Tiago Mata

Even if I was only the ironic twist.

Past and Present

DENVER – Perhaps this year the event acquired a name that at last will stick. The World Financial Crisis? The Great Recession? Why not call it The Long Slump, said Robert Hall, of Stanford University, in his presidential address at the meeting here of the American Economic Association.

A slump describes the time that passes, once a recession begins, before employment returns to its normal level – an average since 1948 of jobs for 95.5 percent of the labor force aged 25 to 54. This slump, which began in the autumn of 2007, is expected to last most of a decade, he said, before the unemployment rate returns to its post-World War II trend. By no means as deep as the Great Depression, it would be almost as long.

The most interesting sessions at the meetings this year were those concerned with what has been learned about the sources of the crisis, and about measures that might be taken to prevent it from happening again. It has become a commonplace that economics had grown overspecialized, that macroeconomists, monetary theorists and finance experts had paid too little attention to each others’ work. That plenty of progress had been made in the borderlands was clear. That no consensus as yet exists about what happened was equally apparent. That “they are working on it” is about all that can be said with certainty.

Interesting, too, was the undercurrent to be found in many conversations of interest in the history of economics itself. History of economic thought – or history of science, if you prefer – is a subject that has all but disappeared in the last thirty years as a topic of major research interest or as a subject of courses in top graduate schools – precisely the period of economic triumphalism.

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O meu pais pensa muito.

Diz-se que o mal da vida pública, e da divida do Estado e do (sempre justificado) pessimismo nacional é o pensamento único. O pensamento único da direita “made in USA” e de conservadorismo fiscal.

Mas há outro, que também diz que é único. O pensamento único da esquerda “produit français” que confunde confronto com critica.

Looking through the MIT’s Media Lab software, hoping to find some clever new web mining/metric tool I came across Personas. You plug your name (or someone else’s) into the website and it produces a colored bar with categories that define your web self (online traces of your name).

Always ready for some self indulgence, I tried my name. Here is what i got in a the first run:

Here is what I got in the second:

A few changes here and there, but a big slice of “online”, another of “education”, and a black dirty little bar of “politics” in the second run. “Sports” somehow comes up too, maybe another Tiago?

I ask because the point of the online exhibit is to suggest puzzlement:

In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

What if one tried the tool on someone unmistakable, whose identity could not be disputed? Someone like Santa Claus. Here is what i got (click to enlarge, but come back for the punchline):

Santa compares rather favorably with the elusive “Tiago Mata”, he is a multifaceted fellow of many colours, He is in equal measure: religious, social, bookish, famous, sportive and musical. Sounds like our man, once a bishop, now a globe trotting, chimney acrobat what sings his way into people’s hearts …and books? The books is the one that I am finding hard to piece in.

In full frontal nerdness, I saw Wall Street (1987) on Saturday and on Sunday Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010).

I remembered Wall Street 87 quite well, I had used the “Greed is Good” clip for a lecture in Amsterdam, but my memory was episodic. I recalled the bar scene, one of the office scenes, colors, gestures and mood. What I had forgotten was how simple the narrative was. Wall Street 87 is black and white, good and evil, the real economy vs the world of finance. Budd Fox (C. Sheen) stands in between, and the story is a personal tale of corruption and redemption, whether we will join those that produce (the workers and their unions) or those that play the zero sum game of insider trading and short sighted profit. What is most remarkable in reviewing Wall Street 87 is how, after a longish study of Budd Fox’s seduction by power and money, the resolution is rushed and clumsy. In a few tight minutes Fox outplays the formidable Gordon Gekko (M. Douglas), and in less minutes still he lands him in jail. Oliver Stone may not have cared for closure, a annoying necessity of narrative. Instead he leaves his audience with the lasting taste of moral corruption.

And morality seems to be, in more confused terms, the driver of Wall Street 2010 edition. The new movie is more interesting because it is more revealing. It reveals what Oliver Stone does not know. He shows no love for any of his characters. The youthful male protagonist, Jake Moore (S. LaBeouf), is a nice guy, idealist, intelligent, loving, but at the same time cocky, and self-absorbed. The female characters as in Wall Street 87, are circumstantial and do not drive the narrative. And then Gekko (M. Douglas) and Bretton James (J. Brolin) stand as the villains, even if they are never despicably evil. Stone’s only expressed, and expressive love is for New York. Vistas of the City punctuate the text, with majesty and pride. Stone doesn’t know what to feel about the business that built NYC. While in 87 he could explain the dealings of the merger and acquisitions generation, the new money makers of Wall Street are harder to illuminate. When something needs explaining, characters suddenly talk faster, and one gets compositions of people crunching numbers in multiple computer screens and lots of generic computer animations, charts and ciphers. The audience gets a sense of bankers with much wealth, expensive toys, and macho egos, but no hook to hang whys and hows. If the story is not the finance, it could be the human tale… but there too certainties are fickle. Unlike in 87, there is no strong filial bond. Parents are no better than sons, notably Moore’s mother (S. Sarandon). Mentors are depressive or proud.

What then is the resolution of this complex yarn and for our economic crisis? Maybe the webpage activism of the female protagonist (C. Mulligan) or a star wars commitment to alternative energies? To me both felt like a caricature, and hence both felt untrue. What ultimately closes the story is an act of accounting. When money that is due somehow finds itself into the entitled hands, then all of a sudden there is peace. Blood, morality and money are parallel flows. The deceivers and the murderers must be poor, the just must be rich. Finally, the just must invest their (monetary) wealth into the purest of the pure, the child, the unborn, who might understand what we don’t, be what we have not been.

For Stone there is nothing out there to save us. We are all bad, it is all crap. What is good is yet to be born and invented. An ironic and sad case for speculation.

Can one compare comedy? What about economic comedy (if there is such a thing)?

Lapsus: Dati confond "inflation" et… "fellation"
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American comedy plays on character and identity, the boring economist, the clueless anchor, misplaced assumptions. French comedy plays on language and monetary sensuality.

The day Saramago died. Once I heard that Saramago had died my first gesture was to look at Publico‘s webpage. Advisedly the newspaper had prepared a warm and informed text on his life and work. It was old news that he was ill. But before one could enjoy the text that big news business offered free, there was an obstacle to conquer.

A bank ad with an ambiguously aged thin man surfing with an iphone, obscured the screen, covering even Saramago’s name, although not his death. The surfer with an iphone might appear a perverse version of magical realism but it had nothing of Saramago’s sentimental and Luddite imagination. Saramago had to die but did we have to bury him?

Over the last year I have taught briefly about the origins of modern finance, a topic that has fascinated Edinburgh sociologists, and magazine writers. In one of the courses I used excerpts from the recent book by Justin Fox, The Myth of the Rational Market. What surprised and pleased me in this book was the balance between the academic and the practitioner in making sense of the academization of finance, something that Donald MacKenzie does well, as does Peter Bernstein before anyone else. Fox starts with Irving Fisher and for his cast of characters the book is a history of economics.

Looking at the references, not many since this is a popular book, I could not find any many mentions of historians of economics, which worried me more than it bothered me. I emailed J. F. about it and he replied:

I read Ingrao and Israel’s ‘Invisible Hand’ (and I’m pretty sure I cited it in the endnotes), a few articles by E. Roy Weintraub, parts of Mirowski’s books and parts of economic histories/biographies of Jevons, Marshall, Hayek and others. But I’ve got to say I was often frustrated with these works; they would usually start off interesting but then veer off in directions that I didn’t see as important.

This, I think, is rather good. Even though there are no tips of the hat to us historians of economics in the preface or anywhere else, even though we go off on tangents that don’t seem to interest the journalist and the wider public, we are read, we are considered.