Dear Readers of My Blog (if any of you even exist, that is),

I’m looking for some company in reading some books about economics and participating in an email discussion about the current state of the global economy. I’ve been having lots of discussions about this topic lately, some wonderfully cathartic and educational, others horribly depressing, and more still immensely frustrating. The root of this frustration is more often a lack of shared vocabulary and historical understanding than it is a lack of shared values, though in few subjects are the two so dramatically intertwined as in economics. Suffice it to say, I’ve found the most productive fruitful conversations to be those in which the participants have read at least some of the same books or articles, even if they vehemently disagree on what they mean.

In a somewhat blind-leading-the-blind experiment, I’ve compiled a list of ten books that might form an initial common ground. Recommendations for this list come from (hopefully less blind) friends, family members, professors, and the books themselves. It is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of a discipline or in any way definitive. I just tried to pick texts which seemed to be in dialogue with each other, and have something valuable to say. Some I’ve read cover to cover, others merely selections, and a couple I’m still waiting to stumble upon in a good used book store. They are listed in chronological order, but I do not propose we read them in that order, or that to join the list you must commit to reading all in their entirety. Instead, the only requirement is that you obtain a few and read them at your leisure. And the list itself? Questions, rants, relevant links, suggested readings, selected passages, apt quotations, critiques: really, whatever the participants desire.

• Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776)
• Karl Marx, Capital (1867)
• William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883)
• Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904)
• Georg Friedrich Knapp, The State Theory of Money (1924)
• John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)
• John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (1967)
• L. Randall Wray, Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price Stability (1999)
• John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004)
• Barry C. Lynn, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (2010)

Some ground rules: The list will be hosted either on rrrojer.net or some more convenient non-Google service. The archives will be private but as with all email, assume you are speaking in a public forum. I will take the role of benevolent dictator/curator when it comes to membership, at least for the time being. Wit and humility encouraged; good natured and pointed name calling acceptable; outright hostility and disrespect less so (think Taibi not Limbaugh). The list is meant to be mixed company, meaning people who have studied economics and people who have not (I certainly fall into the latter category), so minimal jargon please. Knowing my peers this will probably have a lefty bent, but free-market fundies most welcome, especially if you turn a good phrase, as well as the unaffiliated. Though many of us are funemployed and have lots of time on our hands, let’s aim for quality over quantity – count to ten before you send kinda deal – so that busy students and professionals are also welcome. I’m hoping for low-volume high-density, but if it becomes too high traffic for your tastes, you can always unsubscribe. I will ban those deemed abusive.

Interested? Send me an email at rebecca@(this site) with a little explanation of why you want in or what book I’ve most egregiously left off the list. If I get a reasonable quorum I’ll set up a list and send you an invite.

Yours in curiosity,
Rebecca

“Ballad of the Black Gold”
video by Sam Ellison (Ashley/Amber‘s cinematographer!)
song by Reflection Eternal (Talib Kweli & DJ Hi-Tek)

1. The Church of the Savvy. This is my name for the actual belief system that prevails in political journalism. I’ve been keeping a kind of public notebook on it via my Twitter feed.

Prohibited from joining in political struggles, dedicated to observing what is, regardless of whether it ought to be, the savvy believe that these disciplines afford them a special view of the arena, cured of excess sentiment, useless passon, ideological certitude and other defects of vision that players in the system routinely exhibit. As I wrote on Twitter the other day, “the savvy don’t say: I have a better argument than you… They say: I am closer to reality than you. And more mature.”

Now in order for this belief system to operate effectively, it has to continually position the journalist and his or her observations not as right where others are wrong, or virtuous where others are corrupt, or visionary where others are short-sighted, but as practical, hardheaded, unsentimental, and shrewd where others are didactic, ideological, and dreamy. This is part of what’s so insidious about press savviness: it tries to hog realism to itself.

2. The Quest for Innocence, which is the agenda (I say) the press must continually serve, even as it claims to serve no one’s agenda.

Innocence [is] a determination not to be implicated, enlisted, or seen by the public as involved… The quest for innocence in political journalism means the desire to be manifestly agenda-less and thus “prove” in the way you describe things that journalism is not an ideological trade.

3. Regression to a Phony Mean, an especially dubious practice that is principally about self-protection.

Journalists associate the middle with truth, when there may be no reason to… Writing the news so that it lands somewhere near the “halfway point between the best and the worst that might be said about someone” is not a truthtelling impulse at all, but a refuge-seeking one, and it’s possible that this ritual will distort a given story.

4. The View from Nowhere, the taking of which journalists associate with their claim to legitimacy.

Occupy the reasonable middle between two markers for “vocal critic,” and critics look ridiculous charging you with bias. Their symmetrical existence feels like proof of an underlying hysteria. Their mutually incompatible charges seem to cancel each other out. The minute evidence they marshall even shows a touch of fanaticism. It can’t be that simple, that beautiful, that symmetrical… can it? Temptation says yes.

When you have an obligation to remain outside the arena, it is also tempting to feel above the partisans who are struggling within that arena. (But then where else are they going to struggle?) You learn the attractions of a view from nowhere. The daily gift of detachment keeps giving, until you’re almost “above” anyone who tries to get too political with you, or at least in the middle with the microphone between warring factions. There’s power in that; and where there’s power, there’s attraction.

5. He said, she said journalism, a formation I have been trying to bust up by pushing for more fact checking.

“He said, she said” journalism means…

– There’s a public dispute.
– The dispute makes news.
– No real attempt is made to assess clashing truth claims in the story, even though they are in some sense the reason for the story. (Under the “conflict makes news” test.)
– The means for assessment do exist, so it’s possible to exert a factual check on some of the claims, but for whatever reason the report declines to make use of them.
– The symmetry of two sides making opposite claims puts the reporter in the middle between polarized extremes.

When these five conditions are met, the genre is in gear.

6. The sphere of deviance. The power to place certain people, causes and ideas within the deviant sphere is one of the most ideological things journalists ever do.

In the sphere of deviance we find “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” As in the sphere of consensus, neutrality isn’t the watchword here; journalists maintain order by either keeping the deviant out of the news entirely or identifying it within the news frame as unacceptable, radical, or just plain impossible…

Anyone whose views lie within the sphere of deviance—as defined by journalists—will experience the press as an opponent in the struggle for recognition. If you don’t think separation of church and state is such a good idea; if you do think a single payer system is the way to go; if you dissent from the “lockstep behavior of both major American political parties when it comes to Israel” (Glenn Greenwald) chances are you will never find your views reflected in the news. It’s not that there’s a one-sided debate; there’s no debate

[via InfectiousGreed]

Anyway, now Bert is fundraising for his own thesis, a low-budget horror film about a lake monster. He is shooting on 16mm, so all you film-lovers out there especially should really should look inside your hearts & wallets to support the art students trying to prove that real film is not a dying medium.

You can donate as little as $1 ($20 gets a DVD), and speaking from experience, small donations really make a difference on set! Think about all the media you watch for free on the internet— and all the people who make art out of love, maxing out their credit cards in the process. You get to enjoy it and not pay a penny. Well, here is an opportunity to make a tangible contribution. It is a good feeling!

Lake Horror – A 16mm Monster Film — Kickstarter

The only income left for most of those who create is earned through self-promotion, but as Lanier points out this turns culture into nothing but advertising. It fosters a social ethic in which the capacity for crowd manipulation is more highly valued than truth, beauty or thought.

While the severing of intellectual property rights from their creators, whether journalists, photographers or musicians, means that those who create lose the capacity to make a living from their work, aggregators such as Google make money by collecting and distributing this work to lure advertisers. Original work on the Internet, as Lanier points out, is “copied, mashed up, anonymized, analyzed, and turned into bricks in someone else’s fortress to support an advertising scheme.” Lanier warns that if this trend is not halted it will create a “formula that leaves no way for our nation to earn a living in the long term.”

“Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth,” Lanier says.

Chris Hedges: The Information Super-Sewer – Chris Hedges’ Columns – Truthdig

As a founding (now lapsed) member of Harvard Free Culture and a former employee of Creative Commons, these are some pretty hard truths, thoughts I’ve been harboring for over 3 years now but reluctant to state publicly. But perhaps as a result of working on my thesis film— by far my most substantial endeavor to date— combined with getting ready to graduate— meaning next year not only will I no longer have institutional/financial support for making art, but I will have to actually earn a living— that I feel like it’s time to come out about my growing ambivalence towards “free culture.”

To be clear, I don’t blame the Free Culture Movement or Creative Commons. They exist in a fairly obscure corner of internet intelligentsia, pretty much irrelevant in the face of the powerful social and economic forces that have brought us to our current situation, where original content is little more than bait to capture eyes for advertisers.

Frustratingly, fear of this exact situation was the precise reason I originally became such a free culture zealot! Specifically, I was appalled by how record companies would debase great music by putting it into a car commercial. I hated the idea that something I made could be forever converted into commercial speech and used to peddle crap. And so the “non-commercial” option for Creative Commons license held great appeal for me.

More generally, I was impressed the elegance of the intellectual property compromise in the Constitution:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

The free culture movement, it seemed, was interested in restoring the balance between private interest and public good. This was a balance which, if harmoniously struck, actually served both parties better than either extreme: When creators are well-rewarded for their efforts during their lifetimes (or at the least make enough keep working, and maybe eat), the public benefits from their cultural and scientific contributions (if not immediately, then when the works enter the public domain). Likewise, a rich public domain benefits individual creators, in that they have an incredible foundation of work to build upon.

Of course, beginning in the 1970s if not earlier, this compromise had been seriously hijacked by the big media companies, who all but eliminated the “temporary” aspect of their monopoly. So when I first got interested (around 2004?) in the movement, CC/FC seemed like a clever, grassroots way to restore balance to copyright law: enable creators to legally share their work with the public, in a way that was consistent with the new realities of the Internet. The big media companies didn’t understand the new digital frontier, and it was ripe with Utopian potential. Never before has there been such easy access to public domain works! Let us enrich it, and surely someone will soon work out a way for creators to be rewarded!

But somewhere along the way, the fight became less about restoring balance, and more about promoting New Media ahead of Old Media. Google & the like were quick to make alliances with Creative Commons, which as a nascent foundation needed money. They were brought together by a common enemy, Big Media, which was embodied by groups like the RIAA and the MPAA, evil organizations that robbed grandmothers of their retirement savings by suing them for hundreds of thousands of dollars because their grand kid illegally downloaded a handful of songs.

“Don’t be evil” Google was exciting and hip and powerful! They ply their employees with free smoothies and sushi and cliff bars, back massages! Who could resist them as an ally? But one would have to be a fool to think they were fighting for creator’s rights. Was it not their duty as a corporate person to borrow the FC movement’s moral high ground so as to accelerate the inevitable elimination of their clumsy, Luddite competitors?

So as often happens, attempts to fix a broken system resulted in helping to usher in something arguably worse.

But is the situation actually worse? On the one hand, it’s awesome that I can put my short, diy, films online and have potentially infinite numbers of people see them. And I can watch and listen to all sorts of film and music that would be near impossible to access pre-Internet. On the other hand, going forward, it is unlikely I will ever actually get paid to create art or tell stories. Instead, if I find a job at all, I will be getting paid for my ability to capture the attention of consumers. Which I suppose, isn’t that different from before. Except that now consumers will be watching my films on their fucking phones.

Hedges’ column goes on to talk about the frightening implications of the angry, ignorant, digital Internet hive mind— a provocative read. But in light of the more personal nature this post has taken, I give Gillian Welch final word: