussed rather briskly because he has what he considers a better reason for our pessimism in his back pocket. Yes, what Mr. Easterbrook really thinks in his heart of hearts is that our values are screwed up. A confirmed moralist, he seems quite delighted to report that all our material wealth hasn’t really made us happy:

If you sat down with a pencil and graph paper to chart the trends of American and European life since the end of World War II, you'd do a lot of drawing that was pointed up....[B]ut your graphs would lose their skyward direction when the topics turned to the inner self. The trend line for happiness has been flat for fifty years. The trend line is negative for the number of people who consider themselves "very happy," that percentage gradually declining since the 1940s. And the trend line would cascade downward like water over a falls on the topic of avoiding depression. Adjusting for population growth, ten times as many people in the Western nations today suffer from "unipolar" depression, or unremitting bad feelings without a specific cause, than did half a century ago....

And why, if we’ve gotten so darned rich (and we pretty much all are, relative to our grandparents) why doesn’t this translate into greater happiness?

Nearly all well-being research supports the basic conclusion that money and material things are only weakly associated with leading a good life. [Nobel Prize Winning professor] Kahneman sums up his research in the simple phrase, “Life circumstances don’t seem to have much effect on happiness.” Veenhoven’s work suggests that the magic number at which money decouples from happiness is about $10,000 per capita per annum. “In the relationship between national happiness and national income,” he says, “we see a very clear pattern of diminishing returns, with the bend-off point at about $10,000 annual income.” Per-capita income in the United States in 2000 was $29,499. Both the United States and Western Europe are long past the statistical point where, on average, money can still buy happiness.

The paradoxical fact that most of us spend our time pursuing financial rewards far in excess of what well-being researchers think does us any good actually comes in kind of handy for Mr. Easterbrook’s thesis. This is because Mr. Easterbrook has a use for all that excess money (the cash that isn’t buying us happiness.) He wants to use it to buy other people happiness. The last few chapters of the book lay out an agenda of Mr. Easterbrook’s suggestions for how the world should be improved:

(1) Make universal domestic health care a reality
(2) Raise all wages to at least a $10/hour living wage with healthcare benefits (to be accomplished voluntarily, somehow, not via governmental fiat)
(3) “[Devise] a system in which corporate leadership is not based on deceit and greed”
(4) Transcend our modern materialism and nihilism (“Gradually moving beyond materialistic obsession, while discarding fashionable theories of pointlessness in order to reclaim a mainly hopeful view of the human prospect, seem two of the leading challenges facing Western society.”)
(5) End Third World poverty (“The nations of the West should take on as their next historic challenge the defeat of global despair.”)
(6) Deal with global warming

As you notice, not all of these involve spending money, but Mr. Easterbrook’s agenda does have a distinct trend in that direction:

These are the sorts of changes men and women must make for themselves, from within, since no law can ever determine what is in our hearts. But there are also areas where the challenges facing the Western nations, and the globe as a whole, are ones regarding the reform of laws and social structures. That leads to a question: Is there still time to change the world?

And we know how an optimist like Mr. Easterbrook will answer that type of rhetorical question—with a big fat Yes! Obviously—well, at least obviously to Mr. Easterbrook, anyway—

…[t]he reason that the problems of the present—such as developing-world destitution, greenhouse gases, or poverty amidst American plenty—seem “unsolvable” today is simply that we have not yet begun the work of solving them.

I grant you, I was a little stunned to hear that we had not yet begun the task of dealing with American poverty, but, well, whatever. Actually, by the time I got to the end of the book, it dawned on me that Mr. Easterbrook’s view of the world is that of an unreconstructed (okay, barely reconstructed) Great Society 1960’s–style liberal. There is no world problem that a combination of income redistribution and virtuous intentions can’t solve. The effect was so strong that when I finished the book at the mall where I was eating lunch I was tempted to go out and buy some Beatles’ singles, beginning with “All You Need is Love.”

So how do I, as a confirmed pessimist, view all this? Well, naturally, I’ve got some questions about it. The first of these questions goes to the issue of whether or not income above $10,000 annually per capita buys us any happiness, or, more broadly, anything of value.

Mr. Easterbrook’s happiness “data” are entirely the result of self-reported surveys—to wit, how you answer when someone asks if you are very happy, happy, not-so-happy, or blue. While not denigrating the idea of happiness research, I think most of us would have to recognize that polls of this type are awfully fuzzy data collection tools. In fact, Mr. Easterbrook even acknowledges this point, albeit in a sort of backhanded manner:

It’s impossible to be certain, of course, precisely what happiness is. Men and women may go back and forth on whether they feel happy; there is no hard metric, like an SAT score or a forty-yard dash time. Much of what is known on this subject from a data standpoint is “self-reported happiness”—what people tell researchers or pollsters…Psychologist Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for Economics, and a colleague named Amos Tversky spent the better part of two decades trying to devise an reliable, impartial scale of “subjective well-being” and eventually gave up.

Not that such methodological problems slow the good Mr. Easterbrook down for more than a paragraph or two, of course. And there is that data of a reported 10-fold increase in serious depression, which would seem to be a ‘harder’ number, right?

Well…maybe not. As far as I can tell, the notion of a 10-fold increase in serious mental illness is anchored by comparisons with U.S. census data…from 1880! According to an article (that can be read in full here):

The most complete enumeration of severe psychiatric disorders ever carried out by the U.S. Census Office was done in 1880. Because of widespread fears at the time that insanity was increasing, census enumerators were given special forms and extra pay to identify all severely mentally ill people, including querying neighbors of the person in question. In addition, all 100,000 physicians in the United States were asked to report "all idiots and lunatics within the sphere of their personal knowledge," and over 80% did so….A total of 91,997 insane people were identified….The prevalence of insane people, both hospitalized and living in the community, was 1.83 per 1,000 total population….And yet the [large National Institute of Mental Health national] ECA study from 1980 reported a prevalence rate for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder that was almost 10 times higher than the 1880 prevalence rate.

Gee, do you think they used exactly the same criteria for mental illness as we do today (somehow, that phrase “idiots and lunatics” isn’t very reassuring.) Which is not to say that mental illness in general, and depression in specific, isn’t increasing—there are various reasons to think so, although similar methodological objections can be raised to any method of estimating the size of the increase.

But even granting the increasing incidence of depression, the question arises: is depression increasing because we are becoming increasingly and self-defeatingly affluent, as Mr. Easterbrook insists? I did a brief web search regarding studies on depression and noticed several findings that would seem to raise doubts about that argument. A Swedish study (based on the entire population of the country between 1996 and 1999) revealed that:

…with increasing levels of urbanisation, the incidence rates of psychosis and depression rose. Those living in the most densely populated areas had 68%-77% more risk of developing psychosis, and 12%-20% more risk of developing depression, than those living in the least densely populated areas.

Well, there has been a continuing increase in population density over the past century, so presumably a chunk of any increasing depression has come from that source. Another article (from the Medical Journal of Australia, which you can read here) looked at the effects of religious faith on depression and other mental illnesses:

The reasons why people with a sense of religious commitment are less likely to become depressed may include a feeling of social connectedness, exposure to messages about healthy living, or perhaps the reduced exposure to drug-taking behaviour. However, studies controlling for these factors have still found religiosity to be independently protective. So there may be other reasons, such as the comfort that comes from believing in a benevolent and caring God, the view that justice always prevails in the end, or that adverse events always have a meaning and a message. Such attitudes would buffer enormously against the ill-effects of life stresses and the depression that often follows.

Unquestionably, there has been a measurable decline in religious activity over the past century, which would seem to have resulted in another net increase in depression and other mental illness.

And if increasing depression were chiefly the result of excessive materialism and the burden of earning a high income, why is it that the incidence of depression is more common at the bottom end of the income distribution? A paper studying the relationship between socioeconomic status and depression among middle-aged sister and brother pairs in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) reveals that:

There is only moderate sibling resemblance with regard to depression. The depression factors for siblings are correlated between r = 0.09 and r = 0.16; that is, between 9 and 16 percent of the variance in depression is common to sibling pairs. This weak correlation lends support to the hypothesis that depression, at least as measured by the CESD, is primarily situational, rather than a characteristic: a state, rather than a trait. However, the causal model suggests that lower levels of depression are related to a relatively enduring measure of [high] socioeconomic status…Regardless of gender, individuals with more accumulated wealth tend to have lower levels of depression. [emphasis added]

Now, a correlation between low social and economic status and depression can be interpreted several different ways, but at least one of those ways is that higher wealth and accomplishment functions as a (at least partial) safeguard against depression. So perhaps all that getting and spending that Mr. Easterbrook attributes to ‘keeping up with the Jonses’ and to mindless materialism might actually have some significant real-world benefit. After all, the disparity between all the furious effort involved in making ever larger sums of money in society and the absence of any reported ‘happiness’ payoffs is a kind of giant blinking red light announcing that something doesn’t add up here.

Okay, I grant you, my pessimistic world-view has accomplished very little other than to raise no doubt niggling objections to Mr. Easterbrook’s agenda for universal human happiness. Sigh. Well, maybe I picked up one insight into the way.

In his book, Mr. Easterbrook takes a brief detour into the world of ‘positive’ psychology, which is devoted to the study of what makes people happy, good, productive, etc., in opposition to that field’s traditional emphasis on pathology and psychological dysfunction. Again, being the highly moral individual that he is, Mr. Easterbrook interprets the findings of such positive psychologists as Martin Seligman to suggest that an increase in community-oriented activity would make people far happier than an increase in their already bloated income. And that may very well be true. However, being the annoying pessimist I am, I noted another aspect of Dr. Seligman’s thought might explain the surprisingly high rates of depression and lack of joy from all our economic success even better than our rotten values. This is his theory of depression as a form of ‘learned helplessness.’

Back in the 1960s, when Dr. Seligman was a standard-issue behavorist studying the conditioning of dogs via electric shocks, he discovered that it is possible to educate dogs into a state of helplessness by restraining them while forcing them to endure painful electric shocks. Thereafter, the ‘conditioned’ dogs made no effort to avoid the shocks (which were eminently avoidable), apparently already having been convinced that such an effort was futile. Dr. Seligman expanded this into a theory of depression, which he noted resembled such a state of learned helplessness and resignation. He pointed out that in humans, of course, such a state of learned helplessness had less to do with electric shocks and more to do with habitual modes of thinking about failure and the futility of attempts to fix problems.

I’ve often wondered if the low rates of entrepreneurship and the preference for relatively traditional employment models isn’t a function of societal training—to wit, if it’s not a form of ‘learned helplessness.’ It would certainly take a lot of the joy out of making money—even big money—if in the back of your mind you were always convinced, like those poor conditioned dogs, that your ability to make that money was dependent on the sufferance of or on the continuing acuity of your bosses. And if their ability to make good decisions came at the sufferance of or depended on the continuing acuity of other, higher authority figures—like government officials. Gee, I can see where that would make anyone anxious. In fact, I can even see where it might give them a form of collapse anxiety!

Well, maybe I didn't learn so much, but I did get my vacation in the land of the optimists. Hmmm, how are you feeling these days?

Cheers,

Friedrich

at March 29, 2004 | perma-link | (12) comments