Saturday, November 19, 2011
The Hipsterfication Of America
by Linton Weeks, NPR
The hotel lobby in Franklin, Tenn., has an ultra-urban loft-esque feel — exposed air ducts, austere furniture and fixtures, music videos projected onto a flat panel. Everywhere there is lava-lampish aqua and amber lighting.
Sale racks near the front desk display chargers for iPods and BlackBerrys and a variety of snacks, including Cocoa Puffs and Red Bulls. Every room features a media box for digital video and music.
Welcome to Aloft, a hipster hotel on the outskirts of Nashville.
Nearby are Plato's Closet, a recycled-clothing store where hipsters shop, and Which Wich, a sandwich shop — touting its "edgy, magnetic environment" — where hipsters eat.
On the streets of Franklin and Nashville and almost every town throughout America now, hipsters scuttle by on scooters, zip around in Zipcars or Smart cars, roll by on fixed-gear bikes or walk about in snazzy high-top sneakers and longboard shorts. They snap Instagram photos of each other — in black skinny jeans and T-shirts with funky epigrams like "If You Deny It, You Are A Hipster" — and turn the pix into iPhone cases. They buy cool-cat snuggle clothes at American Eagle and down-market monkey boots at Urban Outfitters. They drink cheap beer, listen to music on vinyl records and decorate their lairs with upcycled furniture.
What's funny is that people who aren't hipsters generally express distaste for them and those who appear to be hipsters hate to be identified as such. Everybody hates hipsters ... especially hipsters.
They follow indie bands and camp out at Occupy movements. They work as programmers and shop clerks, baristas and bartenders. They are gamers and volunteers, savvy entrepreneurs and out-of-work basement dwellers.
In case you haven't noticed, hipsters — and those who cater to them — are everywhere. And that really galls some hipsters.
The Ironic Hipster
"Hipster culture is omnipresent," says Peter Furia, a founder of Seedwell Digital Creative Studio in San Francisco. "It dominates fashion, music and lifestyle. It crosses borders of ethnicity, socio-economic status and sexual preference — something that we haven't seen since the boom of hip-hop culture."
Furia's studio is producing a documentary-style Web series, American Hipster — for its nascent YouTube channel — that will debut in April 2012. "What's funny is that people who aren't hipsters generally express distaste for them and those who appear to be hipsters hate to be identified as such. Everybody hates hipsters ... especially hipsters. And the ironic part is that hipsters' opposition to pop culture has become pop culture."
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Photo: Mike Blake/Reuters /Landov
The Probability of Your Existence: Basically Zero
by Juliana Breines
At some point after first learning about the birds and the bees as a child (possibly after watching the opening credits of Look Who's Talking or thinking too hard about the implications of Back to the Future), it occurred to me that I could have easily been someone else. Had my parents not happened to meet when they did, and happened to conceive at the moment they did, with a specific pair of egg and sperm, I wouldn't be here. Apart from being a minor existential crisis, this realization made me feel incredibly lucky. Out of an infinite number of possible people, I was one of those who got a chance at life.
I recently came across a lovely (if statistically questionable) visual demonstration of one person's attempt to approximate the odds that each of us came into the world and exist as we are today. It incorporates probabilities ranging from our parents' first encounter to our unbroken line of ancestors to the emergence of the first single celled organism, concluding with the following analogy:
The probably that we as unique individuals came to be is equivalent to "the probability of 2 million people getting together each to play a game of dice with trillion-sided die. They each roll the dice, and they all come up with the exact same number - for example, 550, 343, 279, 001. The odds that you exist at all are basically zero."
From a psychological perspective, this realization may induce a sense of awe. In a seminal paper, Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt define awe as an emotion that is characterized by vastness (perceiving something that is much larger than the self, physically or psychologically) and by a need for accommodation (a struggle to comprehend something that does not easily fit into existing ways of seeing the world). The double rainbow guy of youtube fame, for example, is clearly in a state of awe (and probably also on drugs).
Awe can be elicited by interpersonal experiences, such as being in the presence of a powerful leader, or having an encounter with God or the supernatural, by physical experiences, such as witnessing a beautiful sunset or a natural disaster, or by cognitive experiences, such as trying to comprehend a grand theory (or an idea as seemingly simple as one's own existence). Research on awe suggests that it involves both a feeling of personal smallness and a sense of connectedness with something larger than the self. Awe-prone individuals (those who tend to have their minds blown more often than most) were found to define themselves as belonging to more universal categories (e.g., "an inhabitant of the earth").
In addition to feeling awe-struck by the near impossibility of your existence, you may also feel another emotion that has attracted the attention of psychologists in recent years - gratitude. Reflecting on near misses can increase happiness and appreciation, as Amie discusses in a previous post. So with Thanksgiving approaching, why not include on your list of things to be grateful for the fact that, against all odds, you and your loved ones made it into the world in the first place.
Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion Cognition & Emotion, 17 (2), 297-314 DOI: 10.1080/02699930302297
via:
Photo: thomasje
At some point after first learning about the birds and the bees as a child (possibly after watching the opening credits of Look Who's Talking or thinking too hard about the implications of Back to the Future), it occurred to me that I could have easily been someone else. Had my parents not happened to meet when they did, and happened to conceive at the moment they did, with a specific pair of egg and sperm, I wouldn't be here. Apart from being a minor existential crisis, this realization made me feel incredibly lucky. Out of an infinite number of possible people, I was one of those who got a chance at life.
I recently came across a lovely (if statistically questionable) visual demonstration of one person's attempt to approximate the odds that each of us came into the world and exist as we are today. It incorporates probabilities ranging from our parents' first encounter to our unbroken line of ancestors to the emergence of the first single celled organism, concluding with the following analogy:The probably that we as unique individuals came to be is equivalent to "the probability of 2 million people getting together each to play a game of dice with trillion-sided die. They each roll the dice, and they all come up with the exact same number - for example, 550, 343, 279, 001. The odds that you exist at all are basically zero."
From a psychological perspective, this realization may induce a sense of awe. In a seminal paper, Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt define awe as an emotion that is characterized by vastness (perceiving something that is much larger than the self, physically or psychologically) and by a need for accommodation (a struggle to comprehend something that does not easily fit into existing ways of seeing the world). The double rainbow guy of youtube fame, for example, is clearly in a state of awe (and probably also on drugs).
Awe can be elicited by interpersonal experiences, such as being in the presence of a powerful leader, or having an encounter with God or the supernatural, by physical experiences, such as witnessing a beautiful sunset or a natural disaster, or by cognitive experiences, such as trying to comprehend a grand theory (or an idea as seemingly simple as one's own existence). Research on awe suggests that it involves both a feeling of personal smallness and a sense of connectedness with something larger than the self. Awe-prone individuals (those who tend to have their minds blown more often than most) were found to define themselves as belonging to more universal categories (e.g., "an inhabitant of the earth").
In addition to feeling awe-struck by the near impossibility of your existence, you may also feel another emotion that has attracted the attention of psychologists in recent years - gratitude. Reflecting on near misses can increase happiness and appreciation, as Amie discusses in a previous post. So with Thanksgiving approaching, why not include on your list of things to be grateful for the fact that, against all odds, you and your loved ones made it into the world in the first place.
Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion Cognition & Emotion, 17 (2), 297-314 DOI: 10.1080/02699930302297
via:
Photo: thomasje
Austerity Alternatives
by George Zornick, The Nation
On the eve of some decision by the supercommittee—or no decision and painful automatic cuts—this is a time to remember the other ideas out there for balancing the budget. There are plenty of credible and thoughtful plans out there. Granted, they are not politically viable at the moment, given the Republican Party’s control of the House of Representatives, and its ability to stop virtually anything in the Senate—not to mention the six votes it controls on the supercommittee.
But to listen to most media coverage of the deficit debates—and too often, the rhetoric thrown about by Republicans and some Democrats—one comes away thinking the only way to get the fiscal house in order is via “entitlement reform” and deep domestic spending cuts, along with higher taxes and fewer loopholes.
But this just isn’t so. For example, the Congressional Progressive Caucus crafted a “People’s Budget,” which eliminates the deficit within ten years while creating a $31 billion surplus—all while protecting valuable programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. You can read the entire budget here (PDF), a one-page summary here (PDF), and an outside analysis by the Economic Policy Institute here (PDF).
Here are some of the plan’s features. On taxes:
The key theme of this plan is to put investment and job creation up front, while protecting the programs that many Americans rely upon for their economic well-being during a recession. Even Bill Clinton, no flaming liberal, called the plan “the most comprehensive alternative to the budgets passed by the House Republicans and recommended by the Simpson-Bowles Commission.”
Read more:
On the eve of some decision by the supercommittee—or no decision and painful automatic cuts—this is a time to remember the other ideas out there for balancing the budget. There are plenty of credible and thoughtful plans out there. Granted, they are not politically viable at the moment, given the Republican Party’s control of the House of Representatives, and its ability to stop virtually anything in the Senate—not to mention the six votes it controls on the supercommittee.
But to listen to most media coverage of the deficit debates—and too often, the rhetoric thrown about by Republicans and some Democrats—one comes away thinking the only way to get the fiscal house in order is via “entitlement reform” and deep domestic spending cuts, along with higher taxes and fewer loopholes.
But this just isn’t so. For example, the Congressional Progressive Caucus crafted a “People’s Budget,” which eliminates the deficit within ten years while creating a $31 billion surplus—all while protecting valuable programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. You can read the entire budget here (PDF), a one-page summary here (PDF), and an outside analysis by the Economic Policy Institute here (PDF).
Here are some of the plan’s features. On taxes:
- Ends the recently passed upper-income tax cuts and lets Bush-era tax cuts expire at the end of 2012 Extends tax credits for the middle class, families and students Creates new tax brackets that range from 45 percent starting at $1 million to 49 percent for $1 billion or more Implements a progressive estate tax Eliminates corporate welfare for oil, gas and coal companies; closes loopholes for multinational corporations Enacts a financial crisis responsibility fee and a financial speculation tax on derivatives and foreign exchange
- Enacts a healthcare public option and negotiates prescription payments with pharmaceutical companies Prevents any cuts to Medicare physician payments for a decade
- Responsibly ends our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to leave America more secure both home and abroad Cuts defense spending by reducing conventional forces, procurement and costly R&D programs
The key theme of this plan is to put investment and job creation up front, while protecting the programs that many Americans rely upon for their economic well-being during a recession. Even Bill Clinton, no flaming liberal, called the plan “the most comprehensive alternative to the budgets passed by the House Republicans and recommended by the Simpson-Bowles Commission.”
Read more:
Friday, November 18, 2011
Forever Green
[ed. Very sweet interview with the Green One himself.]
by Emma Barker, The Daily
He has had decades of success — if not ease — being green. But Kermit the Frog is known to keep his personal life close to his little collar.
His celebrity has been free of public scandal — no affairs, no drug-fueled hotel trashings, no anti-Semitic (or anti-human) slurs. Nothing too notable — aside from his stunningly successful career itself, and a very public, somewhat masochistic, cross-species relationship with a pig.
With a new movie opening Wednesday, Kermit is riding high — and available for a rare interview. Despite his docile demeanor, I was nervous when I emailed Kermit, now 56, a question about his late friend, Jim Henson. Was it a touchy subject? And, more importantly, can Kermit type? I kept it simple: Describe your friendship. But my worry was misguided.
“I’m not exactly sure what Jim did, but whatever it was he really moved me,” Kermit wrote back. “Whenever I needed someone to lend a hand or give me a lift, Jim was there. Jim was so filled with great ideas. He loved to have fun, and he made everyone believe that absolutely anything is possible. Most of all, he wasn’t afraid to roll up his sleeves and make dreams come true.” Then, “I love him and I miss him.” After Henson’s death in 1990, Kermit shied away from the public eye.
Now he is back, bigger than ever, in the loosely autobiographical “The Muppets,” a new take on the 1979 “The Muppet Movie.” Kermit is shown living out his retired years in a dusty, gilded mansion, complete with the likenesses of Kermit and Miss Piggy smiling from a high, electric fence. In the movie he acts tired, coming back to show business with the groan of getting out of a warm bed in the winter.
The turbulence and certain stress of working with “these crazy Muppets” since just after he lost his tail doesn’t show on Kermit’s face. He kicks his feet with a youthful exuberance and his wide, slightly crossed eyes pinch at the corners just a bit more than when he was still a collarless young frog. The frog’s mental fatigue shows only barely through the bright felt, like a mellowed Keith Richards.
Fozzie Bear, who is taller than Kermit and, unlike his best friend, generally wears at least one item of clothing, emailed me about the night he met Kermit. “I was working as a stand-up comic at the El Sleezo. I wasn’t doing much standing-up, but I was doing a lot of ducking and cowering in fear. Kermit walked in and liked what he saw — I don’t know if he liked my act or my ability to avoid injury, but from that moment on we were together, like brothers.” He continued on their special bond: “It was like I’d known him my whole life. He understood what I was trying to do — to become the world’s funniest stand-up comic bear — and he believed that I could do it. That’s what makes Kermit so special to me. Oh, and I also noticed that he was very green and still dripping wet from the swamp.”
Read more:
Ten Las Vegas Secrets
by Rick Lax, Guardian
If you want to gamble but don't know anything about gambling, play craps. More specifically, play craps and bet the PASS LINE. It's easy: you put your money on the table and somebody rolls the dice. If everybody starts cheering, you've won. If everybody gets quiet, you've lost. It's the closest thing to a 50/50 bet you're going to find (except for the DON'T PASS LINE. But if you play that, it'll piss the other players off). Head to O'Sheas, where the low-stakes craps tables practically pour out onto the strip, and where, if you crap out, you can take your final $20 and play beer pong against a team of just-turned-21 frat guys from Ohio State. Tell them you went to college at the University of Michigan – see what happens!
The Cosmopolitan is the newest and swankiest hotel on the Strip. It's the one that looks like the Wynn, if the Wynn were bedazzled by Liberace. As long as you're gambling away your hard-earned cash, you might as well do it alongside the pretty and the powerful. Oh, and if you're gambling at the Cosmo on a Friday, Saturday or Monday night, do it at a table below the elevator that leads up to Marquee, the hottest club on the strip; this is the best people-watching spot in Vegas. More affordable people-watching destinations include Kokomo's Lounge at Mirage and the coffee shop at Wynn.
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G.E. Bringing Good Things to Life
by John McCormack, Weekly Standard
General Electric, one of the largest corporations in America, filed a whopping 57,000-page federal tax return earlier this year but didn't pay taxes on $14 billion in profits. The return, which was filed electronically, would have been 19 feet high if printed out and stacked.
The fact that GE paid no taxes in 2010 was widely reported earlier this year, but the size of its tax return first came to light when House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan (R, Wisc.) made the case for corporate tax reform at a recent townhall meeting. "GE was able to utilize all of these various loopholes, all of these various deductions--it's legal," Ryan said. Nine billion dollars of GE's profits came overseas, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. tax law. GE wasn't taxed on $5 billion in U.S. profits because it utilized numerous deductions and tax credits, including tax breaks for investments in low-income housing, green energy, research and development, as well as depreciation of property.
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Image: Forbes.com
The fact that GE paid no taxes in 2010 was widely reported earlier this year, but the size of its tax return first came to light when House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan (R, Wisc.) made the case for corporate tax reform at a recent townhall meeting. "GE was able to utilize all of these various loopholes, all of these various deductions--it's legal," Ryan said. Nine billion dollars of GE's profits came overseas, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. tax law. GE wasn't taxed on $5 billion in U.S. profits because it utilized numerous deductions and tax credits, including tax breaks for investments in low-income housing, green energy, research and development, as well as depreciation of property.
Read more:
Image: Forbes.com
Cargotecture
by OpenBuildings, The Atlantic
It is estimated that two million empty shipping containers are sitting idle at any given time. Given that, cargotecture, or the adaptive reuse of these giant steel shells, sounds like a remarkably obvious idea: It is sustainable; it creates original and surprising architecture; and there are time-saving, manageability, and module organization advantages as well.
The term cargotecture was coined by HyBrid Architecture of Seattle around 2004 to describe any system built entirely or partially from ISO shipping containers. It's a broad definition. Containers are so versatile that they can be exposed and incorporated into the exterior of a building or construction project, or they can be hidden away, used merely as a structurally strong prefab element. And, if they're used for a temporary project, shipping containers can easily be re-recycled into a new structure.
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Photos: Graft Architects: Platoon Kunsthalle; Mesarchitecture: Sky Is The Limit Observatory
Crowds R Us
by Ian Leslie, Intelligent Life
Shortly after the popular uprising that led to the establishment of the Paris Commune in 1871, the politician Georges Clemenceau recalled witnessing a riot: “Suddenly a terrific noise broke out, and the mob which filled the courtyard burst into the street in the grip of some kind of frenzy…All were shrieking like wild beasts without realising what they were doing.” For those who followed the English riots of 2011, the terms are familiar. On television, in newspapers and comment threads, the rioters were repeatedly likened to animals in the grip of a primitive frenzy, induced not by drink or drugs but by another culprit: the crowd.
Crowds, we are often told, are dumb. They obliterate reason, sentience and accountability, turning individuals into helpless copycats. Commentators on the riots offered different explanations but most agreed that crowd psychology was part of the problem. “The dominant trait of the crowd is to reduce its myriad individuals to a single, dysfunctional persona,” wrote the novelist Will Self in the New Statesman. “The crowd is stupider than the averaging of its component minds.” The violence was said to have spread like a “contagion” through the crowd, facilitated by social media. For those who wanted to sound scientific, the term to drop was “deindividuation”: the loss of identity and moral responsibility that can occur in a group. But do crowds really make us more stupid?
Earlier this year, the world watched a crowd bring down an autocratic government, by the simple act of coming together in one place, day after day, night after night. Egyptian protesters created a micro-society in Tahrir Square, organising garbage collection, defending themselves when they needed to, but otherwise ensuring the protest remained peaceful. As well as courage, this took intelligence, discipline and restraint. Few international observers accused the crowd in Tahrir Square of being dysfunctional, or of turning its members into animals. The Tahrir protesters also used social media, but rather than calling for a ban, as some in Britain did after the riots, people wrote eulogies to the liberating potential of Twitter. It seems that not all crowds are bad. But when bad things happen, the crowd gets the blame. (...)
John Drury, a psychologist at Sussex university who studies crowd behaviour, believes that the idea that crowds induce irrational behaviour and erase individuality just isn’t supported by the evidence. First, most crowds aren’t violent. The crowd in the shopping mall or at a music festival is usually calm and ordered. Even crowds that include conflicting groups, as at football matches, are more likely to be peaceful than not. Second, even when crowds do turn violent, they aren’t necessarily irrational. In the 18th century England was afflicted by food riots. If ever there was an atavistic reason to riot, that was surely it. But the historian E.P. Thompson showed that the riots took place not when food was at its most scarce but when people saw merchants selling grain at a steep profit; the rioters were motivated by a rational sense of injustice rather than the “animal” drive of hunger.
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Picture credit: Lorianne DiSabato (via Flickr)
That Droning Sound
by Michael Scott Moore, Miller-McCune
A county north of Houston made news in Europe at the end of October by taking delivery of a new “weaponizable” drone, a squat remote-controlled helicopter called a ShadowHawk that can fire Tasers or beanbags at people on the ground. Police in Montgomery County say the drone would chase drug smugglers or escaping criminals. Alarmed Europeans wondered if some aspect of drone warfare — so far a problem only for terrorists and other strangers in poor and distant countries — had come home to the First World.
“In the end the police have the same consideration as the military,” writes a columnist at Telepolis, a tech website in Germany, “namely that using drones in risky situations can keep personnel out of danger.” (...)
But an armed police drone would be new. Montgomery County Sheriff Tommy Gage says his ShadowHawk won’t carry weapons, but the drone’s manufacturer, Vanguard Defense Industries, boasts that it’s strong enough to carry a shotgun or even a grenade launcher. The most relevant weapon for chasing fugitives might be the beanbag launcher. Its ammunition, though, isn’t called a beanbag; it’s a “stun baton.”
“You have a stun baton where you can actually engage somebody at altitude with the aircraft,” said Michael Buscher, chief of Vanguard Defense, told Homeland Security News Wire. “A stun baton would essentially disable a suspect.”
Hold on — robotic flying machines trying to whack American citizens with beanbags? Has anyone thought this through?
Small-plane pilots argue that more drones in the air could lead to accidents, precisely because drones fly blind. A cop on the remote control will point his camera almost anywhere besides the direction of the flying craft. “Pilots said police controllers may not be able to see and avoid other aircraft in the area during a sudden police emergency,” writes the Homeland Security Wire, citing a 2008 report from the Government Accountability Office.
Read more:
Photo: vanguarddefense.com
A county north of Houston made news in Europe at the end of October by taking delivery of a new “weaponizable” drone, a squat remote-controlled helicopter called a ShadowHawk that can fire Tasers or beanbags at people on the ground. Police in Montgomery County say the drone would chase drug smugglers or escaping criminals. Alarmed Europeans wondered if some aspect of drone warfare — so far a problem only for terrorists and other strangers in poor and distant countries — had come home to the First World.“In the end the police have the same consideration as the military,” writes a columnist at Telepolis, a tech website in Germany, “namely that using drones in risky situations can keep personnel out of danger.” (...)
But an armed police drone would be new. Montgomery County Sheriff Tommy Gage says his ShadowHawk won’t carry weapons, but the drone’s manufacturer, Vanguard Defense Industries, boasts that it’s strong enough to carry a shotgun or even a grenade launcher. The most relevant weapon for chasing fugitives might be the beanbag launcher. Its ammunition, though, isn’t called a beanbag; it’s a “stun baton.”
“You have a stun baton where you can actually engage somebody at altitude with the aircraft,” said Michael Buscher, chief of Vanguard Defense, told Homeland Security News Wire. “A stun baton would essentially disable a suspect.”
Small-plane pilots argue that more drones in the air could lead to accidents, precisely because drones fly blind. A cop on the remote control will point his camera almost anywhere besides the direction of the flying craft. “Pilots said police controllers may not be able to see and avoid other aircraft in the area during a sudden police emergency,” writes the Homeland Security Wire, citing a 2008 report from the Government Accountability Office.
Read more:
Photo: vanguarddefense.com
Friday Book Club - Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
[ed. I haven't read this yet but enjoy just about everything Michael Lewis writes. This is a great review not only for its description of his book, but for a better understanding of current events raging through Europe.]
by John Lanchester, NY Review of Books
Most people with a special interest in the events of the credit crunch and the Great Recession that followed it have a private benchmark for the excesses that led up to the crash. These benchmarks are a rule of thumb, a rough measure of how far out of control things got; they are phenomena that at the time seemed normal but that in retrospect were a brightly flashing warning light. I came across mine in Iceland, talking to a waitress in a café in the summer of 2009, about eight months after the króna collapsed and the whole country effectively went bankrupt under the debts incurred by its overextended banks. I asked her what had changed about her life since the crash.
“Well,” she said, “if I’m going to spend some time with friends at the weekend we go camping in the countryside.”
“How is that different from what you did before?” I asked.
“We used to take a plane to Milan and go shopping on the via Linate.”
Since that conversation, I’ve privately graded transparently absurd pre-crunch phenomena on a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being complete financial prudence, and 10 being a Reykjavik waitress thinking it normal to be able to afford weekend shopping trips to Milan.
Many people all over the world went nuts on cheap credit in the years of the boom—a boom that was in large part built on an unsustainable spike in personal and governmental debt. Michael Lewis has already written a very good book, The Big Short, about the mechanics of the crash, by casting around for people who didn’t just foresee it, but who made huge bets that it would happen, and profited vastly when it did.1
Boomerang is about what he has come to see as the larger phenomenon behind the credit crunch: the increase in total worldwide debt from $84 trillion in 2002 to $195 trillion now. The thesis is that “the subprime mortgage crisis was more symptom than cause. The deeper social and economic problems that gave rise to it remained.” It is these deeper problems that are dominating economic news at the moment, and led to the desperate measures announced at the European summit on October 27 and to the aborted Greek plan to hold a referendum that followed. The G20 Economic Summit of November 3–4 was dominated by discussion of the Eurozone crisis, but ended with no coherent plan in view, and none has emerged since. Boomerang tells the story of how we got here, and in the course of doing so gathers together an extensive arsenal of data at the top end of my 0–10 Reykjavik waitress scale: the fact that Greek railways have €300 million in other costs; the fact that the Californian city of Vallejo spent 80 percent of its budget on the pension and pay of police, firemen, and other “public safety” workers; the fact that between 2003 and 2007, Iceland’s stock market went up ninefold; the fact that in Ireland, a developer paid €412 million in 2006 for a city dump that is now, because of cleanup costs, valued at negative €30 million.
Lewis has noticed something important about these excesses: that the precise details of how people ran amok varied from culture to culture. Cultural and historical faultlines were exposed by the boom, and behavior varied accordingly.
by John Lanchester, NY Review of Books Most people with a special interest in the events of the credit crunch and the Great Recession that followed it have a private benchmark for the excesses that led up to the crash. These benchmarks are a rule of thumb, a rough measure of how far out of control things got; they are phenomena that at the time seemed normal but that in retrospect were a brightly flashing warning light. I came across mine in Iceland, talking to a waitress in a café in the summer of 2009, about eight months after the króna collapsed and the whole country effectively went bankrupt under the debts incurred by its overextended banks. I asked her what had changed about her life since the crash.
“Well,” she said, “if I’m going to spend some time with friends at the weekend we go camping in the countryside.”
“How is that different from what you did before?” I asked.
“We used to take a plane to Milan and go shopping on the via Linate.”
Since that conversation, I’ve privately graded transparently absurd pre-crunch phenomena on a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being complete financial prudence, and 10 being a Reykjavik waitress thinking it normal to be able to afford weekend shopping trips to Milan.
Many people all over the world went nuts on cheap credit in the years of the boom—a boom that was in large part built on an unsustainable spike in personal and governmental debt. Michael Lewis has already written a very good book, The Big Short, about the mechanics of the crash, by casting around for people who didn’t just foresee it, but who made huge bets that it would happen, and profited vastly when it did.1
Boomerang is about what he has come to see as the larger phenomenon behind the credit crunch: the increase in total worldwide debt from $84 trillion in 2002 to $195 trillion now. The thesis is that “the subprime mortgage crisis was more symptom than cause. The deeper social and economic problems that gave rise to it remained.” It is these deeper problems that are dominating economic news at the moment, and led to the desperate measures announced at the European summit on October 27 and to the aborted Greek plan to hold a referendum that followed. The G20 Economic Summit of November 3–4 was dominated by discussion of the Eurozone crisis, but ended with no coherent plan in view, and none has emerged since. Boomerang tells the story of how we got here, and in the course of doing so gathers together an extensive arsenal of data at the top end of my 0–10 Reykjavik waitress scale: the fact that Greek railways have €300 million in other costs; the fact that the Californian city of Vallejo spent 80 percent of its budget on the pension and pay of police, firemen, and other “public safety” workers; the fact that between 2003 and 2007, Iceland’s stock market went up ninefold; the fact that in Ireland, a developer paid €412 million in 2006 for a city dump that is now, because of cleanup costs, valued at negative €30 million.
Lewis has noticed something important about these excesses: that the precise details of how people ran amok varied from culture to culture. Cultural and historical faultlines were exposed by the boom, and behavior varied accordingly.
The credit wasn’t just money, it was temptation. It offered entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Entire countries were told, “The lights are out, you can do whatever you want to do and no one will ever know.” What they wanted to do with money in the dark varied. Americans wanted to own homes far larger than they could afford, and to allow the strong to exploit the weak. Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers, and to allow their alpha males to reveal a theretofore suppressed megalomania. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish. All these different societies were touched by the same event, but each responded to it in its own peculiar way.Read more:
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