4 posts tagged “economics”

So, to make the long story of the last few weeks short: I turned in all my work, including my thesis, and should be cleared to receive my degree whenever all the paperwork is processed.  My incredibly flexible, generous, and supportive thesis committee deserves a big collective gold star for their tolerance of my terrible work habits.  There should be more faculty like them everywhere, and more graduate programs like this one— not because they tolerate poor work habits, of course, but because of general flexibility, utility, and humaneness.  In certain ways I think the formal master's program, which has been widely abandoned in place of the straight Ph.D.-only track, deserves another look: I have no idea how to make the economics of it work, but it's certainly adequate preparation for teaching comp classes (with the certification courses I didn't take) and/or lower-level literature classes, and a lot of people currently slogging through doctorates are going to get jobs doing just that.  If you want to take five years, be poor, go to the MLA, and write a huge M.A. thesis, you certainly can, but you don't have to.  (Of course it's easy for me to say, from my lofty perch in the entering class for a reasonably competitive Ph.D. program, that it would be great if more people just got master's degrees, as long as I get the doctorate.  That's the way to sell it, by God.)  It deserves further thought, that's all.

Anyway: if you haven't hugged someone with a master's degree today, you should.  The degree has been shown to make its holders 22.8% calmer and 3% cuter than they were before they got it, correcting for the effects of the maturation process overall.

The recycling bin is threatening to take over the kitchen.  Trash day is tomorrow!  Time for curbside recycling!  Ah, but every night homeless people with grocery carts come by and take all the bottles and cans to redeem for pocket cash.  I have empathy for them, of course.  But the recycling service needs the money too, and is awesome.  What to do?  Get up at 6:45, run the containers out to the curb, run back and go to sleep?  I am now making the face that best expresses how appetizing that sounds.  And what if the "poachers" take them in the morning anyway?

There are so many things wrong with this dilemma, I don't know where to start.  Fuck it.  I think maybe I'll make a note of when the truck comes this week, see if I can time it next week, and try to get by without Izze sodas in the meantime.  When did I turn into such a yuppie?

I never seem to have time to read the lit reviews anymore; also, they arrive at the house a month late to begin with.  So I was just last night catching up on the newest LRB, beginning with Jeremy Harding's review of Mike Davis's two latest books.  Fascinating, but after a few paragraphs I was beginning to get visions of mid-century Futurology and comic books... which reminded me that this was Mike Davis under discussion.  Gee whiz, the future looks rotten.

On to solutions: the daring observation that affluence makes us unhappy leads reviewer Barry Schwartz to recommend:

It seems to me that if Offer is right, and I think he is, then one can tackle poverty by a significant redistribution of wealth. In the old days, one would have to justify such redistribution morally by arguing that a shilling in a poor person’s pocket produced more utility than the same shilling in a rich person’s pocket. Although redistribution made some better off at the expense of others, the gains outweighed the losses. The beauty of Offer’s analysis is that if you take it to its logical conclusion, it implies that everyone benefits from redistribution. That the poor benefit is obvious; but the rich benefit also because, with less wealth, they are less plagued by choice and less tempted to succumb to loss of self-control. This is a true Pareto efficient policy.

And if you combine redistribution of wealth with policies designed to enhance ‘in-kind’ goods and services rather than GDP, you can make real social progress. Instead of giving people more money, tempting them to run for even longer on the hedonic treadmill, you could provide better schools, better health care, greener parks and more comfortable community centres from which everyone can benefit. Reduce the working week so that people will have more time to spend as citizens, partners and parents. An important step in this direction would be a new system of national accounts – one that measures what really matters to wellbeing, instead of what’s easy to measure. I’m not sure that Offer would endorse any of these proposals, but it seems to me that if he takes his own analysis seriously, he should. And so should the rest of us.

I realize that shrieking "Dis man is a pofessor?!" doesn't do any good in these postlapsarian times, but I haven't omitted the part of the review where he proves this; I have omitted the passages where he blames the iPod for destroying our relationships with friends and family.  Omigod, I have to stop posting on Vox about this and spend some time with my partner!  Affluence is totally ruining me.  Here, let me give all my debt to charity.

I don't buy it.  Without the hedonic treadmill, currently distracted neighbors would become nosy again.  Bereft of the opera, we'd all have to play push-pin.  The clearest solution is to try to get Offer and Mike Davis in the same room and see if they can find any common ground.  I might put "Wozzeck" on the iPod while I take notes.

Read this thread: it's what runs through my head as I wander around the Bay Area.