The Senatorial Party

I must have read this before, it's my underlining.  But it comes as a revelation:

The most significant thing about Herodotus is that he is the literary expression of a whole people, as cunning in their ability to deal with facts as their prototype, Odysseus, was cunning to deal with monsters.  Herodotus traveled widely and judged rationally of all he saw, but in the vast scope of his story he perforce relied mostly on hundreds of other Greeks who had gone to all the limits of the world with which he dealt, or who had lived before him and handed down to him information on the past, and who were as questioning and as sane as he. 

The epic subject of Herodotus will haunt the philosophy of history from his day to ours. The conflict of molar, obliterative mass civilization emanating from a single power center versus the dynamism of the manifold-centered city-state--eighteenth century America versus 1968 U.S.A.--Herodotus' History is the first large-scale anti-imperialist indictment.  But what is wrong with imperialism?  Did not Persian ecumenical egalitarianism, so like the empire of the Incas, ensure a greater good to a greater number than did the anarchic communalism of Greece?  Eventually the city-state failed so completely that there was no other solution than the takeover of the Persian Empire itself by Alexander.

This would certainly be the utilitarian judgement; but the "Senatorial party"--Herodotus, Tacitus, Cicero, de Tocqueville, Lord Acton--have always disagreed. ...

--So Kenneth Rexroth, Classics Revisited  42-45, at 44-45 (1968).  I really don't remember the phrase "senatorial party," though I underlined it (I believe in the 80s).  It's a beguiling notion until you reflect that it is the party of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.  I assume Rexroth was looking for something more austere and patrician but public-spirited.  The last one I can think of who might meet that model is Lloyd Bentsen.  Am I forgetting anybody important?

The Tesla Ban: Markets for Thee, not for Me

Much good fun this week over the efforts by the North Carolina legislature to make life difficult for Tesla --thereby, as everybody except the participants appears to agree, insulating a favored constituency from the depredations of the free market.  I do not dissent but would this be as good a time as any to keep in mind that there has never, ever, been a truly principled devotee of free markets in any position of power in any sovereignty anywhere?  Folks like Luis Zingales and William Baumol may sketch entrancing models of free market paradise but Albert O. Hirschman (discussing economic growth) long ago articulated the paradox of perfect competition:

[S]ociety a a whole produces  comfortable and perhaps steadily increasing surplus, but every individual firm considered in isolating is barely getting by, so that a single false step will be its undoing.  As a result, everyone is constantly made to perform at the top of his form and society as a whole operates on its--forever expanding-- "production frontier," with economically useful resources fully occupied.

...the image, as Hirschman drily puts it, "of a relentlessly taut economy."  As someone somewhere put it, simply, the last thing you want in the world is a job where you get paid what you're worth--a job, that is, where marginal revenue=marginal cost, and where marginal cost=average cost.  Granted that there are visionaries who may be able to conjure up the image of such a society (usually from a cosseted hidey hole like a university professorship).    But these are few enough to begin with and if by accident they get a transitory grip on the levers of power they pretty quickly learn to unlearn their principled purity and to identify--often with total sincerity--their favorites who deserve protection.

Business/Finance Books: Embarrassment of Riches

Wading into Jean Strouse's Morgan: American Financier, may I take a moment to marvel at how much more and better business/economic history of the United States we have today than we had back when I was a tad,  the best I can remember finding were Matthew Josephson The Robber Barons,  John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, and John Chamberlain, Enterprising America, A Business History of the United States, none entirely worthless but each unsatisfactory in its own way.  I suppose I could add Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday,  although I didn't recognize this as "financial history" until much later.

I won't begin to catalog what is available these days except to note that we've got at least two fullscale presentations of Morgan (I'm counting this) and, FWIW, two of Warren Buffet (link, link).  I keep trying to put together some sort of Amazon top-ten list but I can't narrow it down enough.

Afterthought:  Lacking good history, I suspect the best way to get a feel for American business/financial history was to read Dreiser or Dos Passos.  Might still be a pretty good way.

Louisville Redux

I spent a good (sic) part of my 20s in Louisville, which I remember as an old Midwestern (sic-not southern) metal-bashing town.  My law school commute buddy was the first guy I knew to carry a portable phone.   Or maybe it was just a beeper.  Anyway, the point was that he was some sort of a production expediter at the Ford plant; nobody knew he existed unless the line went down, in which case he had to earn his keep.   Aside from him, I remember the flac for the General Electric heavy appliance plant ("appliance park," they called it), whose job was to chill out the reporters--just one of many strategies his bosses had put into place to try to out-hustle the unions by going over the unions' heads with direct appeals to the populace.

I left in 1969, and haven't been back since for more than three days at a time.  I assumed (though I hadn't  actually checked) that both Ford and GE have long since vanished from the Louisville scene, or at least withered on the vine to mere shadows of their former self, all part of the general hollowing-out of the rust belt (but cf.* infra).

I had learned that Louisville's subsequent fortunes were not all bad.  Two guys playing golf together and riffing on ideas to get rich--they hit upon the idea of what became Humana, the health services giant.  John Y. Brown, Jr., flamboyant son of a flamboyant father, bought Kentucky Fried Chicken from the original Colonel Sanders and kicked it into the big league (Brown in his youth liked to tool up and down Fourth Street in a red convertible with a couple of babes.  "Either the boy will wind up a millionaire or ion the penitentiary," they liked to say.  He did worse: he became a governor).

Recent inquiry shows that Humana is still a major presence in Louisville, and KFC also retains a large footprint. But I somehow failed to grasp the rise of the new driver of the Louisville economy until I stumbled across this in the National Journal: a major employer in its own right and a force multiplier for its surroundings (hint they come to your door). Louisville as the best location in the nation, heh.  I lived in Cleveland in 1954 when they made the same claim, and we know how that turned out.  Anyway, God bless 'em although I do not CafePress CEO Bob Marino when he says that "Louisville  the place where I want to live until I die."

I fired the piece off to the friends from my Louisville days (there aren't may left).  The dependable Swifty took the conversation to a whole new plane:

Hi jack – to me, Louisville was a city of meat packing plants, whisky distilling, beer brewing,  cigarette rolling. Remember when the neighborhood breweries were shutting down? One of the worst tasting beers I ever tried was the Irsh beer, don’t remember it’s name. it held on longer than the others.

 He is right, and I had utterly forgotten: standing outside the cigarette plant with Thelma Stovall, an old union rep running for one state office or another, I forget which but there were so many.  I remember the beer, too.  I tried to write that one of the breweries had "gurgled hideously down the drain," but a narrow-minded copy reader toned it down.  I knew I needed fo find another line of work.

---
*But maybe I was wrong.  I just now did some Googling.  Evidently there is still an Appliance Park; in 2012 they spread the word that they were hiring 230 workers, starting at $13.03 an hour;  they got 10,000  applicants.  The announcement said they wanted people with "competencies."  Meanwhile here is a 2010 press release on  Ford retooling for new production in Louisville.

Update:  I just now thought to check the Louisville unemployment rate.  Seems to be running in excess of eight percent, which would appear high for a city with so much sunny hype.

Thavis on the Vatican

I'm finishing up John Thavis' Vatican Diaries and I think I'll file it under "modified rapture."  Thavis is an accomplished story teller with years of Vatican-watching to draw on and he is able to show how much, here as perhaps everywhere else, grand policy is shaped by less-grand personality, the enthusiasms and aversions of ordinary people.  But he's also a beat reporter who will never burn a source even from his retirement perch in Minnesota, he's put together book which is unlikely to offend any but the most monstrous bitter-enders on any church issue.  Even those cast in a bad light will read in and cluck that he could have been a lot worse (well--possibly excepting the archbishop caught on a wire trying to make his moves on a young priest).  Indeed he largely gives the game away in the first chapter,--a wryly cheerful account of life in the press gaggle on a Papal outing--making the point, perhaps inadvertently, that the most seasoned reporter on the Vatican beat really doesn't get much more by way of inside dope than those of us half a world away at the business end of a TV connection.

One thing he does well is to bring together the fragments of narrative on a bunch of issues that the yokels hear about but don't follow closely day to day--stuff you probably know if you already if you are a faithful reader of Vatican-watcher's blog posts (I'm not--it really hadn't occurred to me that they exist until I read Thavis' book).

Another virtue is that it reminds you how much the Vatican is like the old joke that ends "from then on, it was a hell of a lot like Cincinnati."    Or perhaps Queens: people say the Vatican is like the Mafia and I think there is some truth there, but perhaps not in the sense ordinarily intended.  I don't think the Vatican has a regular modus vivendi of assassination (at least not lately;  cf here and here).  No: the real point is (I'm pretty sure I have written this before)--the real point is that the Mafia is an old,  sluggish, sclerotic behemoth, lurching from limited success to near failure.  So also the Vatican: the real wonder, sometimes, is that they find their way at all.

Which offers a framework for one topic on which Vithers is pretty good: his sketch of the troublesome outliers like the late Marcel Lefebvre, creator of the Order of Saint Pius X and perhaps the church's most visible dissident against Vatican II; or Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ, father of illegitimate children  by at least two women, abusers of countless children, including his own.

Both these worthies are dead now.  But the real question is why they exercised such power for so long--how come nobody gave them the bum's rush long before they became a public embarrassment.

The answer--a moment's reflection ought to give you the hint--is that they were just way too good at what they did.  They created enthusiasm, they prompted vocations, they filled the pews and most of all, they raked in the money.  And even though the founders are dead, one has to assume that some of the old momentum persists.

And so the question has to be:  what happens now, with a new Pope bearing a whole new set of enthusiasms and, yes, new alliances.  I don't know, but I think I may sign up for Vithers' blog just to stay on the cusp.

Afterthought:  I wonder how many people, retiring from Rome, move to Minnesota?

But You Knew That: Passion (and Jewelry)

Mrs. Buce hied me off to Best Buy this morning with a refractory Ipad.  I there acquired the services of an intelligent youngster who spent about half an hour fiddling with the device (no charge) before explaining what she thought I needed to do and making it clear that I should do it myself because I wouldn't want to pay her as much as she would charge.  

"Do you want me to write it out?" she asked.

"Nah, I understand," said.

She grabbed a Post-it and pen.  "I'll write it out,"  she said.

While she wrote, I noticed that she was wearing the largest ring I had ever seen outside the Vatican. Turquoise and silver, as in "Indian."

Finally she passed over a couple of Post-its and turned as if to move away to her next, one may hope more profitable, encounter.  Idly I said:

"Do you make your own rings?"

She stopped in her tracks. "No," she said, but then she turned and launched into what gave promise of being a long narrative about the jewelry game and its intricacies. After a minute or two she caught on to herself, put a cork in it, thanked me and turned away.

What have we learned today children?  We learned that everybody has a passion.  But you knew that.

Did I Destroy Cleveland? Not Entirely (An Update)

A few years back I regaled the faithful with my account of how I destroyed Cleveland.  When the news  broke last week about the house of horrors I naturally hightailed it to Google to see if I was responsible.  Answer: not really.  Target zero for the current gruesome story is about three miles away from the unspeakable Area B.  

But I'm not quite sure that's the end of it.  Like, I am sure, almost everybody else, I found myself wondering: what kind of a neighborhood is this, anyway?  Best I can tell, there are some longterm residents.  Isn't there anything by way of community surveillance that might have picked this up?  Slate picks up on the issue, with a different spin, reacting to a commenter in the Plain Dealer:

“At the moment, the hum of criticism on Seymour Avenue is about the subtle signs, such as the lowered shades or odd behavior of Castro and how he never entertained guests,” he writes. “These are the kinds of signs that police officers who patrol a specific beat over time might notice or hear about from neighbors. But that kind of patrol disappeared when community policing ended.”

That kind of patrol disappeared when community policing ended—that’s the line you should remember if you’re looking to criticize the cops here. Intuition is one of a police officer’s foremost assets. But missing persons and odd behavior become suspicious only when you are intimately familiar with a neighborhood, with what normalcy means and when normalcy is breached.

In Cleveland and elsewhere, that sort of hyperlocal knowledge is on the wane.

 Well yes, that's easy to latch onto.  Good morning, Mr. Policeman Brownbear.  Good morning, Johnny--shouldn't you be in school?   We all have that picture in our mind, and it is unfailingly filed under "ancient history."  As it happens, I live in a neighborhood that has all the old prelapsarian good order that you could possibly imagine--and I haven't seen a beat cop here in 30 years (cruiser did stop in my front yard the other evening and rousted an apparent drug suspect; they let him go).

The inference might be that community policing works if and only if there is a community.  So, wasn't there something by way of community on Seymour Avenue to pick up the slack?  In his justly admired backgrounder, Robert L. Smith sketches a response:

This stretch of Seymour Avenue is near the historic heart of Cleveland's Puerto Rican community but it's no bustling barrio. Yards tend to be fenced with rusty chain-link  on a block of long, narrow lots running between West 25th Street and Scranton Road, just south of Interstate 90 and Scranton Cemetery. Several houses, like the one next door to Castro's, are boarded up and abandoned.

Residents say the neighborhood feels safer since police chased away drug dealers a few years ago, but they learned to keep to themselves and to avoid asking too many questions. "Beware of Dog" and "Keep Out" signs are prevalent.

The block is anchored at its eastern end by a stately, red-brick church, Immanuel Lutheran. At the west end, across West 25th street, is the venerable neighborhood bodega, Caribe Grocery, which has been owned for decades by Ariel Castro's uncle, Julio "Cesi" Castro, and which closed after the media descended.

The industrious Castro family has a long history in Cleveland...

 Well--no, not a response, for with all his best efforts,he doesn't seem to be able to put his finger on the question of why the neighborhood is not a barrio, why it is a ghostly cardboard cutout of what you would want it to be.

Boy I wish I had the answer to that one.  I don't, and I'm sure it is above my pay grade.  But I am willing to shake down at least one possible culprit: It's those %$#@! expressways.  Way I read Google, ground zero is tucked into an armpit (I choose my words with care) formed by I-90 and I-71.  Now just about anybody with any on-the-ground knowledge agrees these days that urban freeways are, in retrospect, a dreadful mistake: that they provided no really adequate solution to urban traffic problems and far worse, they tended to suck the lifeblood out of any community that suffered their depredations.

Yes I know, I know, there are a thousand objections.  Some neighborhoods suffered without any expressway in earshot (actually, that would be my in-laws'),.  Some survived the expressway (Really?  Where?).  I can think of any number of other possible causal factors that would have to be plugged into the equation.  

Still, you imagine yourself at 2207 Seymour and you breath in the exhaust fumes and you listen to the hum-thrum of the traffic every hour, every day, every year, and you have to wonder.

The Issa Rule: With all that Shit, There Must be a Pony!

“I want seven hearings a week, times 40 weeks," he said in 2010. I suspect he hasn't achieved quite those numbers.  But I'd say that Darrell ("our gremlins are different") Issa,  has done a spectacular job of establishing himself not merely as the richest member of the House but the one who gets the most, then perhaps the most visible and memorable, TV time.  Poor John Boehner, orange-faced and weepy, surely racks up more hours in his role as the most ineffectual House leader since Frederick Muhlenberg.  But Issa--a Google search for "Darrell Issa threatens" yields up some 1,410,000 hits;  "Darrell Issa warns," another 78,000; for comparison, "Darrell Issa promises" garners only a measly 43,000.   Here's a guy who, in his role as chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has surely kept the faith with all those whose primary goal is to assure that the executive branch accomplishes nothing, zero, bupkas, nada, zilch--or at least not until it  is wrested away from the foreign-born interloper and returned to the good, grey reactionaries to whom it properly belongs.

All this is a a shame but in more ways than one.  That is: aside from mere partisanship, the government needs oversight, and needs a proper  oversight.   We've had spectacular instances of Congress in its oversight role.  Perhaps  none is more famous than the teamwork of Sam Ervin, Howard ("What did he know and when did he know it?") Baker and others who carried us through the Watergate crisis without losing their dignity and without destroying the national fabric.    We've had legislators who used the investigative power to build honorable careers--perhaps none more  notable than Senator Harry S Truman, the man from Pendergast,  whose work investigating war contractors did so much to overcome his (undeserved) reputation as a machine hack. We've even had investigations that turned on themselves, as when Joe McCarthy set out to destroy the Army and wound up destroying himself ("Have you no sense of decency, sir?").

And to keep matters in focus, we badly need some good investigation now.  The notorious Benghazi debacle, for example: whatever you think of the politics, it was an unambiguous operational failure and we absolutely need the best possible job of reassessment, as in "what went wrong and why?"  But it seems that all we've had so far is grandstanding, name-calling, and the unceasing search for an easy hit.

That is: aside from one what we sometimes get and badly need, we've also had far too many clown shows that end up discrediting not only themselves but the entire legislative process (I know--as if it could be any more discredited than it already is).  And I admit, I don't know, perhaps it is too early to tell.  Maybe Issa's hounding of the ATF, of Obamacare, of Benghazi, of  the CIA, of the SEC, of the Army, of the Attorney General, and now the IRS--maybe somewhere out there somebody will come up with some insights for sensible reform.  

Yeh, and maybe pigs will fly,   But in the interim, here's one more investigation that I'd love to see.  Can we have an inspector general, please, to give us a look at the record of the Issa committee?  How much has that guy cost us since he got his hands on the gavel?   And what, exactly, has he accomplished?  If we're looking for government fraud, waste, and abuse, would it make sense to start right here?

Exam Time

Professors like to complain about grading.  I can sympathize: it is a hard part of the job.  The scandalous secret is that it is the only hard part  of the job.  Other than grading, you can spend your life in following your bliss, and if your trifling classroom obligations aren't what you want them to be, why then you just haven't engineered them right, so you have no one to blame but yourself.  

The trouble with grading is that it is a constant and unforgiving reminder of how little you've accomplished: I blow it in so straight and it comes out so crooked   I told them and I told them.   You really know how to hurt a guy, don't you? Which isn't to say the papers are awful.  Often, by any independent standard, they are pretty good, okay, good enough (once in a while they slip in a ringer but that doesn't change the generalization). The thing is, you want them to be brilliant, just like y--  

Oh wait a minute, maybe they are just as brilliant as you are, and maybe that is precisely the problem. As I think I've said before, my two great nightmares are, one, that I haven't lived to my potential; and two, maybe I have.  As Nietzsche said, you gaze too long into the bluebook and you will find the bluebook looking back. Welcome, professor, this is your life!

But grading time is a good time to put your mind on something, anything, rather than the task at hand.  I wouldn't be surprised that this (grading) week is the week when a whole lot of first drafts get done on the syllabus for next semester, when, of course this time at last I will finally get it right. As for me, I haven't actually retooled the syllabus (though maybe I should)--but have you any idea how many really great full-length operas there are available for free on Youtube?

This might also be a good time to reformulate your entire research agenda.  And for this I can offer a suggestion from the late C. Wright Mills.  It's stated in pre-digital terms, but you can recodify:

[T]he rearranging of the file ... is one way to invite imagination.  You simply dump out heretofore disconnected folders, mixing up their contents, and then re-sort them.  You try to do it in a more or less relaxed way  ... Of course, you will have in mind the several problems on which you are actively working, but you will also try to be passively receptive to unforeseen and unplanned linkages.

 --So Mills in "On Intellectual Craftsmanship," reprinted as an appendix to The Sociological Imagintion (OUP 1959).  And now back to the blueb--oh look, there's a kitty!

That Day Again

My mother died about 30 years ago. Our relationship was, ahem, nuanced, but I can testify that she was a woman of formidable abilities and impressive achievements.  And, to be fair, wanted nothing but the best for her children.

But along with all else, she had a scabrous sense of humor and I bet she would have enjoyed:

All right lady, I'll buy those lousy poppies;
All right lady, I'll buy those pencils too.
All right lady, take off those old dark glasses:
Hello, mother, I knew it was you.

Oddly enough, I can't track down a YouTube version.

Hoisted from the Comments:Eb on What they Teach in School

The other day I wrote a bit about what they do and do not teach in econ 1A. The Sapient Eb* offers an insight which itself invites a comment.  Eb:

It's amusing to compare Econ 101 to Physics 101. Both are largely false, based on simple ideas that have been discredited. Both are pedagogically sound beginnings. But the difference, I think, is that a person who takes Physics 101 and stops there has learned something useful. A person who does the same with Economics 101 has a lot to unlearn before s/he reattains their previous level of sophistication.

I think that law school is comparable to Econ 101.

  Further thoughts: one, I had a law student a while ago with a pretty good engineering background.  He explained the  teaching of the second law of thermodynamics.  First year, they tell you, you write it down and spit it back on the exam.  Second year, they teach it, you say this can't possibly work.  Third year, they teach it, you say, unh hnh, with the right assumptions and the right luck, this just might be true.

Now, as to law school.  Eb, you touch a nerve.  For years my job in the canonical curriculum was the course in "contracts."  And boy to I mean canonical.  So far as I know, every beginning law student at every Anglo-American law school in the known universe takes "contracts."  

But here's the catch: no one practices contract law.  Don't misunderstand; people practice adjectival contract law:  labor contracts, or entertainment contracts, or construction contracts, whatever.  But the law school course in contracts--it was invented in the 19th and early 20th Century by a madman and a pious fool who believed that there was a single unifying set of principles that underlay all contracts and that they could be usefully stated and taught; more, that they were the right place to begin a legal education.

Next point: nobody believes this any more.  Haven't for a long time, if ever.  It was dying, if not dead when I began teaching 45 years ago.  And as they say about Elvis, it's getting deader.  [Side issue: people will object that there is a realm of contract theory that remains alive and well, articulated by, e.g., Randy Barnett and Charles Fried.  True enough, but the relation between contract theory and a unified contract law is at best haphazard or incidental.]

Yet we keep doing it.  Why?   Well I suppose, we can make some plausible  retrospective justifications: it is at least somewhat possible to teach contracts as a course in "legal method" (if we know what that means).  And it's useful, even worthwhile, to explain what you might call a meta-theory of contract: explaining why it came to be some important, why it isn;t really important, what is important in its stead.  But all this is post hoc.  The real reason, I lies somewhere in the realm of inertia or existential angst: if we didn't have a course in contracts, how would we know we are a law school.

Re the rest of the law school curriculum I suspect the story is more complicated, but I note two points. One, my law students spend more and more of their time in "clinicals," or "externships," which may mean "paying us $50k a year so they can work for someone else for free."  Students tend to love clinicals--often better than their regular courses, as they will be quick to tell you.  And they may be right.  But there lingers the embarrassing question: if we are just an apprenticeship mill, why not rip off the mask and show our true identity?

And two, as to classroom work.  Beyond the "required" or "semi-required" core ("the bar courses"), an awful lot of "advanced" legal education tends to look more and more like polisci.  Translated: stuff the professor thinks will be career-advancing for her, and which s/he can persuade students to think of as fun.

And?  And I don't know. I'm painfully aware that I am sounding like the old geezer.  I remember the geezers from my own youth who complained that "the boys" didn't take code pleading or equity any more --"and where will they learn how to replevy a dog?"    I find myself feeling the same way when I see a student taking a course in tenant's rights when he doesn't know how to record a mortgage.

But I recognize that there's an underlying issue here far deeper than I (or, let's be fair, anyone else) can fathom: exactly what does go on inside a University and in particular, is it worth those insanely high prices when so much of the pure content seems to be online for pennies (or even for free)?  We have only the dimmest shadow of an answer though the word "socialization" appears visible through the void.  More crudely, maybe "contracts" and "polisci" and yes, "externships"  are all just artifacts of a system barriers designed to maintain a hierarchy and, specifically, a core of elites whose main role in life is to be In while others are Out.  Oh dear, vulgar Marxism.  Sorry 'bout that.  Really, I am.
 ---
*He goes by the name of Ebenezer Scrooge although I suspect he does not run a London counting house.