Monthly Archives: April 2012

Hedgehog and the Fox

54 Replies

Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote a wonderful little book called The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History. Here is a quick version of Berlin’s thesis.

‘A fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’. This fragment of a verse by Greek poet Archilochus describes the central thesis of Berlin’s masterly essay in which he underlines a fundamental distinction that exists in mankind–between those who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things (foxes) and those who relate everything to a central all-embracing system (hedgehogs).

I think our current election pits a hedgehog (Romney) versus a Fox (Obama). I think the libertarians who comment on this blog are hedgehogs. I think Bob Dylan is a fox and Louis Armstrong and Picasso and Susan Sontag and Martin Scorsese and Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerman are all foxes. I think Ron Paul is a hedgehog and Franklin Graham and Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum are hedgehogs. They see the world through a single lens, be it Austrian economics or fundamentalist religion.

But our world cannot accommodate hedgehogs, because “the infinite variety of things” is only exploding. The hedgehog is incapable of dealing with facts that contradict his world worldview. Take the whole inflation debate which our Libertarian correspondents have been telling us is coming down the pike at hyper speeds for the last four years, because the Treasury and the Fed are “printing money”. As Richard Duncan points out in his new bookThe New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy , that at the very point that Greenspan was unloosing the easy money, Globalization was causing “a 95% drop in the marginal cost of labor by bringing a billion people from the developing world into the global industrial workforce.”

How could you possibly have inflation in such a circumstance? Hayek is simply not able to account for this. So Ron Paul will never stop predicting hyper inflation and the suckers will never stop buying gold futures which PAY NO INTEREST.

Or take Paul Ryan’s insistence that an austerity budget like the Conservatives pushed through in Great Britain is the key to America’s future. Ryan continues to push his budget, which mimics the British one, despite the announcement this week that Britain has fallen back into a double dip recession.

Britain’s austerity experiment in particular has been judged by economists to have been ill-timed and poorly constructed at best. It is a reminder, in the consensus view, that the basic tenets of Keynesian economics – primarily, that government spending plays a key role in maintaining demand when the private sector is struggling in a severe financial crisis — remain as valid as ever.

So much for the hedgehogs. Never let facts get in the way of ideology.

But how are the foxes going to convince the country that their vision that we are at a Cambrian Moment–A time of radical evolutionary development–is a rational reaction to the end of the Interregnum. I am convinced that Liberals must embrace the experimentation that flows from Subsidiarity: the notion that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. David Brooks writing about Jim Manzi’s latest book Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society, notes that experimentation is the key to rethinking our politics.

Manzi wants to infuse government with a culture of experimentation. Set up an F.D.A.-like agency to institute thousands of randomized testing experiments throughout government. Decentralize policy experimentation as much as possible to encourage maximum variation.

Here once again we return to the idea of New Federalism. As you know, I have been wrestling with this idea for years without coming to a satisfactory conclusion. I think as the school year ends this becomes my summer project.

Money, Power and Wall Street

7 Replies

You owe it to yourself to watch the new Frontline two part special, Money, Power and Wall Street. It is as fine an understanding of where we are and how we got here as anything in our media system today. Part Two comes on next week, but already the major themes are becoming clear.

  • Complexity-No one except the “Quants” (the mathematical geniuses in the Big Investment Banks) who designed the Credit Default Swaps that grew to a $50 Trillion market in 8 years, knew how the securities operated or how risky they really were.
  • Transparency-The only reason the spreads were so big on the CDS market was that it was a totally Dark Market. There was no transparency. No one could tell the real values of the securities.
  • The Committee to Save the World-Rubin, Summers, Paulson, Blankfein, Dimon and Geithner were all part of a club that was going to make sure that none of their members would have to take a haircut on all the crap they owned. The Democrats are just as guilty as the Republicans that this happened.

If Obama’s second term looks like Teddy Roosevelt’s second term and he turns into the trust buster populist President, then eventually this wrong doing will be punished. Until then, watch this show and get really pissed off.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

42 Replies

Forty-three years ago I worked for Levon Helm. I was the tour manager for The Band and in my book, Outlaw Blues, I recounted how Levon changed my whole notion of the “cracker”, a name he proudly embraced.

The first night back in LA the guys brought me down to the pool house and in Sammy Davis’s playroom (complete with giant bed and mirrors on the ceiling) they played me what they had recorded in the three months I had been away. The first tune they played was The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down and by the song’s end, tears were welling up in my eyes. Once in a while works of art open up a window to a world one didn’t understand or didn’t even know. James Agee and Walker Evans had collaborated on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and it had opened up a window onto the life of the sharecropper. For me and many others, Levon’s plaintive singing on Dixie achieved the same effect, but in three minutes time. For a Northern liberal who had marched with Martin Luther King, all “crackers” were like Bull Connors to me. But the song gave me an understanding of Levon’s world that would last me the rest of my life. I never viewed the South with the same eyes after that night.

Looking back years later, I think the root of that understanding was that Levon could embody a mournful 19th Century Southern cracker in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and yet live as one of the hippest 20th Century gentlemen I knew, who could hang out with Sonny Boy Williamson and loved Marvin Gaye’s music. The brilliance of the Robbie Robertson song of Southern defeat is that Virgil Caine (Levon’s character in the song) confesses at the end of the Civil War  that “the very best” (including his brother) are dead and “like my father before me, I will work the land” (as a sharecropper?). There is no glory in war and you can’t eat off Dixie pride.

This contradiction embodied in this wonderful man, Levon Helm, is a contradiction we are still living with in America. This is the argument I have with the Techno utopians like Alexis Obanian. 99% of musicians, writers, actors are just “working the land”. They don’t need to get rich, they just want the honor of getting paid for their work. Levon and Garth Hudson made a good living ($150,000 a year) off royalties from The Band’s eight recordings in the 60′s and 70′s up until 2001 when the Big Pirate sites like Limewire and (in 2003) Pirate Bay really got going. And then the record royalties came to a halt. Levon and Garth did not write songs (I was there). Robbie, Richard and Rick did. There is the difference in income.

But the point is that in a normal economy (pre-piracy) Levon would have made a good living for his whole life,  just for having been a brilliant singer and player on all those great records.That was quite enough.

His death hit me harder than I thought it would. Listen to “The Weight” and “Dixie” right now. You will agree he was one of the greats.

 

Cambrian Moment

25 Replies

My friend and colleague John Seely Brown gave a speech yesterday that really lifted my spirits. He said we are in a Cambrian Moment with a whole new tool set consisting of Cloud Computing; Graphic processing chips/systems;Social Networks; Big Data Analytics engines that allow us to do extremely granular sentiment analysis; The rise of the second screen and the Ubiquitous computing environment that John and his colleagues at Xerox PARC described in 1991; Transmedia and its many logics; 5D Immersive Design. As John said, “each one of these is a big deal, but together they create awesome opportunities and also awesome disruptions.”

Unlike JSB, I am only an aspiring polymath, and so I had to research the Cambrian explosion that John uses as his metaphor for our current moment. The Cambrian Explosion was the sudden appearance around 530 million years ago of a huge number of forms of animal life. In other words an explosion of evolutionary progress.

Now I had been prepared for this burst of optimism late last week by a visit from our erstwhile correspondent Alex Bowles. Like John, Alex was brimming over with evolutionary optimism. He felt that technology (many of them on John’s list) would lead us to a new age of transparency where bad actors would have a hard time hiding from the 99%.That our ability to literally “see” how much carbon was pouring out the smokestacks of Koch Industries, would embarrass even the most heartless oligarch into cleaning up his mess.

As readers of this blog well know, I have been saying since 2007 that we are in an Interregnum, a period where “the old is dying, and the new cannot yet be born”. It could be that JSB’s Cambrian Moment signals the end of the Interregnum. At the Lab I run, the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, we have been working on most of the technologies on JSB’s list  and I would say we lead the field in three of his categories: Transmedia, Big Data Analytics and the Second Screen. But our challenge is to move beyond technology and create context for these new tools. As John said in his Stanford Commencement address

We are now, again, in a moment where we need to think of world building but now of a new kind. It is a moment that is not only about making amazing things. Perhaps, also, for the first time we can make contexts as easily as we make content/things. And as all of you here know, shaping contexts allows the emergence of meaning in powerful new ways – for better or for worse. But in addition to having a new arsenal of tools for shaping meaning we now have ways to create a networked imagination – one that emerges around joint action.

Well I hope JSB is right. That this sudden Cambrian explosion of new capabilities will lift us out of this paralyzing Interregnum. If he is right, I think a lot of the new ideas will come out of what my Dean, Ernest Wilson calls The Quad; creative partnerships between public, private, civil and academic sectors. If we take our task of world building seriously, the next few decades could be amazing.

Censorship Con

21 Replies

A profound reversal in attitudes has taken place in the last twenty years. While in the 1960′s the cries of “freedom” and “liberty” came from Progressives, today it is the right that sees liberty under attack. The campaign rhetoric of the four Republican candidates for President all put the defense of liberty at the top of their agenda. They see in Progressives attempts to regulate bad actors in the world’s of finance, health insurance, or environmental pollution a basic attack on the free market. As Rick Santorum said on Super Tuesday about Obamacare, ”Ladies and gentlemen, this is the beginning of the end of freedom in America. Once the government has control of your life, then they got you.”

I think we need to really consider whether liberty is the value that trumps all others in our society. Let’s take the case of the publisher of backpage.com. 

The biggest forum for sex trafficking of under-age girls in the United States appears to be a Web site called Backpage.com. This emporium for girls and women — some under age or forced into prostitution — is in turn owned by an opaque private company called Village Voice Media. Until now it has been unclear who the ultimate owners are.That mystery is solved. The owners turn out to include private equityfinanciers, including Goldman Sachs with a 16 percent stake…

There’s no doubt that many escort ads on Backpage are placed by consenting adults. But it’s equally clear that Backpage plays a major role in the trafficking of minors or women who are coerced. In one recent case in New York City, prosecutors say that a 15-year-old girl was drugged, tied up, raped and sold to johns through Backpage and other sites.Backpage has 70 percent of the market for prostitution ads, according to AIM Group, a trade organization.

Now the State of Washington has passed a law creating criminal penalties for sites like backpage.com for advertising girls under the age of 18. And what is the response from backpage.com–”Censorship”.

“There’s going to have to be a challenge to it,” said Liz McDougall, general counsel for Village Voice Media Holdings. “Otherwise it would effectively shut down an enormous portion of the Internet that currently permits third-party content.”

Now where have I heard that before? The defenders of Kim Dotcom and the other pirates who have lived luxuriously off the stolen work of musicians and filmmakers around the world, say that any attempt to block these sites is censorship. This is utter nonsense. As I have pointed out before, the issue is not Google or Baidu’s precious freedom, but their precious revenues.

How did we get to this point that the Libertarian rhetoric dominates our political debate? The Village Voice’s liberty to service pimps of underage girls, trumps society’s right to protect those girls from exploitation? The selfish individual’s liberty to not buy health insurance and make the rest of us pay for his emergency room care trumps society’s right to create a working health insurance system? Megaupload’s liberty to host stolen movies trumps the artist’s right to get paid for his work?

As I have said before, we must come off the barricades and stop using this foolish rhetoric of censorship and liberty where it really does not apply. You have no right to free food. Why do you think you have a right to free music? It is time for all the parties involved to sit at the table and figure out some solutions that afford the creators of imaginative work to get paid for their considerable labors.