Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category

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Urban Precedents

Published by peter on 2009-02-23 in Culture, Heroes, History, Politics and Post-Industrial Nomads. 0 Comments

In the excitement over the USA’s first black American President, some people have become over-excited. An example is Marbury, who claims Barack Obama is also the nation’s first urban President.  This is simply not the case.

Although most US Presidents are creatures of the countryside or the suburbs, there have been at least two Presidents with as much claim to be urbanistas as does young Bam. Most recent was John F. Kennedy, raised in Boston and a sophisticated habitue of London, Washington and New York City before becoming President. Of course, as all rich kids of his time did, he spent summers sailing on the Cape or vacationing in Florida, but JFK was as urban as they come.

And before JFK, a century ago, there was Teddy Roosevelt, born and raised in Manhattan, and urban to the core. Of course he loved Nature (he could justly also claim the title of the country’s first Environmentalist President), and he decamped to the wilderness of the North Dakota Badlands to find himself after the death of his first wife. But this was a man who was such an urban-dweller that he took the job of President of the Police Commission of the New York City Police Department – the NYPD! – literally running to his office on the day of his appointment, according to the account of his friend, the journalist Lincoln Steffens. While in that post, Roosevelt spent his evenings walking the streets of Manhattan to meet his policemen on the beat:

T.R. went about  at night with [journalist Jacob] Riis as his guide to see the police at work.  He had some bizarre experiences.   He caught men off post, talking together; he caught them in all sorts of misconduct and had funny, picturesque adventures, which Riis described to all of us [journalists] (so fair was he as a reporter) and which we all wrote to the amusement of newspaper readers.  But what T.R. was really doing – the idea of Riis in proposing it – was to talk personally with the individual policemen and ask them to believe in him, in the law, which they were to enforce.  T.R. knew, he said, the power they were up against, the tremendous, enduring power of organized evil, but he promised he would take care of them.”

Walking the streets of Manhattan at night is not the behaviour of a President Cornpone. Obama is the third urban President the USA has had, not the first.

Reference:
Lincoln Steffens [1931]:  The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens.  (New York, USA:  Harcourt Brace and Company.)

Brand immortality

Published by peter on 2009-02-09 in Advertising, Computer technology, Culture and Telecommunications. 0 Comments

Catching up with films I missed when they first appeared, I have just watched that action-spy thriller of the almost-over Cold War, Little Nikita, which first appeared in 1988.

The story was fairly predictable, and the most exciting moment for me occurred at minute 77, when two of the protagonists, trying to flee San Diego for Mexico, turned a corner on which was located a NYNEX Business Center. These were a nationwide chain of 80 retail computer hardware and services outlets most of which NYNEX bought from IBM in 1986 (according to rumour, after a handshake over an inter-CEO game of golf), and then sold in 1991 to Computerland.    When NYNEX owned them, they comprised the third-largest non-franchise network of retail computer outlets in the US.

One of the seven Baby Bells (aka RBOCs) created by the break up of the Bell System in 1984, NYNEX was the only one to pursue an adult career as an IT services company, at one point earning sufficient revenues from software and related services to be placed in the Top-10 largest US software companies.    For all the synergies, however, telecommunications and software development are sufficiently different businesses, and/or NYNEX senior managers cared insufficiently for these differences, that NYNEX never appeared to take seriously their role as a software company.   Having cured itself of its untypical desire to be a leading software house by re-selling most of its purchases in this sector, NYNEX, a few mergers later, has now become Verizon.

It is nice to think that, in centuries to come, the NYNEX Business Centers brand will live on in the moving pictures.

A salute to Dot Crowe and Kewpie Harris

Published by peter on 2009-02-04 in Culture, Heroes, History, Jazz, Music and Obituaries. 0 Comments

In my teens, I played the church organ for wedding ceremonies, receptions, etc.  For this I had the significant help of an elderly spinster lady, Miss Dorothy (“Dot”) Crowe, who also played the organ and piano.  She lent me music, gave me performance and business tips, referred clients on to me, and, at one point, advised me to increase my fees to increase the demand for my services.  My first of many experiences of the failure of mainstream economic theory was that demand for organ-playing services increased with price – the more I charged, the more business came my way.   I learnt that potential customers, who did not know one organist from another (even if they had heard them each play), used price to judge quality: charging lower than my competitors, as I did initially, meant that I was assumed to be not as good or not as reliable an organist as they.   It was very nice of Dot Crowe, who was after all also a competitor, to tell me of this.

As far as I knew at the time, Miss Crowe, who was then aged somewhere between 60 and 75, had spent all her life quietly and staidly playing the church organ for Sunday mass and for local weddings. Recently, however, I discovered that she had had an earlier career as a swing band pianist.   According to Col Stratford’s oral history of jazz on the Far North Coast of New South Wales, Australia (see reference below), by 1938 Dot Crowe was a band member of Aub Aumos’s band, The Nitelites (photo, page 47).   She later led her own band, Dot Crowe and the Arcadian Six.   I am stunned to learn this about her, and my admiration, which was already high, now reaches the skies.   I never knew she had had this experience when I knew her, and now, of course, it is too late to ask her about it.

The Far North Coast of New South Wales was an epicentre of early jazz in Australia, largely due to the energy and influence of one man:  David Samuel (aka “Kewpie”) Harris.  Kewpie Harris arrived in Ballina in 1919, aged 27, apparently selling suitcases.   He died, mostly forgotten, in Brisbane in 1981.   His nickname arose apparently because his youthful face was open and wide-eyed, like that of a Kewpie Doll. Harris had been born in Britain, and as a schoolboy was a chorister at St Paul’s and St. Stephen’s churches in London.   As a teenager, he was a member of the orchestra of Tom Worthington in their regular gig at the Holborn Restaurant, London.     For a time he worked in San Francisco, and also played in dance bands on the steamships of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s West Coast fleet. By 1913, he was in Australia and had formed a dance band in North Sydney, and played violin with symphony orchestras and ensembles in Sydney.  (As a violinist in Sydney before WW I, he presumably knew Alfred Hill, Australian composer and violinist, and, earlier, a player with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.) 

According to family lore, Harris learnt jazz from black American musicians he met on his travels.  Upon arrival in Ballina, Harris helped create the Ballina Jazz Band with several other players, including my grandfather and great-uncle. The original members of the band were:  Rex Gibson on piano, Harris on violin, saxes, and keyboard percussion (originally marimba and xylophone, and later vibes), Harry Holt on trombone, Charles McBurney on trumpet, and Tom McBurney on drums.   Harris then led jazz bands with regular gigs in Northern NSW till 1951, when he left to join the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

Why was jazz so strong in that part of Australia?  Partly, perhaps, because Ballina, at the mouth of the Richmond River, was a major trading port – until rail replaced shipping as the main form of freight transport to and from the region, and within the region. Ports have lots of visitors, interested in entertainment and with free time and cash.  Partly also, because the area hosted a US Air Force base during WW II (just down the coast, at Evans Head).  With the end of the war in the Pacific, and the arrival of television to Australia (in 1956), weekly dances declined in popularity, and no longer regularly attracted the hundreds or thousands that dances even at tiny river ports like Bungawalbyn and Woodburn once did.  Dance bands all but disappeared.   I guess that good, entrepreneurial jazz musicians were forced to join classical orchestras or to play Mendelssohn’s Wedding March for people with their minds on other things, and spend their evenings remembering what great fun they had once had, and given.

FOOTNOTE (added 2010-08-18): The Kewpie Harris Band is also mentioned in this history of Lismore’s Crethar’s Wonderbar, home of the world-famous Crethar hamburger.   A descendant of Harris’ band is the recently reformed Northern Rivers Big Band (for which, in its earlier incarnation, my father played). See here.

The photo shows the Ballina Jazz Band in 1919.  Players were (left to right):  Tom McBurney, Harry Holt, Kewpie Harris, Charles McBurney, and Rex Gibson.

References:
Julia Buchanan [1982]:  “Bandleader died a forgotten figure.”  The Northern Star. Lismore, NSW, Australia. 6 January 1982, page 50.

Interview with Tom McBurney [1977-01-11] in The Indonesian Observer, reported in Stratford [1990].
Colin Stratford [1990]:  From The Stage.  Lismore, NSW, Australia. ISBN:  0-9594070-2-2.

Mailer on Obama

Published by peter on 2009-01-15 in Culture, History, Obama speeches and Politics. 0 Comments

Norman Mailer on Barack Obama Robert Kennedy:

He was as attractive as a movie star.   Not attractive as his brother had been, for Jack Kennedy had looked like the sort of vital leading man who would steal the girl from Ronald Reagan every time, no, Bobby Kennedy had looked more like a phenomenon of a movie star — he could have filled some magical empty space between Mickey Rooney and James Dean, they would have cast him sooner or later in some remake of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, and everyone would have said, “Impossible casting!  He’s too young.”   And he was too young.  Too young for Senator, too young for President, it felt strange in his presence, thinking of him as President, as if the country would be giddy, like the whirl of one’s stomach in the drop of an elevator or the jokes about an adolescent falling in love, it was incredible to think of him as President, and yet marvelous, as if only a marvelous country would finally dare to have him.

Source:
Norman Mailer [1968]: Miami and the Siege of Chicago. (New York: Primus),  pp. 201-202.

Vale George Brecht

Published by peter on 2008-12-16 in Art, Culture, Music and Obituaries. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Fluxus artist George Brecht (born George MacDiarmid in 1926) has just died, aged 82. He was a student in the Experimental Composition class which John Cage gave at the New School in New York in the late 1950s, Regretting that I was born too late to join this class*, I took the next best step, which was to track down a copy of Brecht’s notebooks in order to pore over his lecture notes taken in this class.  His most recent exhibition was at MACBA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, in 2006.

The photo that was here showed Brecht performing “Drip Music” (1959): “For single or multiple performance. A source of dripping water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel.”

* I did once take a composition class with Gentleman Jim Penberthy (1917-1999), which makes me a grand-pupil of Nadia Boulanger. That class focused mainly on Penberthy’s compositional method of expressionist serialism.

Class struggles at the check-out

Published by peter on 2008-11-14 in Culture, Market planning and Marketing strategy. 0 Comments

Newcomers to Britain usually notice the pervasiveness of the nation’s class system.  This is a country which even has two classes of stamps!  The British supermarket chains have long been a battleground of the class struggle, with some offering mainly own-label, discounted products, and others offering mainly own-label, premium-priced products!   I can recall an elderly neighbour once asking me which of the several nearby supermarkets I shopped at, and then saying, “I’m so pleased!” when I gave an answer which she thought demonstrated that we were in the same social class.
Now there is news that some of the chains are heading down-market, in order to take advantage of the recession.   But how to do this without losing your current market-position image, nor those customers still able and willing to pay premium prices?

Epideictic arguments

Published by peter on 2008-11-06 in Argumentation, Culture, Decision theory, Politics, Rhetoric and Uncertainty. 0 Comments

Suppose you are diagnosed with a serious medical condition, and you seek advice from two doctors.  The first doctor, let’s call him Dr Barack, says that there are three possible courses of treatment.   He labels these courses, A, B and C, and then proceeds to walk you methodically through each course – what separate basic procedures are involved, in what order, with what likely side effects, and with what costs and durations, what chances of success or failure, and what likely survival rates.   He finishes this methodical exposition by summing up each treatment, with pithy statements such as, “Course A is the cheapest and most proven.  Course B is an experimental treatment, which makes it higher risk, but it may be the most effective.  Course C . . .” etc.
The other doctor, let’s call him Dr John, in contrast talks in a manner which is apparently lacking all structure. He begins a long, discursive narrative about the many different basic procedures possible, not in any particular order, jumping back and forth between these as he focuses first on the costs of procedures, then switching to their durations, then back again to costs, then onto their expected side effects, with tangential discussions in the middle about the history of the experimental tests undertaken of one of the procedures and about his having suffered torture while a POW in Vietnam, etc, etc.  And he does all this without any indication that some procedures are part of larger courses of treatment, or are even linked in any way, and speaking without using any patient-friendly labelling or summarizing of the decision-options.
Which doctor would you choose to treat you?  If this description was all that you knew, then Doctor Barack would appear to be the much better organized of the two doctors.   Most of us would have more confidence being treated by a doctor who sounds better-organized, who appears to know what he was doing, compared to a doctor who sounds dis-organized.   More importantly, it is also evident that Doctor Barack knows how to structure what he knows into a coherent whole, into a form which makes his knowledge easier to transmit to others, easier for a patient to understand, and which also facilitates the subsequent decision-making by the patient.  We generally have more confidence in the underlying knowledge and expertise of people able to explain their knowledge and expertise well, than in those who cannot.
If we reasoned this way, we would be choosing between the two doctors on the basis of their different rhetorical styles:  we would be judging the contents of their arguments (in this case, the content is their ability to provide us with effective treatment) on the basis of the styles of their arguments.  Such reasoning processes, which use form to assess content, are called epideictic, as are arguments which draw attention to their own style.
Advertising provides many examples of epideictic arguments, particularly in cultures where the intended target audience is savvy regarding the form of advertisements.  In Britain, for instance, the film director Michael Winner starred in a series of TV advertisements for an insurance company in which the actors pretending to be real people giving endorsements revealed that they were just actors, pretending to be real people giving endorsements.   This was a glimpse behind the curtain of theatrical artifice, with the actors themselves pulling back the curtain.  Why do this?  Well, self-reference only works with a knowledgeable audience, perhaps so knowledgeable that they have even grown cynical with the claims of advertisers.   By winking at the audience, the advertisers are colluding with this cynicism, saying to the audience, “we know you think this and we agree, so our advert is pitched to you, you cynical sophisticates, not to those others who don’t get it.”
The world-weary tone of the narration of Apple’s “Future” series of adverts here is another example of advertisements which knowingly direct our attention to their own style.
Apple Future Advertisement – Robots
And Dr Barack and Dr John?  One argument against electing Senator Obama to the US Presidency was that he lacked executive experience.  A counter-argument, made even by the good Senator Obama himself, was that he demonstrated his executive capabilities through the competence, professionalism and effectiveness of his management of his own campaign.   This is an epideictic argument.
There is nothing necessarily irrational or fallacious about such arguments or such modes of reasoning; indeed, it is often the case that the only relevant information available for a decision on a claim of substantive content is the form of the claim.   Experienced investors in hi-tech start-ups, for example, know that the business plan they are presented with is most unlikely to be implemented, because the world changes too fast and too radically for any plan to endure.   A key factor in the decision to invest must therefore be an assessment of the capability of the management team to adjust the business plan to changing circumstances, from recognizing that circumstances have in fact changed, to acting quickly and effectively in response, through to evaluating the outcomes.   How to assess this capability for decision-making robustness?  Well, one basis is the past experience of the team.  But experience may well hinder managerial flexibility rather than facilitate it, especially in a turbulent environment.  Another way to assess this capability is to subject the team to a stress test – contesting the assumptions and reasoning of the business plan, being unreasonable in questions and challenges, prodding and poking and provoking the team to see how well and how quickly they can respond, in real time, without preparation.   In all of this, a decision on the substance of the investment is being made from evidence about the form – about how well the management team responds to such stress testing.   This is perfectly rational, given the absence of any other basis on which to make a decision and given our imperfect knowledge of the future.
Likewise, an assessment of Senator Obama’s capabilities for high managerial office on the basis of his competence at managing his campaign was also eminently rational and perfectly justifiable.   The incoherent nature of Senator McCain’s campaign and the panic-struck and erratic manner in which he responded to surprising events (such as the financial crisis of September 2008) was similarly an indication of his likely style of government; the style here did not produce confidence in the content.  For many people,  the choice between candidates in the US Presidential campaign was an epideictic one.
POSTSCRIPT (2011-12-14):
Over at Normblog, Norm has a nice example of epideictic reasoning:  deciding between two arguments on the basis of how the arguments were made (presented), rather than by their content.  As always with such reasoning – and contrary to much educated opinion – such reasoning can be perfectly rational, as is the case here.
PS2 (2016-09-05): 
John Lanchester in a book review of a book about investor activism gives a nice example of attempting to influence people’s opinions using epideictic means: Warren Buffet’s annual letters to investors in Berkshire Hathaway:

Even the look of the letters – deliberately plain to the point of hokiness, with old-school fonts and layout hardly changed in fifty years – is didactic. The message is: no flash here, only substance. Go to the company’s Web site, arguably the ugliest in the world, and you are greeted by “A Message from Warren E. Buffet” telling you that he doesn’t make stock recommendations but that you will save money by insuring your car with GEICO and buying your jewelry from Borsheims.” (page 78)

PS3 (2017-04-02):
Dale Russakof, in a New Yorker profile of now-Senator Cory Booker, says:

Over lunch at Andros Diner, Booker told me that [fellow Yale Law School student Ed] Nicoll taught him an invaluable lesson: “Investors bet on people, not on business plans, because they know successful people will find a way to be successful.” (page 60)
 

Refs and Acks
The medical example is due to William Rehg.
John Lanchester [2016]: Cover letter. New Yorker, 5 September 2016, pp.76-79.
William Rehg [1997]: Reason and rhetoric in Habermas’s theory of argumentation,  pp. 358-377 in:  W. Jost and M. J. Hyde (Editors): Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader. New Haven, CN, USA: Yale University Press.
Dale Russakoff [2014]: Schooled. The New Yorker, 19 May 2014, pp. 58-73.

This is our moment. This is our time.

Published by peter on 2008-11-05 in Culture and Globalization. 0 Comments


From the best public orator since John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, President-elect Barack Obama’s speech in Chicago, Illinois, on election night 4 November 2008:

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.I know you didn’t do this just to win an election and I know you didn’t do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime – two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century. Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us. There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after their children fall asleep and wonder how they’ll make the mortgage, or pay their doctor’s bills, or save enough for college. There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created; new schools to build and threats to meet and alliances to repair.
It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.
It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled – Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.
It’s the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.
It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.
I just received a very gracious call from Senator McCain. He fought long and hard in this campaign, and he’s fought even longer and harder for the country he loves. He has endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine, and we are better off for the service rendered by this brave and selfless leader. I congratulate him and Governor Palin for all they have achieved, and I look forward to working with them to renew this nation’s promise in the months ahead.
I want to thank my partner in this journey, a man who campaigned from his heart and spoke for the men and women he grew up with on the streets of Scranton and rode with on that train home to Delaware, the Vice President-elect of the United States, Joe Biden.
I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last sixteen years, the rock of our family and the love of my life, our nation’s next First Lady, Michelle Obama. Sasha and Malia, I love you both so much, and you have earned the new puppy that’s coming with us to the White House. And while she’s no longer with us, I know my grandmother is watching, along with the family that made me who I am. I miss them tonight, and know that my debt to them is beyond measure.
To my campaign manager David Plouffe, my chief strategist David Axelrod, and the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of politics – you made this happen, and I am forever grateful for what you’ve sacrificed to get it done.
But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to – it belongs to you.
I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn’t start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington – it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston.
It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give five dollars and ten dollars and twenty dollars to this cause. It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy; who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep; from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on the doors of perfect strangers; from the millions of Americans who volunteered, and organized, and proved that more than two centuries later, a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth. This is your victory.
The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America – I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you – we as a people will get there.
There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make as President, and we know that government can’t solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And above all, I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it’s been done in America for two-hundred and twenty-one years – block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.
What began twenty-one months ago in the depths of winter must not end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek – it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.
So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us anything, it’s that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers – in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people.
Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long. Let us remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House – a party founded on the values of self-reliance, individual liberty, and national unity. Those are values we all share, and while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, “We are not enemies, but friends…though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn – I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too.
And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world – our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. To those who would tear this world down – we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security – we support you. And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright – tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.
For that is the true genius of America – that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that’s on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She’s a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing – Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.
She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons – because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.
And tonight, I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America – the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can’t, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.
At a time when women’s voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.
When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs and a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.
When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.
She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that “We Shall Overcome.” Yes we can.
A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.
America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves – if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?
This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment. This is our time – to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth – that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people:
Yes We Can. Thank you, God bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.”

Why vote?

Published by peter on 2008-11-02 in Anthropology, Culture, Decision theory and Economics. 0 Comments

Someone once joked that economists are people who see something working in practice, and then wonder if it will also work in theory.   One practice that mainstream economists have long failed to explain theoretically is voting.    Following the (so-called) rational choice models of Arrow and Downs, they calculate the likely net monetary benefit of voting to an individual voter, and compare that to the likely net costs to the voter.  With long queues due to inadequately-resourced or incompetently-managed voting administrations (such as those in many US states), these costs can be considerable.  Since one vote is very unlikely to have any marginal consequences, economists are stumped as to why any person votes.
One explanation for voting, of course, is that voters are indeed feeble-minded or irrational, unable to calculate the costs and benefits themselves, or, if they can, unable to act in their own self-interest.   This is the standard explanation, and it strikes me as morally reprehensible:  a failure to explain or model some phenomenon theoretically is justified on the grounds that the phenomenon should not exist.
Another explanation for voting may be that the rational-choice models understate the benefits or overstate the costs to individuals of voting.   Some economists, as if in a parody of themselves, have now  – in 2008!  – discovered altruism.  Factor in the benefits to others,  this study claims, and the balance of benefits to costs may move more in favour of benefits.
A third explanation for voting may be that rational-choice models are simply inappropriate to the phenomena under study.  The rational choice model assumes that citizens in a democracy are passive consumers of political ideas and proposals, with their only action being the selection of representatives at election times.   Since at least the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, this quaint notion of a passive citizenry has been rebutted repeatedly by direct political action by citizens.  The most famous example, of course, was the uprising against colonial taxation known as the American War of Independence, which, one imagines, some economist or two may have heard speak of.   There’s also the various revolutions and uprisings of 1789, 1791, 1848, 1854, 1871, 1905, 1910, 1917, 1926, 1949, 1953, 1956, 1968 and 1989, just to list the most important since economics began to be studied systematically.
An historically-informed observer would surely conclude that a model of voting in which citizens produce as well as consume political ideas is likely to have more calibrative traction than one in which citizens do nothing except (if they so choose) vote.   Such a theory already exists in political science, where it goes under the name of deliberative democracy.   One wonders what terrors would strike the earth were an economist to read the relevant literature before modeling some domain.
People vote not only out of their own self-interest (if they ever do that), but also to influence the direction of their country, to act in solidarity with others, to elect to join a group, to demonstrate membership of a group, to respond to peer pressure, because the law requires they do, or to exercise a hard-won civil right.  Only a person with no sense of history – an economist, say – would fail to understand the importance – indeed, the extreme rationality – of this last factor, especially during a year when a major political party has nominated a black candidate for President of the USA, and the other party a woman for Veep.  At the founding of the USA, neither candidate would have been allowed to vote.
Not for the first time, mainstream economics has ignored social structures and processes when studying social phenomena, focusing only on those factors which can be assigned to an individual (indeed, some idealized, self-interested, desiccated calculating machine) and, within these, only on factors able to be quantified.   The big question here is not why people vote, which is obvious, but why economists seem unable to recognize social structures and processes which can be clearly seen by most everyone else.  What is it about mainstream economists that makes them autistic in this regard?   Do they simply have an under-supply of inter-personal intelligence, unable to empathize with or reason about others?
 
References and Acknowledgments:
Hat-tip to Normblog. 
Kenneth J. Arrow [1951]: Social Choice and Individual Values. New York City, NY, USA: Wiley.
J. Bessette [1980]: “Deliberative Democracy: The majority principle in republican government”,  pp. 102-116, in: R. A. Goldwin and W. A. Schambra (Editors): How Democratic is the Constitution? Washington, DC, USA: American Enterprise Institute.
James Bohman and William Rehg (Editors) [1997]: Deliberative Democracy:  Essays on Reason and Politics.  Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
Anthony Downs [1957]: An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York City, NY, USA: Harper and Row.