During the credit boom of 2005 to 2007, profits and pay
reached unprecedented highs. It is now evident that the
bankers were being rewarded largely for taking on
unacknowledged risks: after the subprime market collapsed,
bank shareholders and taxpayers were left to pick up the
losses. From an economy-wide perspective, this experience
suggests that at least some of the profits that Wall
Street bankers claim to generate, and that they use to
justify their big pay packages, are illusory.
At the end of his piece, Cassidy links the stagnation of the middle class, which accelerated in the 1980s, to the simultaneous rise of giant Wall Street investment banking houses, derivatives traders, etc. I don’t think this causation hypothesis is entirely inaccurate, but I would instead emphasize Cassidy’s idea of a lack of societal contribution — as evidenced but he title, that’s the best take-away from the article.
So, what is the deal with the stagnation of the middle class? Krugman would attribute it to the loss of “strong unions, a high minimum wage, and … progressive tax system” that produced a broader distribution of wealth in the 40s and was dismantled in the 80s. I don’t disagree, but I think a force more powerful than government policies underlies the stagnation.
Certainly, the general declining trend of the US since the 1980s (punctuated by bubbles, growth, busts) is extraordinarily multifactorial, but I think Gladwell’s The Risk Pool points to an extremely important, always overlooked factor: our aging population.
This relation between the number of people who aren’t of
working age and the number of people who are is captured
in the dependency ratio.
…
Demographers estimate
that declines in dependency ratios are responsible for
about a third of the East Asian economic miracle of the
postwar era; this is a part of the world that, in the
course of twenty-five years, saw its dependency ratio
decline thirty-five per cent.
The more people you have working to support those who can’t, the more resources you have left over to grow. As our nation grows older and lives longer, our dependency ratio rises, and our working population must first support the growing ranks of the dependent before it can put resources towards growing our economy.
To my future children: I used to own this. Not this exact Trapper Keeper, but this exact design. The title of this Trapper Keeper is “Designer Space”. This is ironic, because this is supremely ugly. Yes, your father used to have amazing taste.
I am exhausted. Hot, too. Thankfully today is much cooler, but a few days back it was the hottest day ever recorded in Minnesota. Of course, there are certain factors regarding the weather station calling the official numbers into question, but here’s what we’ve got:
The dew point sensor at Moorhead spiked to
88 degrees at 7pm Tuesday evening. That’s the highest dew
point ever recorded in Minnesota. (Previous record was/is 86
degrees).
When you combine the air temperature of 93 at that hour,
the heat index calculates out to a Persian Gulf level of
130 degrees! That would also be the highest heat index
ever recorded in Minnesota. (Previously 124 degrees
at Moorhead in 1966)
HERE IS A LISTING OF THE MAXIMUM
HEAT INDEX VALUES CALCULATED FROM
THE TEMPERATURE AND DEW POINT
REPORTED BY AUTOMATED SENSORS
ACROSS CENTRAL AND SOUTHERN
MINNESOTA AND WEST CENTRAL
WISCONSIN.
MINNEAPOLIS ASOS (836 FT)(ASOS) 353 PM JUL 19 119 F
Anyhow, it has been HOT. Mykala and I both took turns going a little bit crazy on different days — the heat went to our heads.
So, here I sit at our office desk, with the fan blowing directly at me, trying to cram some information into my head for my last standard exam of school.
I’ve been thinking about the movie Tree of Life, and I haven’t really gotten anywhere. A nice, attempted partial explication of the themes was written by Matt Zoller Seitz, but take a look at this quote:
Why is there a creation sequence? What does it mean?
It’s probably in there because Malick has been imagining
the creation of the universe since he was a boy, and
always wanted to see it depicted on a big screen.
This bothers me a little bit. Basically, Malick gets to produce this entire rambling piece that Seitz describes as a puzzle with no box art. Malick doesn’t do interviews. We don’t know what Malick truly intended. So, we have to place an enormous amount of trust in Malick, that he actually does have an overarching artistic vision.
What if he doesn’t?
If there’s no strict vision, then Malick gets to just toss in scenes of whatever he wants, whenever he wants to. The viewers and critics are forced to do intellectual backflips to connect dots that might not have even been meant to be connected.
I think I trust Malick, but I don’t really have any reason to do so. I’m not sure if all the dots are worth connecting.
My 84-year-old patient was nearing the end of another denture fitting appointment, and he had just accidentally spilled all of his water on the operatory floor. “No no,” I said, “you’re doing just fine.” Trying to reassure him, I couldn’t think of anything better to say.
At the time, I didn’t realize that I was not going to see my patient again. Shortly after that appointment, I was informed that he had to be transferred to hospice and would be unable to make any future appointments at the school. Still, a few months later, his words come to me every few days, reminding me of something important.
Biking along the Greenway today, my wife and I were happy: we will soon celebrate two years of marriage, we have years of happiness ahead, and are excited about the unpredictable nature of life. Like a path strewn with riches I don’t yet know of, my life winds away in front of me.
I’m just old enough to know I should enjoy what youth I still have.
I’m young enough to be able to execute.
But there’s still this poison that creeps in: as we biked along, I’m getting upset about something at school, or upset that there’s something in my eye, or angry that I didn’t pack sunscreen. The point is: loss of perspective is poison. It yanks you out of the experiential and into the narrative. And it happens to me with shameful frequency. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes, my patient’s words crash through my shortsightedness: “I’m not doing so well.”
Alex, here you are, doing great. But you think there’s something wrong. You’ve got years ahead, but you’re stuck dwelling on short-term minutiae. You’ve got your health, but obsess over the jog you didn’t take. Inevitably, when I recall my patient’s words, I feel a sense of guilt. Somewhere, in a quiet room, my patient is sitting. He can’t do the things I can. His best years are behind him. He has family, but more often than not they’re elsewhere. He told me getting married was the best thing he ever did, but now his wife is gone.
Yet, I have the audacity to get upset over something in my eye.
We biked the Midtown Greenway today: headed over to Lake Calhoun and enjoyed the shops and biking. On the southwest side of the lake, there was a group of college kids that had set up a giant slip ‘n slide. We stopped and joined the spectators. One lady: “I couldn’t figure out why that girl was covered in soap!”
On our way back, we stopped at the connection between Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles, which turns 100 in two days. The plaque on the path there said that 100,000 people celebrated the joining of the two lakes, that celebrations last for a week, that the lakes were filled with whimsical floats, and that a symphony from New York came in to perform a march written expressly for the occasion.
This obituary for Huguette Clark, who recently died at the age of 104, may be one of the oddest I’ve ever read.
For the quarter-century that followed, Mrs. Clark lived
in the apartment in near solitude, amid a profusion of
dollhouses and their occupants. She ate austere lunches
of crackers and sardines and watched television, most
avidly “The Flintstones.” A housekeeper kept the dolls’
dresses impeccably ironed.
Odd, right? Take into further account that she had multiple estates around the country and lived most of her life on Fifth Avenue in New York.
Oh, and she was worth over 400 million dollars.
Her father was William A. Clark, a copper baron born in the 1800s. He built an absolutely astounding 121 bedroom mansion on Fifth Avenue. Here’s a picture, courtesy of the New York Times:
It was, in a stupendous act of stupidity and greed, knocked down in 1926 when restrictions on building height were lifted. Carter B. Horsley:
“No loss was viewed in retrospect to have been greater
than that of Senator William Clark’s 121-room pile at
Seventy-seventh Street, which was felled by the wrecker’s
ball in 1926,” wrote Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin
and Thomas Mellins in their book, “New York 1930,
Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars,”
(Rizzoli, 1988).
“Yet at the time only The New York Times appeared moved:
‘As for the Clark palace, it has been condemned
unreasonably, indiscriminately. An echo of the
architectural orgy of the Paris Exposition of 1900, its
only fault is that it stops short of perfection in its
kind. The inlaid gold leaf that decks its interior
woodwork should have been spread upon its fantastic
stonework without. Its astronomical tower should have been
surmounted by an orrery with a sun of flame and planets of
solid gold. It might thus have truly exemplified the
senatorial mood of the eighteen-nineties, illumined by the
ambitions of a doge.’
That was this woman’s home, for a time. With her, the last living memory of that house, that era, is gone. How small our scratches and turrets on the earth seem after time’s erosion.
My wife just made the most wonderful veggie burger on toasted sandwich thin for lunch. The secret? An awesome veggie burger (do you remember which brand, Mykala?) and smoked gouda. Wow. Happy grilling season, minus the grilling and minus the meat.
This great talk, in which James H Kunstler dissects suburbia, articulates an important problem. We’ve built “places that aren’t worth caring about” that are only accessible via giant highways powered by cars running on temporarily cheap oil. So, when you take the long view (which isn’t very long at this point), you’ll find that suburbs can’t continue as they are. People do not thrive in the isolation of suburbs:
But what happens is, of course, it mutates over the next
80 years and it turns into something rather insidious. It
becomes a cartoon of a country house, in a cartoon of the
country. And that’s the great non-articulated agony of
suburbia, and one of the reasons that it lends itself to
ridicule. Because it hasn’t delivered what it’s been
promising for half a century now.
