The Divide: Taibbi's writing has matured, but the system is still broken

Taibbi’s last book, Griftopia, got to me.  Not like it made me mad, but you could tell the seething rage that was behind his words and it was so heavy that it almost detracted from his argument (The argument that you and I all got sold out).

Here, he’s toned it down.  In the Divide, Taibbi flips back and forth between the malefactors of great wealth that can wreck a planet and a financial system AND then he looks at the people who suffer great injustice at the hands of the law.  It is a class thing, as well as a race thing, and a gender thing.  The concept of the two Americas is alive and well, and Taibbi shows it well.

A couple of notes: if you have followed Taibbi’s reporting in the Rolling Stone, some of these stories will feel familiar, but he does a good job rolling what may be disparate reportage into a coherent argument. The second note I am not sure if it says more about me or Taibbi or the system he covers.  The sections that relate the great crimes the wealthy perpetuate are engagingly told, but they don’t get my lather up.  I did get that lather up when he accounted for individual’s struggles against a racist immigration and justice apparatus. I guess I can relate to those better, since I have been much closer to the bottom in society than I ever will be to the top.  I heartily recommend everyone needs to read this book, but they should check with their doctor beforehand.  

David Harvey: Contradictions have the nasty habit of not being resolved but merely moved around.

By this point, I have read enough David Harvey to know his house style.  Loquacious in person, his prose can feel torturous at times. That’s not a critique per se, but an acknowledgement of Harvy’s desire to be exact in his language.  It also brings about sentences of absolute beauty from time to time.  You just have to be on the alert for them.  I flagged a couple, but I won’t drop them in here without context.  I’ll just point you to pages 91, 125, and 130.

In this new book, Harvey explores 17 different contradictions – not in the sense of opposition, but contradiction where “two seemingly opposed forces are simultaneously present” (1), such as reality and appearance. These contradictions are both points of strengths and weaknesses for Harvey (and others in the Marxian tradition).  He divides up the contradictions he identifies into Foundation, Moving, and Dangerous types.  

Truth be told, I need to reread the book if I really want to get analytical here.  I was just chugging along, and finding Harvey’s points of consonance until I got to the end. My main take-away is that in the face of even 17 contradictions, capital is not going to fall in on itself.  The grave-diggers still need to dig. That is bad news for me because I am normally so passive.  Perhaps I should stop trying to understand the world and maybe go change it. Or Maybe tomorrow.

Commie Girl in the OC: Dated but Funny

Verso – that fine radical imprint – recently had a sale to commemorate the opening of its virtual storefront (I’m sure they had something before).  They had all their titles at fifty percent off.  I scanned thorough the titles and filled my cart.  Then I came to amazon to price compare and pare my cart and price compare.

I didn’t buy it through Verso.  I bought it through Amazon because they had it on clearance.  

Let me tell you, you should have to pay full price for this book.  Every letter is worth it. I mean, unless you start asking about what value really is, and then does value exist at all so either this book is worthless or priceless or both at the same time.  But if you start doing that you’re digressing.

Listen:

Let me tell you a little secret.  I bought this book because Schoenkopf is my Wonkette, pure and simple. I like here work now. 

I also like her work then.  The publication date here is 2008, and it looks like the books are repurposed essays from her time at an independent weekly covering Orange County and the rest of California from the late 90’s to 2008. So they’re a little dated: you might not have experience with the area: or the people: you might not have watched “The Real Housewives of Orange County”. 

That doesn’t matter. Schoenkopf has an amazingly engaging writing ‘voice’, and in these essays she is able to blend her personal experiences with larger issues with verve and ease that you don’t notice the transition.  The flow quickly – I finished the book in an evening.  Buy it. And read her website.

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History -- Good history, short on the alternatives.

I read Stiglitz and Sen’s “Mismeasuring  Our Lives” a while back, and I bought their arguments that GDP was itself defective and overly reductive and measured some of the wrong things. They proposed a dashboard of stats that would better measure wellbeing than GDP does.

Coyle does not think this is necessary. After going through a history of GDP, she concluded:

GDP does a good job of measuring how fast (or not) the output of “the economy” is growing. And GDP growth is closely linked to social welfare. GDP struggles with measuring innovation, quality and intangibles, but it does a better job than any currently available alternative. (136)

And then she proposes some tweaks to GDP to better work in the information economy.

Overall she does a good job outlining the history.  It is accessible to everyone with some background in national accounting (even if just econ 101).  My only issue is where she looks at possible alternatives to GDP.  I kept waiting for her to really get into the Sen/Stiglitz study, and then she did. For one page (118). Then where she lost me, was her paragraph dismissal of the Bhutaneese metric of “Gross National Happiness”  (112). I am a fan of trying to track flourishing, even if that makes me “Grotesque”  by her words without much justification. These parts are all too short and come across as dismissive, even in a brief, affectionate history.

Quick thought on: A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present by Howard Zinn

Reading this book can be a chore. It takes some time, and is kind of dense.

The down side is that if you read this book at the right time of your life it can change your worldview. That's not without its problems. You have to take down your 80s posters with pictures of fast cars. You have to throw out your Ayn Rand books. You'll no longer be welcome at the Von Mises institute,

But here's the plus side. There's never a wrong time to read this book.

The rent is too damn high: not as bad as you might think.

My normal position on Matt is that he needs kicked in the teeth.  I know him as the economics blogger at slate.

You know he "only" has a BA in philosophy.  Sure, sure, it's from "Harvard". But that really means it was taught by advanced grad students.  My state degree came from actual "Doctors".

And his Slate stuff was insufferable.  I don;t think it was his fault though. He has to spill a lot of content.

I really thought he was an insufferable writer, but then I read this.

Matt shows how current zoning is bad for both left and right reasons. Maybe we should allow better and smarter zoning so that more dense development is allowed where the market asks for it. If the measure of a book is that is convinces a reader of the writer's position, this book works (in spite of my preconceived notions of Matt's writings).

The only issue, as it remains with all public policy books, is the "What is to be done" section. I have an appreciating piece of land in an inner-ring suburb of Chicago. Why would I accommodate what he wants?  Otherwise, go Matt, I might want to learn how to spell "Yglesias".

Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys: Who Plays Brad Katsuyama in the Movie?

Michal Lewis is a national treasure.  He is able to take complex things and make them accessible to people like your mom – if you want to be condescending to your mother. In a way, he is one of the best nonfiction writers in English working today. I’d put him up there with Bill Bryson. But you know that already.  This is a Michael Lewis book. You know: the guy who wrote Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short, and that other book you like.

What Lewis does is take a look at an issue, but he does this thing where instead of boring you with a lot of details, he tells the story of a person  (For real – this book has no index, no endnotes) and the problem they face and the cool things they do.  The person isn’t really usually that far removed from what we imagine ourselves to be, but perhaps a better version than the self we really are.  In Flash Boys, that person is Brad Katsuyama.  Katsuyama was a worker on the exchange for the Royal Bank of Canada. He noticed that there were issues with trading. Namely that the trades that his traders were trying to make basically disappeared in front of him when they tried to execute them.

This lead the reader to go on a journey led by Lewis as the reader follows along with Katsuyama as everyone learns what the issue was and why those trades were disappearing. Mainly the story is computers, software, and companies using their smarts to insert themselves in the middle of a trade.

Eventually Brad and the reader learn all about this and is disenchanted with the system as it exists so he sets out to change this. His mission is to create a new exchange that disarms the smart “High Frequency Trading” and levels the playing field for everyone.  It’s a good story, and Lewis tells it well.

My issue with it is that with the structure of the story, where it focuses on Katsuyama and his team, is that it is one-sided.  The implicit message is that they are the good guys and the HFT guys are the bad guys.  If you don’t know much about the world that Lewis describes then you take it for granted that he is right.  The last third of the book becomes an advertisement for the exchange that was started.  It has started a lot of conversations amongst finance and economic people about the value of HFT, but that is nowhere in the book. Does it help price discovery; does it provide liquidity; does it make trading more efficient ? Or is HFT just predatory; is it pure rent as Lewis quotes someone  “The market is all about algos and routers. It’s hard to figure this stuff out. There’s no book you can read .” (209)? I don’t know, but thankfully this book is bringing those issues.

Ultimately, I have to hoist a footnote that Lewis writes that sums up the whole book for me: “’Glitch’ belongs in the same category as ‘liquidity’ or for that matter, ‘high frequency trading.’ All terms used to obscure rather than to clarify, and to put minds to early rest.”(203).  Lewis lets in his editorial voice come in to show that even though he has written a whole book there is an inexactness to defining what HFT is – you have to get to the nitty-gritty to really know (He recommends a couple of books in the text but I didn’t highlight them). Because in the end, this book is only tangentially about HFT. It is really about Brad Katsuyama. All I wonder is who is going to play him in the movie