Schnell! Eeeeaaasssy. Um?

Culture, Economy, Media, Movies

I walked into Elysium a few minutes late, and Matt Damon was getting the beat-down from a robot, to whom he’d had the temerity to back talk. This robot was the only character in the film whose motivations were clear and whose actions were a function of its character. Nothing else made any sense.

In the future, an orbital post-scarcity society with the capacity to manipulate complex organic systems at the sub-molecular level maintains Fordist manufactories on Earth. Is it just to give the proles something to do? A single line of dialogue to the effect of, “We gotta keep them busy or they will revolt,” might have covered this flaw, although how an earthbound population could revolt against a well-armed space station, manifest numerical superiority or no, is quite a question, and in any case, most of the people on Earth don’t appear to have work, so there goes that theory. William Fitchner plays the vicious capitalist who runs this robot mill. He does most of his via computer terminal in a hermetically sealed office; naturally, we wonder: why is he on earth at all? Couldn’t he just Skype? Rather more to the point, in an orbital society capable of manipulating individual atoms, why is there still enterprise capitalism? Is it like contact sports, a vicious and anachronistic entertainment, practiced by only a few professionals, kept around for entertainment and kicks? Well, our industrialist suggests that it’s essential he get his company back to profitability, and he is willing to assist Jodie Foster in a coup to do so. Wait, wait, wait a minute. She offers him a 200-year contract to build Elysium’s missiles and robots. Does this not imply a competing firm, or firms? But there’s only one space station. How are these other firms in business? Who’s buying their robots and missiles? Am I going insane? What day is this?

The movie desires to be an allegory of illegal immigration, the hispanophone have-nots of a SoCal favela relentlessly throwing themselves over the Rio Grande of Near Earth Orbit in order to get to the better lives Elysium has to offer. Wait, what? Oh, no, I’m sorry. They’re going for miracle cures. Elysium doesn’t offer a better life. It just offers to fix your boo-boos. Three out of every four shiploads of immigrants gets blown to smithereens, so, like, it appears that you do not increase your chances of beating that cancer, if you consider the actual odds. Here again, the motivations are completely nonsensical, and needlessly so. We could understand people risking their lives to escape this wretched Earth in order to make a new life in space, but all evidence suggests that even those who get there and get their thyroid problems and sugar diabeetuss cleared up get deported right back to our little ball of pollution. Your cancer’s fixed, but you’re still going to starve to death. Hm.

Meanwhile, on Elysium, Jodie Foster plays a French fascist. Fascism, like capitalism, seems an odd ideology for a post-economic paradise, but I suppose assholes will always be with us. She plays some kind of secretary of defense, and she growls that the feckless leadership of Elysium is going to get them all killed, or something, despite the fact that everything on Elysium seems to be going absolutely swimmingly, and the few Earthers who do manage to crash land in this vast La Jolla in the sky appear to be swiftly rounded up and returned. Again and again and again, nothing about this world justifies her snarling aggression (nor her French, but I suppose it’s just meant to convey aristocratic awfulness, so we’ll laissez-faire).Why not make immigration a really confounding problem? The smugglers have figured out how to get hundreds, thousands of people onto Elysium. It’s upsetting the political order. They’re voting for OBAMA! The white peoples is gettin’ restless. Jodie Foster seule pouvait eux sauver !

So Jodie Foster wants to take over Elysium for no reason, and she has William Fitchner rewrite the code for the Elysium operating system. Which he can do, because he or his company built it? Why is he in such desperate straits, then? Why is he bugging Jodie Foster for contracts? Why doesn’t he take over? I don’t know, I guess he read the script, and it says that he didn’t. He’s motivated by money in a world where money is irrelevant. Elysium has no stores, no ATMs. It’s just houses and swimming pools. Robots bring you champagne. At no point do we see any sort of transactional exchange, except of course when William begs Jodie for a contract. No one has a reason to do anything. William Fitchner goes to Earth, writes the magical spell to take over Elysium, and gets shot down by Matt Damon. Damon is dying because he got irradiated building robots in the factory that exists for no reason. Apparently this happens all the time, because they have a robot whose design features make it useful solely for the purpose of pulling irradiated humans out of a robot chamber. Yo, why didn’t you just send a robot into the radiation chamber in the first place, guys? No, Jim! You’ll flood the whole compartment! He’s dead already.

Anyway, Matt Damon and a gang of dudes who have kept Mazda 626s operational for two centuries shoot down his airplane. Matt Damon has been technologically augmented, and they download the shit into his brain. They unscramble it on the Dell desktop that I had in my office when I was an administrative assistant 10 years ago. Aw, shee-it, it’s the codes to do something. Argue argue. Run run run run run. Jodie Foster sends an augmented assassin whose motivation is that he fucking loves killing shit after Matt Damon. Eventually, everyone ends up on Elysium, because although this is the future and they are able to manipulate matter at the atomic level, if Jodie Foster is distracted for a sec, any asshole can just roll right through the gate, because Elysium’s automated systems read the script and realized that’s what they were supposed to do because of the plot. For no particular reason, the assassin stabs Jodie Foster in the neck with a piece of glass and decides that now he wants to rule Elysium. Has he ever even been to Elysium? Who cares? Jodie Foster bleeds to death on the floor in a closet with a woman who is only in this movie to prove that Matt Damon is not gay, even though Matt Damon is clearly gay; the only person with whom he has a convincing emotional connection is the sexy DL Latin thug car thief who is his best friend, who gets killed, and whose death is Damon’s one moment of actual pathos. These two obviously were boning, but don’t worry, look, there’s this woman!

So the movie kills its main villain in the middle of the last act for no reason, and then reminds you of the narrative senselessness of this act by occasionally cutting back to the room where Jodie Foster is literally lying dead under a tarp, which is the one allegory this movie gets right, except that it is an allegory for this movie. Then some shit happens, and then it turns out that there is no reason at all for the material privation and medical hopelessness on earth, and then the movie is over. I suppose there was some decent production design, in the sense that it all looked better than Star Wars Episode I. Foster does a fine villain, but her character makes so little sense that her performance was lost, and although Damon does the everyman with some skill, he gets lost as soon as the action starts. Bourne proved him a capable action hero in the hands of a capable action director. Here, alas, no.

Look, the future as an allegory for the present moment is effectively the whole point of science fiction, so the movie’s intentions were in the right place, but Blomkamp didn’t think about his concept. You don’t need a Tolkienian backstory to build a realistic fictional world, but consistency matters. If no one has any reason to do anything, or if they act constantly in contravention of their own apparent interests, then all an audience can do is be confused. The movie struggles to present its characters in the tradition of psychological realism. This may be the future, but these people are just like us, etc. etc. And yet, because everything these characters do is in the service of a story that ought not be taking place at all according to its own rules and logic, all these emotions and psychologies are rendered not more, but less real.

Poor? No.

Culture, Economy, Media, War and Politics

To me, the most interesting reaction to the recent Guardian/Glenn Greenwald reporting on the US Government’s vast, creepy, and stupid engagement in various programs of indiscriminate eavesdropping is the shock and disbelief evinced by, mostly, partisan defenders of the President to the effect that there is something deeply disturbing and unbelievable about the idea that a “high-school dropout” could have advanced, succeeded, and come into a six figure salary. Nevermind that the technology industries have always valorized the dropout narrative and that there are prominent tech billionaires offering substantial grants to kids who skip college in order to do something useful with their lives. I’m reminded of some educational activists who point out that in the eyes of the New York Times et al., $250,000 a year is too poor to live in Manhattan, but a teacher making fifty grand is an entitled sinecure living high on the hog. The point is . . . no, the question is: is $200,000 a lot of money to make in a year? Well, in the eyes of the professional classes and their media interlocutors, the answer is: no, if you’re the right kind of person; yes, if you’re not.

The people who express these doubts in the media, who find it so extraordinary that a guy with a mere GED could make what still passes for a decent living in this country, and indeed, find it in a sense offensive that this should be the case, as if the lack of a particular kind of credential is in fact a moral demerit that renders personal financial success not merely suspect but anathema to the proper order of an economy, are the sort of people who eagerly get on board with notions like, “every child should have the opportunity to go to college.” You can ignore the word opportunity; it is a mere formalism. They mean, everyone should go to college. (The obvious economic rejoinder is that if the thing is no longer scarce, it is no longer valuable. Witness, ladies and gentlemen, the Bachelor’s degree. But I digress.) Usually this exhortation is coupled with some vague notion that we—America, if you were wondering—are being outcompeted by China in the war to endow our children with “the skills they will need for the jobs of tomorrow.” No one ever quite gets around to mentioning what those skills are. I assume they mean computers. And it appears, InshSteveJobs, that what a guy or gal needs in order to figger out them crazy computers, is not a college degree, but access to a computer.

In fact, the universalizing of college education has completely elided the distinction between credential and skill. In the days when college was just finishing school for men of a particular class, there was a lot less confusion. I’ll confess to being a conservative sympathizer in certain domains, but I don’t pine for those days. They were shitty. Nevertheless, there was a very real recognition that reading history didn’t make a man fit to be a banker; it made a man clubbable, and then he learned to be a banker. But I propose to you that if Edward Snowden had a BA in English and Creative Writing from Oberlin College and went on to become a high-paid analyst at a defense contractor, no one would say boo about it, even though he would be in a practical sense no more qualified, and hell, probably less so, than any randomly selected dropout blogger. Guys, I know whereof I speak.

What about a degree in visual arts and documentary filmmaking—here I will reveal my conservative sympathies and laugh that such things exist—qualifies a person to judge, one way or other, the professional and vocational qualifications of a person to be a data systems/IT guy? Did you even set up your own home WiFi? Was Edward Snowden a qualified employee? I don’t know, but the dispositive evidence one way or other has nothing to do with whether or not he got into Phi Beta Kappa. The sheer de haut en bas snobbery of it is pretty astonishing, especially as it comes from the sort of technocratic centrists and liberals for whom class distinction is supposed to evaporate in the upward movement of social progress. Hey, I think the IT guy who fixes my copier who probably has a 2-year degree from somewhere makes more money than I do, but you know what, I’m just a manager, whereas he has skills.

No Homo Economicus

Conspiracy and the Occult, Economy, Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and Politics

As a rule, I’m suspicious of economic explanations, because I regard economics as a fraudulent pseudoscience, although in my more charitable moments, I allow that it might just be a kind of Becherian proto-science, a vast expanse of arithmetical phlogiston that our descendant generations will regard as very nearly quaint. The civic discourse of the present era is completely dominated by economics; young pundits with degrees in philosophy begin to be taken seriously only when they start dropping its jargony solecisms into their op-eds. Economics actually claims to be both a behavioral science and a physical one, even though it appears to believe that its natural laws derive from the word problems at the back of the book than vice versa, and anyway it has a record of near total failure at figuring out why things actually happened or predicting if and when they will happen again. All that said, I’m going to propose a sort of economic explanation for the fact that the government just can’t stop spying on us.

I think we need to see programs like the NSA’s immense and unanswerable but also totally wasteful and unproductive spying program as a form of rent-seeking. That isn’t to say that it isn’t also weird, evil, sinister, and creepily totalitarian, and it isn’t necessarily to claim that it’s a sign of gross incompetence either. For instance: rent-seeking investment banks are very good at what they do, which is balling up other people’s money, auctioning it off, and charging everyone for the privilege of having someone else direct their losses. They are useless, unproductive, and destructive, and they can seem incompetent if you take as their task the purported reason for such institutions to exist, which is to generate wealth for their clients while directing their clients’ wealth toward investment in productive enterprise, but if you understand them for what they actually are, understand that the purpose of Goldman Sachs is to rob people to grow Goldman Sachs, then their incompetence begins to seem a little more like a form of genius.

Well, the surveillance state is at its root—and this isn’t to discount all of its other more nefarious acts and ends, but simply to regard them as symptomatic rather than causal—an ongoing argument for its own existence, a self-replicating machine whose only real purpose is itself. What on earth will the government do with all this data? Well, it will hire more people and discover that this particular dataset is broad but shallow which will necessitate gathering billions more bytes which will continue to have precisely the same effect of necessitating more, more, and more until, hopefully, one day the machines become actually intelligent and decide to devote their considerable processing power to something more necessary, like playing chess or writing metrical poetry.

Some of us nerds recognize it: information is still sufficiently scarce and finite to function as a kind of currency, and the spies are just taking a commission at every point of exchange, but at least when VISA does it with the old money some satisfied customer may walk away from some satisfied merchant. You might consider the NSA program, and others like it, as a kind of information tax without benefits—it’s an absolute requirement, universal and un-appealable, but it doesn’t even cold patch a pothole on the information superhighway. When Google maps your brain into a computer you might get a coupon out of it, some provision of service in exchange. In the meantime, while I believe that we should fight and protest these intrusions on our privacy and personhood, I also come down on the vaguely optimistic side; just as JP Morgan has no idea what to do with its billions other than make more billions, I don’t think the government can do much with this titanic volume of information but add to it. It is morally but not practically outrageous; it’s an exercise of mere accumulation, which isn’t a sign of malevolence so much as of a chronic and probably terminal decadence.

You Can’t Spell Revenue By Principal Operations Without Venal

Culture, Economy, Education, Plus ça change motherfuckers

Diane Ravitch, now an indefatigable opponent of the weirdly popular idea that the proper formative model for The Children, Who Are the Future is a combination of factory feedlot and highway weigh station, finds the Washington Post lambasting the State of Texas–yes, that Texas–for “reduc[ing] the number of end-of-course exams required for a diploma and loosen[ing] the required courses for graduation.” Needless to say, the Chinese (“increased international competition”) make an appearance, as does the, uh, the, uh, the spurious notion that “an auto technician or sheet-metal worker” needs something called Algebra II. The fact that the Post editorial board uses the term “auto technician” suggests a gang of 24-month BMW leaseholders who haven’t exactly been frequenting the local Meineke for the $29.99 fluids brakes & rotation special, but, you know, whatever. Look, we all know that these people are assholes, but Ravitch is wrong to suppose that they also don’t know what they’re talking about. She’s kinder than I am. Unfortunately Diane, they’re just assholes.

Now I am an agèd 32, an icy planetoid careening through the scattered disk of the Millennial Generation, far, far from the warm, YOLO star at its core, and I can’t remember whether I ever took Algebra II, or if it had anything to do with getting a job. I do, on the other hand, know a thing or two about financial accounting and corporate finance. Also, I have an internet connection, and therefore access to the Washington Post Company’s Investor Relations Page and Annual Report. So lemme first lay something graphical down upon ye:

That is to say that 55% of their gross receipts come from boondoggling students. But the Post is a business, and you don’t measure a business by revenues alone. You gotta look at income, and the nice folks at Investor Relations are kind enough to provide revenue and income by operating segment, and right now, the picture of the Education segment resembles a particularly terrifying Bosch. In 2010, the segment booked $360 million in operational income. In 2011, it dropped to $96 million.

In 2012, it booked a $105 million loss.

Damn, girlfriend, don’t take my word for it. What’s management got to say?

Education Division. Education division revenue in 2012 totaled $2,196.5 million, a 9% decline from $2,404.5 million in 2011. Excluding revenue from acquired businesses, education division revenue declined 10% in 2012. Kaplan reported an operating loss of $105.4 million for 2012, compared to operating income of $96.3 million in 2011. Kaplan’s 2012 operating results were adversely impacted by a significant decline in KHE results; a $111.6 million noncash goodwill and other long-lived assets impairment charge related to KTP; and $45.2 million in restructuring costs. These were offset by improved results at KTP and Kaplan International.

In response to student demand levels, Kaplan has formulated and implemented restructuring plans at its various businesses that have resulted in significant costs in 2012 and 2011, with the objective of establishing lower cost levels in future periods. Across all businesses, restructuring costs totaled $45.2 million in 2012 and $28.9 million in 2011. Kaplan currently expects to incur approximately $25 million in additional restructuring costs in 2013 at KHE and Kaplan International in conjunction with completing these restructuring plans. Kaplan may also incur additional restructuring charges in 2013 as the Company continues to evaluate its cost structure.

When a company starts to “incur additional restructuring charges” as it “continues to evaluate its cost structure,” you can be reasonably sure that, in the poetical language of MBAs everywhere, their Revenue Model Is Fucked. Pace WalMart and its giant un-staffed aisles of rotting meat, you cannot make profit on cost cutting and labor arbitrage alone. At some point, you have to sell shit that people want to buy at a price somewhat greater than the expense of actually putting it on the shelves. But this is the sort of fundamental logic of the marketplace that the parishoners understand even as the high priests of late capitalism keep yammering about miracles from their corner pulpits. Every braid shop in DC gets this basic equation, with or without Algebra II. Meanwhile, the WaPo group is booking $100 million dollar goodwill impairment expenses for one subdivision of its Education segment. Oh, I guess that means they have been completely misrepresenting their asset base too, huh. You mean to tell me that KTP (Kaplan Test Prep) doesn’t actually have hundreds of millions in goodwill? Like I said, not idiots. Just assholes.

Well, we’ve wandered far enough afield. The Washington Post, the newspaper, is a loss leader for the Washington Post, the company; damn, they ought to just reorganize it as a marketing division, eliminate sales and ad revenue altogether, and deduct the whole thing as a business expense. And so, anytime you see the Post editorializing about something that directly affects the core businesses (roughly speaking, training scams and cable TV), you should ask, cui bono? Which roughly translates as, NO, FUCK YOU!

You see, when even Texas recognizes that even these United States are still filled with “auto technicians” and welders and waitrons and janitors and a hundred million other mooks just trying to work a job and pay the rent and afford a beer and the WaPo’s cable box at the end of the day, well, that’s a lot less need for test prep; it’s a lot fewer kids getting shoveled into pointless 2-year Kaplan Higher Ed (KHE) ~~pogroms~~ programs in dental veterinary respiratory therapeutic office support. The thing about “rigorous” curricula and expensive testing is that it provides a busted gas cap through which rent-seeking corporations can siphon more money out of the unsuspecting public.

I mean, when you think about it, schooling is actually a pretty low-rent activity, right? Considered at its most fundamental level. You build a center-courtyard building with a bunch of identical rooms. You buy some books. You divide everyone up by age and you hire 1 staff person per 15-20 kids to talk all day. Whatever your opinions on the particular merits of universal education, this is a remarkably efficient delivery of an effectively universal service. You hire some janitors and some cafeteria ladies and maybe a coach, and then the only annual service contract you’ve got to worry about are the nice guys who fix the boilers. YO, HOW’S A DIVERSIFIED EDUCATION AND MEDIA COMPANY SUPPOSED TO GET ITS NUT UP IN THAT?

Well, what you do is you get everyone all hepped up about the devilish Chinese eating our kids’ lunch, and you add a little taste of cryptoracism about achievement gaps and such, and you get politicians and schoolboards and affiliated business roundtables and chambers of commerce to insist that without seventeen different kinds of tests, all of them proprietary, all of them supported by teacher training (fee for service) and software packages (licensing, fees, service, updates) and, for the rich kids, more test prep (fee for service) outside of school, ad inf., well, like we said, CHINA! Look out!

So basically, the guys at the Washington Post, well, they don’t know enough higher order math to go make money at their own investment firms. You gotta know, like, calculus. But they do know that selling Algebra II is one small step toward making back that $100 million loss.

A Fine Romance

Culture, Economy, Media, The Life of the Mind

In our society, anxious self-scrutiny (not to be confused with critical self-examination) not only serves to regulate information signaled to others and to interpret signals received; it also establishes an ironic distance from the deadly routine of daily life. On the one hand, the degradation of work makes skill and competence increasingly irrelevant to material success and thus encourages the presentation of the self as a commodity; on the other hand, it discourages commitment to the job and drives people as the only alternative to boredom and despair, to view work with self-critical detachment. When jobs consist of little more than meaningless motions, and when social routines, formerly dignified as ritual, degenerate into role playing, the work—whether he toils on an assembly line or holds down high-paying job in a large bureaucracy, seeks to escape from the resulting sense of inauthenticity by creating an ironic distance from his daily routine. He attempts to transform role playing into a symbolic elevation of daily life.

-Christopher Lasch, from The Culture of Narcissism

Early in The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch says that Homo capitalus is represented by Robinson Crusoe, in his senescence by Moll Flanders. I like the formulation, even if it implies an ultimate penitence that seems unlikely. Maybe Roxana would be more apropos. The point is plain enough. Both characters are self-reliant, but the former makes while the latter is merely on the make. Well, then again, Crusoe had a slave. Take it away, J.M. Coetzee. All metaphors collapse under the burden of specificity. I think that this one, broadly taken, stands.

Lasch is a great crank. Contempt is the natural pairing for erudition, like a good Sauternes and foie gras. I hold his clunky Freudianism against him because I despise psychology as the pseudoscience of the very “anxious self-scrutiny” that Lasch condemns, but Lasch behaves more like a juge d’instruction than a shrink, and his diagnoses shade into the prosecutorial. If occasionally absent-minded, wandering off to land gratuitous roundhouses on the soft body of “radical lesbianism” and other such mythological pillowcases, his central thesis is sound: bourgeois society is the author of the very things it so “readily” subjects to “moralistic inflation.”

That is to say that in establishing an “etiology” and a taxonomy of contemporary narcissism, Lasch is careful (and indefatigable) in noting that all these narcissistic habits and attitudes are the natural outgrowths and ends of the habits and attitudes of bourgeois capitalism. You might say that’s obvious, and, well, uh, okay. That’s true. No one proposes that hook-up culture or texting or Urban Outfitters or whatever the New York Times and National Review are on about emerged, causa sui, out of the void, although you do find some people, especially on the National Review side of the thumb-worn coin, treating The Sixties like just such a Titan, first god from whom all the rest of our dire modern principalities declined.

Narcissism came out in ’78. Guys, The Free People Store opened in Philly in ’70. Lasch died in ’94. Well, people had been cybersexing each other on IRC since the late 80s. I started pic swapping on mIRC in the late middle 90s, just a few years after Lasch’s demise. To get back to the point of the prior paragraph, most modern moralizers acknowledge in an abstract way that the unspeakable vices of the youth and The Children, Who Are Our Future have history, lineage, and heredity, but they still approach the advent of Facebook with a google-eyed and hilariously un-self-realized crackpot Marxism. Everything represents a Definitive Break With The Past.

Social Networking, the latest broad technological enabler of both cultural narcissism and narcissistic moral peacocking about cultural narcissism is really too large and amorphous for the worriers to land any convincing blows. Newspapers hate bloggers and magazines whine about Twitter, although no one is really sure if these are social networks or New Media Platforms or micro-versions of mini-magazines. Lately, the pearl-clutching has moved on to the universal self-documentarianism of Instragramming and photo sharing in general, the pervasive criticism being that the succeeding generations of Our Society have become little more than gross exhibitionists and voyeurs.

I’m not sure who’s guiltier of anxious self-scrutiny, the Instagrammers or their discontents. There is something pitiable about a system of self-display whose single desirable outcome is approval. Oh, You Follow Me, You Really Follow Me. Look on my works, ye mighty, and LIKE. On the other hand, what is crasser, what could be more tawdry, than a bunch of adults gazing in priestly disapproval at the crypto-nubile attention-seeking of the young people who stand to inherit this wrecked, violent, wonder-less civilization.

The answer is right now composing a trend piece for the Times “Thursday Styles.” Having denied a couple of generations now any but the narrowest alleyway to the material heights that represent the sole remaining source of transcendence and object of veneration, shall we now complain that young people publicly style their lives like Vogue spreads? In a country that idolizes the likes of these assholes, will we regret that kids curate their existence in pale imitation thereof? Isn’t there a certain irony in people who write for wide-circulation publications and go on the teevee complaining about voyeurs and exhibitionists?

I am going to ruin the many hours you spent getting that lousy BA and define modernity for you. Modernity is the destruction of old forms combined with the retention of old prejudices. When I hear you complain about your sons and daughters wasting their time with sepia filters and party photos, I have just two questions: how much do you pay for cable, and are you hiring? Oh, are the answers a lot and no, respectively? I figured.

This isn’t to say that there’s anything to celebrate in Snapchat. I thank the internet for any number of successful, mutually pleasant, wholly salutary casual encounters, but even I think the world has made it a minute too easy and an ounce too cheap to show each other pictures of our genitals. But I actually find, amidst the preening and ersatz editorialism of the Instagram et alia generation a kind of social revanchism that I do appreciate. “Oh, it’s a small town. Everyone knows everything about everyone.” One of the worst habits of our society is its gratuitous secrecy, its capacious furtiveness. What I like about Instagram and Facebook and all the rest lies in the refusal to accede to the fussy insistence that, while it may be all right to get drunk at a party, it is wrong, wrong to let your boss know about it. Or your mom.

What bourgeois society valorizes as individuality and liberty is very often little more than a bland, greedy, nasty little sense of possession. It reeks of monetization. It disapproves of sharing. We have even coined the term: over-sharing. By which we mean something very similar to hastily foregoing the possibility of copyright. No, I object. If we can’t have a better world, we can at least keep in touch.

Financeketeers

Economy

How could professional analysts have gotten it so wrong?

Apple’s stock that is. The Times is on it! They have interviewed experts. They found a professor or two. It’s a lotta things! It’s complicated! Some say one thing, and some say a modification of this one thing. Get your tootsie-frootsie ice-ah cream!

Fortunately, I am here to uh-splain it all for you. Here is what happened. Gather round. There was once a young man named Fredrich Maynard Krugman. He got an undergraduate degree in history with a minor in sociology, and then he got into Wharton or some shit. In pursuit of his MBA, he took a couple of finance courses. The first one taught him how to value bonds and equities, and the second one taught him how to figure out firm valuations based on the partial capital structure information in the word problems at the end of the chapter. Also, he took a statistics class; it didn’t really stick, but he does vaguely recall what an adjusted R-squared means, and Professor N. Viswanathan was nice enough to show everyone that you could just use the Slope function in Excel when you didn’t want all that ANOVA bullshit that you don’t understand anyway.

So he graduates. Now, he doesn’t have a background in applied math or anything, so he gets a job as what the New York Times calls “a professional analyst.” And after a couple of weeks on the job, his boss comes over, and he’s like, “What the fuck is this?” It’s Fred’s analysis of Apple’s stock, and it says, with charming earnestness, that the stock is overvalued at one gatrizillion kroner per share.

Fred explains that he just took Apple’s recent Earnings Per Share divided by a growth rate derived from the firm’s capital structure model and both its own historic stock beta as well as the historic betas of similar firms and competitors, and then he added the Net Present Value of Future Growth Opportunities, which he carefully figured after diligently calling some industry insiders plus an old frat bro of his who actually works in product development at Apple—nothing untoward, just to get a feel for what might be in the pipeline . . . and at this point, his boss is like, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Fred says that Apple has followed the classic tech company trajectory; it’s still a big valuable firm, but it’s getting awfully blue-chippy, producing popular products for a pretty mature market, unlikely at this point to get much bigger or grow much faster . . . I mean, how much bigger could it possibly get?

Fred’s boss is like, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

He then explains that the job of analysts is to predict that popular firms are worth tons of money until such time as that analysis proves wrong. So you can put away your little NPVGO model, you fucking nerd. No one can predict the market anyway. Don’t you know anything? Just follow the momentum. What’s the trend? Who cares what the company is doing? Just mention something about the earnings report. What are you doing playing with all that SAS shit, anyway? What are you, some kind of engineer? Pick better fonts. Get invited on Bloomberg. And for fuck’s sake, is that Jos. A. Bank? Christ.

The Meaning of the Word, Reform, in the Political Discourse of a An Early Post-Late-Capital Society

Economy, Poetry

It is, I think, the unborn sense that through
some demiurgic Will-to-Being all
our right intents can just meet up and do
an imitation of a shopping mall.
Is it convenient? Does it have enough
free parking for giant cars we bought to fill
with self-entitled kids and useless stuff
that we forget until the VISA bill
arrives? Well, we don’t mind; at least we get
the miles, our purchase transubstantiated—
unaffordable? Yes. And yet
we think it might be renegotiated,
our debts forgiven, household assets free
by act of god or luck at lottery.