Peter Frase

The New Left Review, which I write about here often, is my favorite left political publication. They got a lot of crap a few years back when they relaunched their journal with a new, seemingly more apolitical orientation, but in retrospect that choice seems strongly justified--and it resulted in a fairly unique publication. NLR now approaches the world analytically, rather than polemically, in a way that is genuinely geared toward increasing the reader's understanding of the conjuncture rather than propagandizing for a position. And yet its point of view is still recognizably from the left, to a degree that can be jarring when one is used to reading the organs of establishment liberal and conservative thought.

NLR's virtues are particularly evident in its extensive international coverage.  The articles it publishes about the non-Western world read like they are attempting to understand other countries from the inside, and convey to a Western reader what they are like for the people who live there. That this is so remarkable is a damning indictment of other publications. But as John Judis recently noted, the mainstream press in the United States seems incapable of reporting international events in terms of anything other than domestic political concerns. And even in supposedly "left" publications,  international analysis is typically a thinly-veiled intervention in some parochial domestic political debate.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of Dissent, a magazine which seems to believe that the world only exists as an aspect of American domestic politics, and moreover that U.S. "humanitarian" warmongering against the rest of the world is the key to human emancipation. Recently, for example, they published a review of Mahmood Mamdani's Savior's and Survivors which, while raising some legitimate issues of scholarship, was far more concerned with smearing Mamdani and defending the ridiculous doctrines of "humanitarian intervention" than in understanding what is happening in the Sudan.

I thought of this again as I was reading the most recent NLR, which contains an excellent article on Myanmar by the historian and area specialist Mary Callahan. It's an overview of the country's politics, which describes the current system of military rule as the legacy of the country's colonial history, in which Britain destroyed traditional systems of social control and left behind an ethnically fragmented and divided society. Callahan gives good reasons to believe that, despite the wishful thinking of Western and exile activists, the junta is unlikely to be driven from power in the immediate future.

After reading the peace, I wondered what, if anything, Dissent had published on Myanmar recently. Given their history, I didn't expect good things, but I was prepared to be suprised--they do sometimes publish very good things, even on international affairs.

What I found, however, was even worse than I imagined. The first three hits from the print publication were: an interview with Anthony Giddens in which Myanmar is used as a throwaway line to underscore the inevitable superiority of liberal capitalism; a windbaggy piece about "democratization" which again refers to Myanmar in passing (as a "Fascist Disneyland"); and a Clifford Geertz essay on decolonization in which the country only appears in laundry lists of diverse ex-colonial states.

The result from the web archive was even more absurd: a piece from Michael Walzer on "Ten Foreign Policy Changes if Obama is Elected". Given the author, the content was predictable. Even so, this reads like a parody of liberal imperialist thinking:

5) A stronger (rhetorically stronger or stronger in practice?) commitment to “the responsibility to protect” in places like Darfur and Myanmar, though the new administration is not going to send American troops into any countries where we are not already engaged. Are there other countries ready to send troops? If they are ready, the U.S. under Obama would probably be willing to support, help pay for, equip, and transport the troops. More than that: Obama has talked about creating a no-fly zone over Darfur—a good thing to do, certainly, but even then I doubt that the UN’s 20,000 African troops would be sufficient to stop the killing without some reinforcement from better trained and more disciplined armies.

Hm, yes, that place Myanmar, I hear they're having some trouble with human rights, or cyclones, or something. Better send in the troops, old chap! (No Africans, though, they're no good.)

The way Walzer can cavalierly throw around this kind of warmongering is bad enough. But for Dissent to publish this kind of irresponsible call for blood in a country it has not deemed worthy of a single article? It underscores the despicable and immoral quality of the "liberal hawks", who seem more interested in finding excuses for military action than in considering its consequences.

Detroit facts are like the opposite of Chuck Norris facts. Each one portrays the city of Detroit as being unimaginably and implausibly screwed up and economically depressed. And unlike Chuck Norris facts, Detroit facts are true.

My favorite Detroit fact used to be: what's the average price of a house in Detroit? I would ask people this, and almost no-one gets it. When I first started asking people this a couple of years ago, it was about $10,000. I think it's less now--the median was reported as $7,500 earlier this year.

Now, however, I have a new favorite Detroit fact. In New York City, you can buy this for $600,000:

It's a very nice little studio apartment in Greenwich village. On the other hand, for only $583,000 in Detroit, you could have bought this:

That's right, it's the Silverdome. Needless to say, this does not augur well for the future of Detroit. Nor does this:

This plots gains in house prices with post-crash declines in different cities. Detroit's housing prices didn't really go up during the bubble, but they've come down with the crash.  Which suggests that it's the underlying weakness of the local economy that's bringing down prices. I think urbanists need to be thinking a lot harder about what we can do about places like this--bringing them back to their former glory seems impossible, but to simply abandon the people who live there would be immoral. We need a strategy for, quite frankly, gradually letting these places shrink. See also Ed Glaeser on the case for letting Buffalo die.

The present crisis looks as though it may bring about a long-delayed moment of reckoning in the field of economics. Macro-economics has been plunged into turmoil now that many of its leading practitioners stand exposed as dogmatists blithely clinging to absurd pre-Keynesian notions about the impossibility of economic stimulus and the inherent rationality of markets, who have nothing at all to say about the roots of the current turmoil. Micro-economics, meanwhile, has seen Freakonomics run its course, as long-standing criticisms of the obsession with "clean identification" over meaningful questions spill over into a new row over climate-change denialism.

Joining the pile-on, Jon Elster has an article in the electronic journal Capitalism and Society on the "excessive ambitions" of the social sciences. Focusing on economics--but referring to related fields--he criticizes three main lines of inquiry: rational choice theory, behavioral economics, and statistical inference.

Although I agree with most of the article's arguments, much of it seemed rather under-argued. At various points, Elster's argument seems to be: "I don't need to provide an example of this; isn't it obvious?" And with respect to his claim that "much work in economics and political science is devoid of empirical, aesthetic, or mathematical interest, which means that it has no value at all", I'm inclined to agree. But it's hard for me to say that Elster is contributing a whole lot to the discussion. I'm also a bit skeptical of the claim that behavioral economics has "predictive but not prescriptive implications", given the efforts of people like Cass Sunstein to implement "libertarian paternalist" policies based on an understanding of some of the irrationalities studied in behavioral research.

But the part of the essay closest to my own interests was on data analysis. Here Elster is wading into the well-travelled terrain of complaining about poorly reasoned statistical analysis. He himself admits to being inexpert in these matters, and so relies on others, especially David Freedman. But he still sees fit to proclaim that we are awash in work that is both methodogically suspect and insufficiently engaged with its empirical substance.

The criticisms raised are all familiar. The specter of "data snooping . . . curve-fitting . . . arbitrariness in the measurement of . . . variables", and so on, all fit under the rubric of what Freedman called "data driven model selection". And indeed these things are all problems. But much of Elster's discussion suffers from his lack of familiarity with the debates. He refers repeatedly to the problem of statistical significance testing--both the confusion of statistical and substantive significance, and the arbitrariness of the traditional 5% threshold for detecting effects. While I wouldn't deny that these abuses persist, I think that years of relentless polemics on this issue from people like Deirdre McCloskey and Jacob Cohen have had an impact, and practice has begun to shift in a more productive direction.

Elster never really moves beyond these technical details to grapple with the larger philosphical issues that arise in applied statistics. For example, all of the problems with statistical significance arise from an over-reliance on the null hypothesis testing model of inference--even though as Andrew Gelman says, the true value of a parameter is never zero in any real social science situation. Simply by moving in the direction of estimating the magnitude of effects and their confidence intervals, we can avoid many of these problems.

And although Freedman makes a number of very important criticisms of standard practice, the article that Elster relies upon relies very heavily on the weakness of the causal claims made about regression models. As a superior model, Freedman invokes John Snow's analysis of cholera in the 1850's, which used simple methods but relied upon identifying a natural experiment in which different houses received their water from different sources. In this respect, the article is redolent of the time it was published (1991), when the obsession with clean identification and natural experiments was still gaining steam, and valid causal inference seemed like the most important goal of social science.

Yet we now see the limitations of that research agenda. It's rare and fortuitous to find a situation like Snow's cholera study, in which a vitally important question is illuminated by a clean natural experiment. All too often, the search for identification leads researchers to study obscure topics of little general relevance, thereby gaining internal validity (verifiable causality in a given data set) at the expense external validity (applicability to broader social situations). This is what has led to the stagnation of Freakonomics-style research. What we have to accept, I think, is that it is often impossible to find an analytical strategy which is both free of strong assumptions about causality and applicable beyond a narrow and artificial situation. The goal of causal inference, that is, is a noble but often futile pursuit. In place of causal inference, what we must often do instead is causal interpretation, in which essentially descriptive tools (such as regression) are interpreted causally based on prior knowledge, logical argument and empirical tests that persuasively refute alternative explanations.**

This is, I think, consistent with the role Elster proposes for data analysis, in the closing of his essay: an enterprize which "turns on substantive causal knowledge of the field in question together with the imagination to concoct testable implications that can establish 'novel facts'". And Elster gives some useful practical suggestions for improving results, such as partitioning data sets, fitting models on only one half, and not looking at the other half of the cases until a model is decided upon. But as with many rants against statistical malpractice, it seems to me that the real sociological issue is being sidestepped, which is that the institutional structure of social science strongly incentivizes malpractice. To put it another way, the purpose of academic social science is not, in general, to produce valid inference about the world; it is to produce publications. As long as that is the case, it seems unlikely that bad practices can be definitively stamped out.

**Addendum: Fabio Rojas says what I wanted to say, rather more concisely. He notes that "identification is a luxury when you have an abundance of data and a pretty clear idea about what casual effects you care about.". Causal inference where possible, causal interpretation where necessary, ought to be the guiding principle. Via the Social Science Statistics blog, there is also a very interesting paper by Angus Deaton on the problems of causal inference. Of particular note is the difficulty of testing the assumptions behind instrumental variables methods, and the often-elided distinction between an instrument that is external to the process under investigation (that is, not caused by the system being studied) and one that is truly exogenous (that is, uncorrelated with the error term in the regression of the outcome on the predictor of interest.)

I identify with Jeremy Freese to an unhealthy degree. When the other options are to a) have a life; or b) do something that advances his career, he chooses to concoct a home-brewed match between GSS respondents in 2006 and their 2008 re-interviews. I would totally do this. I still might do this.

And then he drops the brutal insight that provides my title. Context.

UPDATE: And then Kieran Healy drops this:

The real distinction between qualitative and quantitative is not widely appreciated. People think it has something to do with counting versus not counting, but this is a mistake. If the interpretive work necessary to make sense of things is immediately obvious to everyone, it’s qualitative data. If the interpretative work you need to do is immediately obvious only to experts, it’s quantitative data.

Have you seen this man?

[Cross-posted from The Activist]

The talk of blog-land this week is Ryan Lizza's long New Yorker profile of Obama administration economist-guru Larry Summers. It's an interesting and useful piece, although I think it's far too forgiving of Summers and the Obama administration for all the reasons Dean Baker provides here. I would only add that it's shameful to write a discussion of Summers' years at Harvard without mentioning the Andrei Shleifer affair, an episode of raw gangsterism in which Summers connived to protect a man who had enriched himself by immiserating the Russian people and wrecking their country.

However, what I want to focus on in the Lizza piece is the curious case of one Jared Bernstein. Formerly an economist at the very progressive Economic Policy Institute, Bernstein is now the chief economic adviser to Vice President Biden. More importantly, he is the only high-ranking economist in the Obama White House whom one could plausibly describe as "on the left." And in the photo that accompanies the Lizza profile, he appears alongside Summers, Tim Geithner, Christina Romer and Peter Orszag, a group that is described in a caption as "the advisers who meet with the President daily to discuss the economy".

In the actual article, however, he only appears three times in passing. The first is in December 2008, when the Obama economic team meets in Chicago to discuss their response to the economic crisis. Although we are given an extensive description of the contributions from Romer, Orszag and others in this conversation, we do not hear what, if anything, Bernstein had to say. More significantly, Lizza reports that at the end of the meeting, "Summers, Romer, Geithner, Orszag, Emanuel, and Jason Furman huddled in the corner to lock down" the amount of the stimulus package. Bernstein, apparently, was politely dismissed before this little summit.

Bernstein reappears in a discussion of Summers' alleged conversion from gung-ho deregulator to chastened Keynesian, averring that "I was reading Larry’s articles in the Financial Times over the past couple of years, and thought, Wow, it’s all too rare that you see the thinking of such a prominent economist move like that." But here he's being brought in as an outside commentator whose job is to burnish Summers' lefty cred (and give Lizza an excuse to repeat the often-told fact that Bernstein used to be some kind of hippie musician). The fact that he works in the White House is essentially irrelevant. His only other appearance in the piece is at the end, where Lizza reports that there is "a half-hour meeting each morning, in which Obama is briefed by the top members of his economic team: Summers, Geithner, Romer, Orszag, and Bernstein." From Obama's policies and Lizza's reporting, it's not hard to conclude that one of these five is pulling significantly less weight with the President than the other four.

I bring up all of this not just because I like Jared Bernstein and wish he had more influence than Larry Summers, but to raise a larger point about the relationship between the Obama administration and the left. Thus far, it seems to me that in every case where a solid progressive has entered the administration, they would have been better off staying outside. Bernstein, I suspect, would be more effective if he could do what Dean Baker and Robert Reich are doing: criticize the administration's economic policy from the left. Instead, he's in a position where he can't honestly speak his mind because of his official post, and yet he still seems to have minimal impact on policy-making. A similar case, I think, can be made about Van Jones, whose Glenn Beck-inspired defenestration from the White House may turn out to be a blessing if it frees him up to be a consistent and outspoken progressive about environmental justice issues. And the list goes on: Hilda Solis, for example, seems to have vanished without a trace.

There's long been a debate among leftists in this country about the relative merits of "inside" and "outside" strategies for moving the state and the Democratic party to the left. I believe, as do many in DSA, that a successful strategy has to incorporate both. But the case of Jared Bernstein is, I think, a cautionary tale: being "inside" a Democratic administration means nothing if you don't have a voice there. In that case, it amounts to nothing more than a co-opting of progressive voices by a fundamentally conservative political project.

Lots of interesting stuff in the most recent New Left Review. Last night I went through Gopal Balakrishnan's latest, in which he argues that the capitalist world system is not in for a return to rapid growth any time soon, but is instead headed toward the stagnant "stationary state" that characterized pre-industrial civilizations:

Note that this is subtly different from the "catastrophist" predictions which leftists have historically made, and which have a terrible track record. Balakrishnan is not arguing that capitalism is on the verge of collapsing and giving way to something else, because there is no oppositional movement powerful enough to bring about this outcome. He opens his essay with a quote from Gramsci, speaking about the potential for a "crisis that lasts many decades"; the passage evokes a more famous remark Gramsci's that "the old is dying, and the new cannot yet be born".

Balakrishnan gives four reasons for his prognosis: "demographic disproportion, ecological deterioration, politico-ideological de-legitimation and geo-political maladaptation". These refer to:

• The aging of Western societies, leading to a situation in which there are fewer productive workers supporting the retirement benefits of a growing elderly population. The growing cost of health care and the weak prospects for productivity growth in the service sector will lead to serious fiscal pressure on the state.
• The effects of climate change and other man-made disasters. While a transition to a "green capitalism" may theoretically be possible, at present it seems as though neither the bourgeoisie nor the political elite have the will to see this through.
• Neoliberalism has been discredited by the crisis, but the Keynesianism of the postwar era seems equally incapable of restoring growth, and instead can only prop the system up with a series of desperate bailouts and fiscal stimulus measures. Meanwhile, there remains no credible ideological challenge from the left. The consequence is escalating depoliticization and cynicism across the world polity.
• Finally, no clear successor to the American hegemon presents itself: China's economy is still too weak to shoulder the burden, Europe lacks the unified state capacity to do it, and no ad-hoc alliance of world powers seems capable of truly restructuring the system and moving it to a new stage.

The piece is speculative, without much in the way of empirical evidence, but it's nonetheless useful. As to these four explanations, some strike me as more plausible than others.

The ageing of Western societies is a real phenomenon, of course, but I am skeptical that it will have quite the impact that Balakrishnan suggests. For one thing, there is no reason to suppose that the current retirement age will remain fixed--indeed, we have already seen some efforts to push it up. Since fewer jobs today require intensive manual labor, it is feasible for people to remain at work longer. Of course, increasing the retirement age would be a reversal of one of the great gains made by the working class in the twentieth century, and it would have highly inequitable consequences for those who do still work in manual occupations. But we are speaking here only of possible resolutions of the crisis, not desirable ones.

Balakrishnan is also too quick to accept at face value the argument that health expenditures will continue to accelerate rapidly while the service sector will experience no productivity gains, based on what appears to be a variant of Baumol's cost disease theory.  The argument about health care betrays some ignorance about health care economics. Much of the cost of care in the United States is driven by the perverse structure of the market for health services, and the comparison of modern welfare states shows that the state is quite capable of restraining cost growth. As for the rest of the service sector, the issue of slow productivity growth is a real one, but I would not discount the possibility of realizing substantial efficiency gains. Think of the growth in self-checkout machines at grocery stores, which could do to grocery employment what ATM's did for bank tellers. Or, even more dramatic, consider the innovations in online education which could completely upend the existing system of higher learning. I suspect, in fact, that increased productivity in services has been held back by the appallingly low wages at the bottom of the American labor market, which have disincentivized employers from economizing on labor.

As for ecology, I am unfortunately afraid that Balakrishnan is right. The way the climate change debate has unfolded in the United States and elsewhere certainly suggests that the capitalist class is incapable of putting their long-term interests ahead of short-term profits and ideological antipathy to state solutions such as carbon taxes or even cap-and-trade. (Although the recent defections from the chamber of commerce are perhaps hopeful signs.) At the same time, it's still difficult to imagine that China will really consent to restrain their emissions in a way that the earlier industrializers never had to, all in order to ameliorate a problem that they themselves did not create.

While the consequences of climate change for humanity will be terrible, however, I do wonder whether they will really be as bad as all that for capital accumulation. On the one hand, ecological chaos would lead to a widespread destruction and devaluation of capital, allowing a new round of accumulation to proceed. On the other hand, there' s no reason in principle that adapting to and cleaning up after climate change-induced mayhem can't be highly profitable, even if its human consequences are terrible. The relevant maxim here, it seems to me, is that the reason capitalism never collapses is that there always turns out to be a way of resolving the crisis at the expense of the working class.

The issue of ideological drift and delegitimization of political institutions is, to me, the strongest of the arguments Balakrishnan musters--though oddly, it is the one he gives in the least detail. The bankruptcy of neoliberalism and the insufficiency of mainstream Keynesian solutions are plain enough.  As is the depoliticization and demobilization of the demos, the supposed mass base of bourgeois democracy. But what is even more ominous is the way in which bourgeois political institutions seem increasingly incapable of competently managing capitalism, even from a narrowly capitalist standpoint. Years of tax revolts and racist pandering from the right have lead to a situation in which it is always possible to appropriate new funds for new programs (at least if they take the form of giveaways to business or the rich), but never possible to raise the tax revenue to pay for them.  The end state of this trajectory is California, where Proposition 13, a 2/3 majority requirement for legislative tax increases, and a fanatical Republican minority have rendered the state an ungovernable wreck.

This situation appears intolerable, yet there remains no ideology on the horizon that seems capable of challenging it--certainly not Barack Obama's technocratic center-rightism, which appears to be interested only in the restoration of postmodern finance capitalism's status quo. And as Fredric Jameson points out, “the mass of people . . . do not themselves have to believe in any hegemonic ideology of the system, but only to be convinced of its permanence”.

The final of the four arguments, about geo-politics, is the most difficult to assess. As to the present moment, it certainly seems correct. American power is already over-extended, and the fiscal dilemmas outlined above may, eventually and hopefully, actually make cuts in defense spending thinkable in this country. I'm less pessimistic than Balakrishnan about the future of a united Europe, but it certainly doesn't seem like any rapid further consolidation is likely in the near term. As for China, it may yet rise to take its place in a Sinocentric world system, as Giovanni Arrighi and other World Systems theorists predicted long ago. But in the meantime, it does seem as though we are in for a period of uncertainty and chaos.

It is never wise to discount capitalism's ability to reinvent itself. We may yet see the launch of a new regime of accumulation in the coming years. Or, we may see another speculative bubble, putting off the crisis for another decade before culminating in an even worse crash. But if Balakrishnan is right, and we're in for a slow, grinding stagnation, then the political order of the day will be the Gramscian "war of position", as the left struggles to reorganize itself and raise the banners of "a better world in birth".

But what is that world, and what will be inscribed on our banners? That is, what are the principles that would underpin an alternative to capitalism today? That, alas, is a topic for another day.

It's been a couple of weeks  since I finished Infinite Jest, a bit ahead of schedule. Now that the Infinite Summer is officially concluded, I feel like I ought to write out some reflections on the book, after I have a bit of distance from it but before it starts to fade from my memory.

So much has been said about this book over the years, and so much has been said again on all the blogs and forums associated with the Infinite Summer project, that it's hard to figure out a way to add much additional value. But what strikes me now about this book is something that was really catalyzed by reading it as a part of this big, virtual book group. What I find most compelling about Infinite Jest, I think, is the way it reveals the personalities and commitments of the people who read it.

Any serious novel can do that, of course, if people invest themselves seriously in it. But IJ is particularly suited to this task, for a couple of reasons. The first is the way it attempts to convey an everyday life that is recognizably ours, even if set in a hyperbolic and vaguely plausible near future: the book is about us, now, in the culture of post-modern capitalism. And because it's such a big baggy monster, that "us" can encompass a wide range of social worlds: privileged intellectual misfits, recovering opiate addicts, political terrorists, and so on.

But the book also tends to reveal people because it is so obviously shot through with Wallace's own passionate feelings about the way our culture revels in self-abnegation (through substances or entertainment), as well as the insights he thinks he has about how we might live better, more meaningful, more fulfilling lives. The book isn't a parable, of course, and there's no unambiguous moral lesson to draw from it. Yet it's hard to escape the sense that it's author wanted it "to make us act, and to help us live", as Durkheim once described the purpose of religion. It's that aspect of the work, I think, that compels people to measure it against their own moral intuitions, and to measure themselves against the book.

In sum, the book is very much a representative document of late capitalism's Age of the Memoir: confessional, therapeutic, a bit self-absorbed, and defined by a retreat from the political, or the social, and towards the personal and the introspective. But Wallace is smart enough to recognize this retreat for what it is, and by writing fiction he escapes the memoir culture's small-minded obsession with consistency and factuality. The result is a work of art which does far more to plumb the soul of its reader than would the work of any real-life tennis prodigy, or addict,  or Quebecois terrorist. (And lest we forget, Wallace himself was at least two of these things.)

A few examples.

Which is your favorite plot thread?

It says a lot I think, which part of the Sierpinski gasket you prefer: Hal and ETA, or Don and Ennet House, or Marathe and Steeply. To judge from the forums, Hal is the character most readers identify with, which I suppose is unsurprising. Not only is he the most fully developed character in the early parts of the story, his background (privileged) and preoccupations (intellectual, neurotic) no doubt overlap heavily with those of the book's audience--as indeed they do with mine. But maybe that's why I never really identified (or Identified) with Hal. He came off to me as self-involved, whiny, and above all completely unable to put his own situation in its proper context. I sort of hated him for the same reason I hate the main character in The Catcher in the Rye. In both cases, part of my revulsion is rooted, I think, in recognizing in them some unpleasant elements of my own personality.

Then there's Don Gately. In the second half of the book, he becomes the most sympathetic character. But he is also, to me, the most intellectually challenging to the reader. Hal's way of coping is a familiar one to the kind of educated, literary person who reads IJ: self-absorption, over-thinking, and substances. Gately, on the other hand, is Wallace's best effort at portraying an uneducated, unintellectual person who nevertheless at least approaches being a healthy and good person. It seems at times, as though he is good because he resists self-examination--avoiding unnecessary thought being, of course, one of the cliches of AA. For a reader who is like Hal, and unlike Don, there's no real way to completely embrace Don's way without being either disingenuous about one's own personality and history, or else fetishizing Don as some kind of "noble savage". Yet we're left with the inescapable conclusion that, if there's any way out of the psychological traps Wallace describes, Gately is more or less it.

Then there's the real sleeper, Marathe and Steeply. I haven't come across anyone who says this is their favorite part of the book, and honestly it isn't mine either. On the other hand, I did consistently find it funny and interesting, more so than the ETA sections a lot of the time. Maybe it's because I read a lot of non-fiction and social science, so I have a high tolerance for theoretical exposition disguised as dialogue. But I also think that the writing in those segments is as richly evocative and lyrical as anything in the book, even though it's just two guys talking to each other for hours on end. I got a kick out of simultaneously trying to picture Hugh Steeply's absurd drag, and hear Remy Marathe's over-the-top (and utterly non-verisimilitudinous) accent.

Wardine and yrstruly

I thought these sections were really good, and everything like that. I didn't even find them difficult to read--once I got the hang of the dialect Wallace was going for, I could hear it in my head and the sections flowed forward quite poetically and musically.

The objections to this section seem to be of two flavors. The first, and less interesting one, comes from people who expect something different from novels than I do. Rather than an interesting challenge, they find these passages to be an affront to the reader, from an author who is more interested in making his reader work than in creating an enjoyable story. Of course, one of the major themes of the book, in my view, is that life is about much more than enjoyment, and that enjoyment can often get in the way of really living life. But that's just what makes this reaction to these sections interesting, since others obviously didn't interpret the book the same way I did.

The second objection stems, it seems, from a kind of political correctness, from people who find the attempt to evoke some form of African-American Vernacular English to be patronizing or offensive, a kind of minstrelsy.  This strikes me as a misreading. For one thing, there's no reason to believe that Wallace was aiming for an accurate reproduction of any existing dialect. But more importantly, I suspect that the people accusing Wallace of being patronizing are really projecting their own prejudices about language, which I discussed in a previous post: namely, that the speech of poor people, or uneducated people, or black people, is in some "wrong" relative to the speech of people like David Foster Wallace. I also think it has to do with liberal uneasiness about race. It's telling to me that some people apparently would have preferred Wallace to simply ignore the existence of black people, rather than trying--and maybe failing!--to represent some black people as part of his broader tableau. I didn't see the same kind of hand-wringing about Don Gately, after all, even though Wallace's childhood was a pretty long way away from Bimmy's.

The Incredible Randy Lenz

For my money, Randy Lenz is by far the most interesting of the minor characters. He is totally repulsive, of course. On that absolutely everyone seems to agree. But the way people react to him can be tremendously revealing: the Infinite Summer forum thread about Lenz is a captivating display of this.

One immediate divide concerns Lenz's animal torture: some people find it unspeakably horrible, more so than just about anything else in the book, to the point that they find themselves driven away from the book by it. Others (like me) don't see how Lenz's works can be worse than some of the horrible things that happen to human beings in the novel; we worry about a tendency to privilege the lives of "innocent" animals over those of less pure-seeming humans. For me, Lenz's total and utter debasement wasn't really driven home until the last scene he appears in, where we find him cutting off Poor Tony's fingers in the hope of appeasing the AFR and getting another look at the Entertainment.

The other interesting thing about Lenz is the way he brings out people's Manichaean tendencies. Most of the other characters in the books seem to provoke some level of sympathy from readers. Indeed, the way a character like Gately is written seems calculated to make you care about and root for him, despite the fact that he was directly responsible for more than one man's death and allowed another to die because of his cowardice and addiction. But Lenz is an exception: a lot of the discussion of him takes for granted that he is some kind of pure evil, in contrast to the complex and conflicted characters that populate the rest of the book.

This, to me, is not the point of Lenz's character at all. I see him as a necessary complement to the Gately character, a man who has to be seen as occupying the same continuum of addiction as all the other Ennet House residents. If we only had Gately, the story would be too simplistically uplifting: it doesn't matter that your mom was a drunk who got beaten everyday, or that you're a serious Demerol addict with no real prospects--just Take It One Day At A Time and you'll be OK! The point of Lenz, it seems to me, is that not everyone escapes from the various personal and social traumas that lead us to destroy ourselves. Not because they are weak or evil people, but because the self-destructive force of addiction and trauma are so great. In a different way, Poor Tony is an example of this too--and I don't think it's an accident that he and Lenz are together in their last scene. To put it another way, it seems to me that the only way to fully sympathize with, and Identify with, Don Gately, the only way to fully appreciate the difficulty of his struggle, is to recognize that any of us could, under a certain set of circumstances, be pulled as low as Randy Lenz.

Infinite Jest isn't the best book I've ever read, but it is one that will stay with me. I was going to write that I found it more emotionally affecting than other things I've read lately, but that isn't quite right. What it is, is emotionally challenging. That's what really makes it a different kind of "big book" from, say, Gravity's Rainbow or Ulysses, which are primarily intellectual challenges.  This is a book that really made it hard to maintain a pose of emotional detachment or ironic distance--which, in these times, is a real achievement.

Compare and contrast:

"Work is where they find their real fulfilment--running an investment bank , designing an airport, bringing on stream a new family of antibiotics. If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work."  --J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes

"Old premise: work sucks, and after decades of toil, one has “earned the right” to get paid to do nothing. New premise: work is self-defined, self-led and empowering. Small-scale and global-reach entrepreneurship is a reality and this will make work a joy rather than a painful necessity." -Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, The American Scene

The libertarian right assures us that the preceding is a description of utopia.

This message intellectually sponsored by the Work Less Party.

Henry Farrell expresses the duality of social scientific thought by invoking a passage from one of my favorite books, Calvino's Invisible Cities. The comments spin out the eternal quantitative vs. qualitative research debate, in both more and less interesting permutations.

Historically and philosophically, the whole qual-quant divide is an important object of social science, since it is itself a consequence of the same process of modernity and capitalist development that produces social science itself. It is only when society and its institutions appear at a scale too large for the human mind to grasp all at once that we require abstractions--particularly statistical and mathematic ones--to simplifiy and describe our social world to ourselves.

Within academia, however, there is a seemingly inescapable sense that qualitative and quantitative epistemologies are locked in some kind of zero-sum competition. These days people like to talk about "mixed methods", but I agree with some commenters in the above thread that this too often amounts to doing a quantitative study and then using qualitative examples (from interviews or ethnography or whatever) as examples or window dressing.

It seems to me that a lot of this is driven by a misapprehension about what either approach is really good for.  The problem is that we expect quantitative and qualitative approaches to do the same kind of thing; that is, to collect data and use them to test well-defined hypotheses. I find that quantitative approaches are generally quite useful for taking well-defined concepts, and reasonably precise operationalizations of those concepts, and testing the interrelations between them. If your question is "do high tax rates inhibit economic growth", and you have acceptable definitions and data for the subject and object of that hypothesis, then you can make useful--though never definitive--inferences using quantitative methods.

Qualitative methods are less often (though sometimes) suited to this kind of thing, because they are by nature rooted in the idiosyncracies of specific cases and hence are difficult to generalize. What qualitative work is really good for, I think, is in generating concepts. Quantitative analysis presupposes a huge conceptual apparatus: from the way ideas are operationalized, to the way survey questions are written, to the way variables are defined, to the way models are parameterized. Some of these presuppositions can be adjusted in the course of an analysis, but others are deeply encoded in the information we use. If  you want to know whether the categories of a "race" variable are appropriate, the best strategy is probably a qualitative one, which will examine how racial categories are experienced by people, and how they operate in everyday life. Likewise, new hypotheses can arise from "thick description" which would not be apparent from consulting large tables of numbers.

This, however, brings up an issue that will probably be uncomfortable for a lot of qualitative social scientists, particular those who are concerned with defending the "scientific" credentials of their work. Namely, can we draw a clear boundary between qualitative social science, journalism, and even fiction, with regards to their utility for driving the concept-formation process? Social science typically differentiates itself from mere journalism by its greater rigour; yet in my reading, the kind of rigour which is most important to qualitative work will be its interpretive rigour, rather than its precision in research design and data-gathering. Whether one is starting with ethnographic field notes or with The Wire, the point is to draw out and develop concepts and hypotheses in a sufficiently precise way that they can be tested with larger-scale (which is to say, generally quantitative) empirical data.

To put things this way seems to slide into a kind of cultural studies, except that the latter tends to set itself up as oppositional, rather than complementary, to quantitative empirical work. We would do far better, I think, to recognize that data analysis without qualitative conceptual interpretation is sterile and stagnant, while qualitative analysis without large-scale empiricism will tend to be speculative and inconclusive.

The new issue of City and Community has an article by Peter Dreier and John Atlas about a show that captivates many an urban sociologist, The Wire. Their piece extends comments they made last year in Dissent, in a symposium about the show. In both pieces, they repeat the common accusation that the show is nihilistic, because it presents urban problems but doesn't show any solutions to them. To bolster the point, they dredge up a quotation from an interview, in which Simon proclaims that meaningful change is impossible "within the current political structure".

As a corrective to what they see as The Wire's shortcomings, Dreier and Atlas catalogue some of the real community activists who have struggled against injustice in Baltimore, and won some small victories. And these are indeed inspiring and courageous people, who have managed to win some real improvements in people's lives. But by bringing them up and presenting them as the solution to all the problems The Wire portrays, I think Dreier and Atlas miss the point of what David Simon and Ed Burns are doing with the show.

It's misleading to say that The Wire is nihilistic. It's true that the problems it portrays appear, within the context of the narrative, to be insoluble. And it may even seem, initially, as though the show is sympathetic to a conservative position: the poor will always be with us, government intervention always makes things worse, so we might as well just give up and try to make things better in our own small, individualist way. But this would be a profound misreading, because the show suggests, not that there are no solutions, but something far more complex. We come to understand, as the seasons unfold, that each of the dysfunctional institutions we see is embedded in a larger system that goes far beyond the scale of Baltimore. There is, as Stringer Bell puts it in season 3, "a game beyond the game". We therefore have to conclude, not that there are no solutions, but that there may be no solutions at the scale of a single city.

The police find themselves hamstrung by their need to deal with national agencies like the FBI, which has been caught up in the mania of the "war on terror". The dockworkers find their way of life destroyed by the automation and the transformation of the global shipping industry. The mayor is at the mercy of Maryland state politics because he needs funding. The local newspaper struggles, and fails, to adjust to a world of profit-driven news and competition from new media. Even the drug dealers are at the mercy of their out-of-town "connect".

None of this implies that Baltimore's doom is inevitable. Neither imperialism, nor neoliberalism, nor Republican domination of state politics, nor the tabloidization of all journalism are inevitable. If they seem that way on the show, it is because of the careful and clever way in which the story is framed: these larger-scale institutions, the ones where the real agency lies, are always kept off screen and held beyond the reach of the characters. Thus the world the characters inhabit appears to them to be one where nothing can be changed. That doesn't mean that the world of the show, that we viewers can sense, is actually so tragic.

But is true that none of these problems can be solved in a single city, and most of them require a long-term, and fairly radical project of social transformation. This may present difficulties for liberals who would prefer that social problems have incremental, non-threatening solutions. But by presenting small-scale local activism as an adequate response, Dreier and Atlas do a disservice both to the problems they address, and to the activists themselves.

Perhaps, however, their real political objective is somewhat different from simply promoting the importance of urban collective action. The giveaway comes at the end of the City and Community version of their essay:

Perhaps, a year or two from now, Simon or another writer will propose a new series to TV networks about the inner workings of the White House and an idealistic young president, a former community organizer, who uses his bully pulpit to mobilize the American people around their better instincts.

This president would challenge the influence of big business and its political allies, to build a movement, a New Deal for the 21st century, to revitalize an economy brought to its knees by Wall Street greed, address the nation's health care and environmental problems, provide adequate funding for inner-city schools, reduce poverty and homelessness, and strengthen the power of unions and community groups.

A show like that would certainly be a nice bit of wish-fulfilment for liberals who like to imagine a "great man" riding in and fulfilling all their fantasies. But it's unclear what has to do with our world, in which an ambitious young politician used his charisma and the wishful thinking of his base to ride to power, and then proceeded to cater to the needs of bankers and insurance companies while sinking America ever deeper into an intractable war in Afghanistan. Faced with that reality, the world of The Wire doesn't look so nihilistic or unrealistic after all.