Strange Fruit

We saw Strange Fruit at Ann Arbor's summer festival a couple of weeks ago. They do not really do very much, in some sense, but their performance is nonetheless oddly compelling.

Here is a video courtesy of Damn Arbor.

Artists and politics

Start with this fine piece from Nick Gillespie about artists caught up with Qaddafi, which features this astounding quotation:

I don’t think either the L.A. Times' scolding or Sting's inflated sense of his own diplomatic powers really applies. On this matter I agree with Hitler. When news surfaced that some of his favorite artists had signed a communist pamphlet, the easygoing Führer waved the matter off, saying, “I don't take any of that seriously. We should never judge artists by their political views. The imagination they need for their work deprives them of the ability to think in realistic terms. Artists are simple-hearted souls. Today they sign this, tomorrow that; they don't even look to see what it is, so long as it seems to them well-meaning.”

Completely unrelated is this interview with Jeff Daniels on film subsidies (and other topics). The faith he and the interviewer share in the Ernst & Young study is charmingly naive. Indeed, a take-down of the E & Y study would make a nice short paper for someone in public finance. [Just to be clear, I think in general Jeff Daniels is a good guy and deserves praise for his work in Michigan; he just shouldn't be opining on economics.]

This older piece by Nick on artists kissing the bottom of The One is worth reading as well.

Subsidizing the arts

Wise words from Tyler Cowen at MR.

Like Tyler, I don't mind the indirect subsidy via the tax system. Unlike Tyler, I do not see the point of having government boards that dole out money. Let people vote with their voluntary contributions.

As a second best, I agree with Tyler's suggestion to have the funding at the federal level, rather than the state and local level. I would also focus it on mainstream cultural institutions that everyone can agree on and that have very low political content.

Success in America

Reading Thomas Sowell's Ethnic America in college affected my thinking about the progress of various ethnic/racial groups in American society quite substantially. I learned for the first time about the historical discrimination against the Irish and against many Eastern and Southern European ethnic groups when they first arrived in the US. I also learned about the idea of selective immigration for the first time - the notion that individuals from a given group who show up in the US, or anywhere else, as with the Chinese diaspora scattered around Asia, are not randomly selected from the population, and that this might have something to do with how they fare in their new homes. The relative success of immigrant blacks from the Caribbean in the US was also news to me at the time. In addition, Sowell charts the gradual rise over time of groups like the Irish up the scale of average incomes.

This Slate essay by Nicholas Lemann considers a later stage in the process of economic success and cultural assimilation. One might call this the "regression to the mean" part. I could see this pretty plainly among the Chinese students at Western Ontario when I taught there. The first generation kids, who were way over-represented in our honors program, particularly among that segment of the honors program that got by on effort rather than just on smarts, worked really, really hard. More than once I had a student in my office tell a story of genuine sleep deprivation brought on by extreme pressure from parents for academic success. By the third generation, my casual observation suggested that it was more often clothes, cars and parties (and, presumably, as Lemann suggests, hockey as well).

Via "The .Plan"

A very different sort of talk

The Departments of Comparative Literature and English Literature at the University of Michigan present:

The Freudian Robot
Lecture by Lydia H. Liu
4pm, Thursday September 30, 2010
3222 Angell Hall

What is the psychic life of digital media? Lydia Liu will speak on digital writing and its fateful entanglement with the Freudian unconscious. Her new research demonstrates how the evolution of alphabetical writing into the ideographic system of digital media alters the threshold of sense and nonsense for the mind and compels a new understanding of human-machine interplay at the level of the unconscious.

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I really like the phrase "alters the threshold of sense and nonsense for the mind". We don't get to talk like that in economics! Actually I like the whole thing, just as words.

On the other hand, I received a good dose of Frederik Crews in graduate school (thanks Nat!) and so anything that appears to take Freudianism seriously necessarily crosses my threshold of nonsense.

Is poetry reasonable?

Reason on free verse - a fine rant and one I largely agree with. The free verse poems in the Atlantic are pompous and impenetrable.

We did haiku and e.e. cummings style poems at my junior high. What we did not do were sentence diagrams, which I did not get until I took German in high school. They proved pretty useful in my compiler class in college.

Cultural and political persistence

A modern report on what the English ambassador wrote about his stay in Denmark in the early 1690s.

My favorite bit:

"In Denmark there are no seditions, mutinies, or libels against the government, but all people are, or appear to be, lovers of their king, notwithstanding their ill-treatment, and the hardships they groan under. And I suppose one principal reason of this to be the equality of the taxes, and the manner of taxing. It is not to be imagined by those that see it not, what a comfort it is to the sufferers to be ill-used alike."

Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, remains remarkably homogeneous on many dimensions, including the politics. Or, at least, I perceive them as such in juxtaposition to the wildly heterogeneous US.

I can report, though, based on personal experience that the food has gotten better in the intervening centuries!

Hat tip: Lars Skipper

Only shades of gray ...

There is an old Monkees' song called Shades of Gray, the chorus to which is

But today there is no day or night
Today there is no dark or light.
Today there is no black or white,
Only shades of gray

This WaPo article on Obama's blackness, or rather his partial lack of blackness, reminded me of that song, as well as of Ursula LeGuin's novel The Lathe of Heaven, in which the protagonist can affect the world with his dreams. He starts to try to consciously manipulate this power; his attempt to end racism in this way succeeds as when he awakes everyone is gray. This is portrayed in the novel, as I recall, as something of a negative, but that is not so clear to me.

It strikes me that inter-marriage is the one sure-fire solution to racial and ethnic separation and discord. I am glad to see it rising in the US and extending to groups where historically it has been low, such as blacks and whites, as well as continuing in cases where it was already high, as with whites and Asians. This is just the melting pot, doing its good work.

On libertarian feminism (and broader related issues)

I had a discussion with Jim Heckman many years ago in which he described a disagreement he had had with Richard Epstein at Chicago about separating out state oppression of blacks from what might be called social oppression of blacks. In the post-bellum south, he had argued, the two were largely one in the same and thus both difficult to separate and perhaps also not that useful to separate.

Along those lines, I think it is a narrow view indeed to assume that the best society can be obtained simply by figuring out how to restrain the state to the provision of public goods combined with thoughtful redistribution. Surely this would help, but it would not be enough. A society with such a modest state could still be a distinctly illiberal state, depending on what was happening with its culture. Social actions can be oppressive just like the over-armed agents of the state; that this oppression takes somewhat different forms makes it no less real. This, to me, is part of the appeal of thinking of myself as a classical liberal rather than a libertarian, as classical liberal thought extends its purview well beyond just questions of governmental size and scope.

I was reminded of this line of thinking by reading this piece by Reason's Kerry Howley on the relationship between libertarianism and feminism. Here's a taste:

Libertarians spend an enormous amount of time telling people that they are, in fact, oppressed. We don’t call it “consciousness raising” when we explain why you ought to be able to shoot up while selling your kidney to a sex worker, but that’s what it is.

Hat tip: Julian Sanchez

UMMA: The Infinite Landscape

We were out walking little E today in the (light) snow and stopped off for a warm 45 minutes at the remote site of the University of Michigan Museum of Art to see their current exhibit of landscape photographs from their collection. You can actually see many of the images on-line by following the link, but will miss the fun of watching E eat crackers while you view the art. The images range widely in age and location and provided a wonderfully quiet interlude of contemplation this afternoon.

For readers not in A2, UMMA has a remote site because their main building on the central campus is being remodeled and expanded, a project that will reach completion early in 2009. For readers in A2, UMMA is well worth a visit every month or two.