miyazaki intro

Here is an interesting article on the famous Japanese movie director Hayao Miyazaki. It has a lot of interesting tidbits, including his views on Disney, as well as some interesting facts about his political views. Miyazaki is apparently strongly influenced by Marxism and Communism. My friend Zhun has told me that this theme appears in an early television show of his titled Future Boy Conan. While the communist theme of industrialism and a post-capitalist utopia are described very explicitly in that show, one can see more subtle elements of this in his later movies as well.

For example, in one of his most celebrated films titled Spirited Away (2001), the theme of greed is encompassed in the interesting character, "Noface." He is first portrayed in the movie as essentially a passive character. He does not voluntarily enter the spirit bath house but waits to be welcomed in by Chihiro. He is a product of his environment (definitely a Marxian idea) since once he enters the bath house (which could easily be seen as the ideal capitalist firm), he is overtaken by the greed of the workers and he feeds off of this greed just as much as the greed feeds off of him. It is not until he encounters the genuinely selfless Chihiro that Noface changes back to his previous form. He then spends time with Xeneba in a world that is completely the opposite of Yubaba's, an ideal post-capitalist society that is another recurring theme in his movies.

Check out a very good Miyazaki interview at the Disney studios here

At any rate, enjoy the excellent introduction to Miyazaki and his ideas!

t.s. eliot's "the waste land"

T.S. Eliot reads his poem "The Waste Land" (from HarperAudio)

The text can be found here

say hello

Welcome. You may be new to this blog (I just advertised on Facebook with the very hope of this), or you might have been reading it for a while now but never commented, or you may be one of the select few who have actually commented on my posts. Regardless of who you are, I'd like to extend a warm Hello and Welcome to you. I've recently finished a project where I tagged all my entries for easier viewing for you, the reader. You can find a list of the tags on the right side of my blog (you may have to scroll down).

I did this for two reasons. First, it gives me an opportunity to look back and reflect on where this blog has gone since May, when I began writing for it with the intention of putting some research and teaching ideas out in a public forum and also freshen things up every now and then with some articles on my hobbies. Second, it gives you the opportunity to browse topics according to your own interest. Initially, I thought I would accomplish this by including a Google "search" bar on my blog. But I realized later on that it's probably not the best way to find, say, my review of Final Fantasy Tactics A2 or my writings on the the social nature of property. So hopefully this is a bit more effective. Since you will now more easily find those posts simply by clicking on the tag "videogames" or "law and economics"

So, enjoy! And please feel free to give me your comments. They are much appreciated.

link roundup - more on how kafka stimulates your brain, some comments on classical music, and more

First, here is a followup to the previous discussion on this blog about a psychological study which showed through an experiment how Kafka stimulates your brain.

As I noted in the comments to this post, there is more to this study than simply showing a relationship between the experience of the absurd and intellectual activity: a psychologist working on this project notes "We're so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere.... We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning" such as mathematical understanding.

Another quote, just because I find this idea so fascinating: "Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. After thinking about their own inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less tolerant of outsiders, studies find. When insulted, they profess more loyalty to friends — and when told they’ve done poorly on a trivia test, they even identify more strongly with their school’s winning teams."

Here we find some interesting comments by former conductor Alfred Brendel who has recently retired and taken up writing. He talks about his revelation that life is "grotesque and absurd" -- but it's more uplifting than that, I promise! Includes an interesting perspective on Rachmaninov and classical music in general.

Roberts makes some comments on who should win the Nobel Prize in economics.

Arthur Krystal in the New York Times on "When Writers Speak"

And, for good measure here are movements 1, 2, and 3 of Beethoven's Piano Sonata 31 in A flat major, Op. 110 for two reasons: first, I've been listening to his piano sonatas a lot lately and find them absolutely amazing (particularly I've listened to no. 32 an uncountable number of times); second, so you can see for yourself about the end of the third movement and whether it inspires laughs, as Brendel says in his piece linked to above.

My apologies, but one more on classical music: Glenn Gould talks about how he plays Mozart in an age of "super recording techniques", etc., basically defending his unique artistic style. Only 3.5 minutes, highly recommended.

Gould, brilliant quote: "I think that all the basic statements have been made for posterity now, I think what we must do is try to find our way around these things [the super recording techniques and so on], try to find a raison d'etre, that is somehow different and yet still somehow right, that makes sense. I think if it does not, if it does not really make sense one must chuck it out and indeed I would have said that two days after having made that record had I not listened to it in a playback booth and thought it really is fun and it really does make sense and it really does say something about the architecture of that particular work then I would have chucked it out and gone back and done it as Hollywood would prefer."

Enjoy, and happy Sunday!

thoughts on the department talk

On Tuesday:

A lot of what was said had to do with the events leading up to the package deal in the spring of 1973. Some things were said about what happened immediately afterward: the battles fought between the faculty and the grad students, for instance. However, almost nothing was said about the state of radical economics or the department in the 1980s. A few things were said about the 90s, and of course Sam and Steve gave their thoughts on the current state of radical economics and where it might go in the future. While I do have some issues with what some people said about the present and future, I was more interested in the past: specifically, what happened in those early years of the department that led, so quickly, to things changing?

In our digging up of EGSO records over the summer, we came across a variety of memos and minutes beginning in the late 1970s. These were really helpful in constructing a memory of some of the debates which occurred (such as the controversy over the Affirmative Action committee). But they also painted a picture of EGSO's thoughts on their situation as graduate students in this unique department. Their views on TA allocation, funding issues, and other matters of cogovernance are strikingly similar to the views expressed by EGSO today on the same or similar issues. Their views on the changing direction of the department can also be captured in these documents. Indeed, as early as 1983 when students expressed concern over the change in curriculum they noted the changing direction of certain professors' work in the department, towards more mainstream ideas and techniques.

What I find so interesting about this early look at the orientation of the department is how quickly things changed. It makes me wonder, what was the lifespan of this radical movement in economics, both here and in the profession as a whole? If these economists really were riding a wave of social movements, when that wave died did the movement die with it?

This is the reason why I ask: does it really make sense to talk about "the history of radical economics and a radical department, 1973-present" or is it more like "the history of radical economics and a radical department, 1973-79" or some proximate date? The framing of the study, I believe, is essential to understanding both the nature of a radical department and what we can do today to change things for the better. Why? Here is my point: because if radicalism more or less lost steam after this early period (the "to 1979" scenario) then we must look at what things were like at that time, and try our best to go back to that time. Otherwise, in the "to present" scenario, we are left wondering whether radical economics is a simple skirting of the mainstream by people who mostly ask alternative and slightly more interesting questions without relying entirely on neoclassical tools to answer them.

My personal thoughts on the issue are that radicalism was most likely a punctuated event in the history of economic thought in the U.S. I have very few doubts that things were quite different in UMass econ by the mid-1980s and probably even earlier. The question is then, what are the reasons for this change? Like most questions in history, there are both agency and social institutions dimensions to the story, related through some notion of dialectics which I won't go into too much :) I will briefly sketch out what I see as some of the main factors.

1. Sam plays a central role in this history because he was the organizer of the group of professors who were hired in the spring of 1973. Before coming to UMass he researched other attempts at radical institutions that had ultimately dissolved. While he was hesitant at first to share the lessons he learned in studying these departments, later on he admitted that lack of group cohesion was a central element to all of the failure stories. While the initial pact amongst the five did exist, Sam turned towards a different set of questions and ideas in the 1980s which dealt less with critiquing capitalism and more with studying topics that were excluded by neoclassicals at that time, and criticizing the neoclassical theory. He admits this himself.

In fact, by moving more in the direction of Hayek (criticizing the Walrasian model) than, say, Rawls (providing moral critiques of capitalism), Sam had not only given up on the intellectual challenge posed by the construction of a post-capitalist society but he also became increasingly engaged with the academic aspect of his research program. (Find a previous post here on where I see the relationship between radical academics and society.)

2. The problems facing the world in the 1970s when some economists got interested in radical ideas were monumental: global inequality, imperialism, and at the same time a fear of Marxist ideas as "dangerous and subversive." This is definitely a volatile point in global history in terms of what was being talked about and the severity with which people held oppositional views. The 1980s, in contrast, were a period of social conservatism, government crackdown of unions, and the beginning of an era characterized by leftist economists as "neoliberalism." Given that to at least some extent social movements informed these radical economists, you can possibly make an argument that it works in the other direction as well: specifically, that this period gave new theoretical strength to the fundamental neoclassical doctrines of competitive markets and little government intervention.

What does this mean for an understanding of radical economics and what radical economists can do about it? First, as Jim Crotty pointed out near the end, the social problems (partly outlined in -2-)which they confronted in the 1970s are no bigger than the problems radical economists face today. The conditions exist for radical economists to criticize capitalism and face the greater intellectual challenge of constructing an alternative, so what radical economics had in the 1970s is similar to (if not less important than) what radical economists have today.

Second, so much of this is about individual choices, and that is something I find both amazingly beautiful and powerful but also very dangerous. Here, I believe all we can do is trust in education and fruitful debate. In fact, lots of debate -- open communication is absolutely central. And, it might be necessary to make some pacts at times :) but we should not view them as necessary evils but as opportunities for cooperation.

Finally, I would strongly differ with Sam concerning open engagement with the top of the mainstream. There is no a priori reason to do this, and in fact it may compromise our position by fetishizing the elite, which is directly contrary to radical principles.

library thing

Check out this site: http://www.librarything.com/

It's a space you can use to catalog what you've read, find related authors you may find interesting, and read others' comments and reviews.

It seems like a great site. In addition to the above, their "author" pages contain a wealth of information about the author as well as popular links associated with them. For example, here is the entry on Murakami.

Enjoy!

dreaming, again

In the past two weeks, my class has covered what I find to be some of the most fundamental questions facing students of American history and the history of capitalism. However, I have doubts about whether I conveyed my extreme enthusiasm in class. Partly, this is because the issues are so complex that it's hard to go to the front of the class every other day and show them anything representing a coherent answer. I'm somewhat confused myself, and the hardest thing to do as a teacher is pretend like you know something really well when you are still searching for the answer yourself.

For example, today we read the beginning chapters of Kessler-Harris' Out to Work. Sure, the book is about the gendered aspects of work but it is just as much about workers coming to grips with the new social relations that came to dominate the economy by 1860. For example, on pg. 21 she asks, "Could a largely agrarian population unused to laboring for masters be persuaded not merely to sell their labor, but to sell it in confined quarters and under conditions that could remove them from their agrarian roots?" Honestly, this is one of the most striking sentences I've read in any work of economic history. It goes to the core of what the changing social economic system truly meant for these workers. I think it is the mark of a great historian (social, political, economic or other) to ask a question about the psyche of the people he or she is studying. Indeed, this is one of the questions that motivated me to focus on this time period in American history. I really want to understand on a fundamental level how factory work became such an integral part of American society and how people responded to it.

This is related to what I believe is the other central question of this time period which we have studied in class: given that work is a social relationship between parties, these relationships have a legal expression in the form of contracts. In fact, this is one of the most important expressions of the work relationship because contracts specify an exchange of property rights (labor power for a wage), and people are instinctually very attached to their property and the rules governing the use and distribution of that property. Here is the second question: How did the law deal with the changing nature of contracts which reflected the rise of factory work?

Of course, the two questions are intricately related. At the same time that you see the rise of a will theory of contract, you see the rise of proletarianization. Both are rooted in individualism, the market economy, liberalism. But the roots are more complex than what this simple picture may imply. Simultaneously with the rise of the factory worker, societies consciously grasped onto the home as a point of stability. How are we to fit this into our narrative, especially if the institutions of democratic capitalism are so entrenched by 1860?

Actually, how "entrenched" were they? Shaun, a friend of mine and a commentor on a few previous posts of mine on this subject questions whether we should think about capitalism in a utilitarian framework -- as an efficient economic system representing the interests of the majority. Can power explain the rise of capitalism in the U.S.? Does individualism contain any grain of truth in the story?

Such difficult questions indeed. I fully appreciate what my friend Zhun told me back in May when I was searching for a unifying theme for my American history syllabus: find that, and you have yourself a dissertation.