Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I don't have anything much to say about the impending sequestration, but if that's what you're into, I'll offer some links. We can always start with what a reference work says:  Auburn University  . But it might be more amusing to listen to what Maria Bartiromo, the Money Honey, thinks about it all: Click here . As a reminder, the subjects of discussion are across-the-board budget cuts designed to serve as a Monster (as a recent piece in Slate explained it) to scare both parties into coming to an agreement to do something important but less monstrous. The New York Times has focused on delays in air travel . That reminds me of the good old days. The early 1980s, when a new and jelly bean consuming president faced a job action from traffiuc controllers.  PATCO is long gone , but air traffic controllers may be happy to see themselves in the news in a sympathetic light. Historic resonances aside, some observers just don't see the sequestration 'monster...

Earlier this week I wrote of sequence and causation.  If a city experiences both an increase in the crime rate and an increase in unemployment, what can we infer? If you are of one political persuasion, you will surely infer that the criminals drove businesses out of town, leading to an increase in unemployment. If you are of another political persuasion, you’ll as readily declare that the increase in unemployment made people desperate for money, or angry, or both, and led to the higher level of crime. But that is polemics, not fact finding. Perhaps the truth of the matter is a bit of both, perhaps it is neither. The correlation doesn’t tell you. Here is an anti-Humean corollary. Even if you have a temporal sequence you can’t securely infer causation. It is true that in economics especially a reliable forecasting of event A by event B, is sometimes called “Granger causality,”  after Clive Granger. But Granger causality isn’t old-fashioned, one-pool-ball-hits-another, no...

Another quote from Greekonomics by Vicky Pryce. She paints a vivid picture of what a Greek exit from the euro, the re-creation of the drachma as an instrument of govt policy, would actually mean: "A serious possibility of exit -- and how could it be kept completely secret? -- would lead to a full-scale run on the banks. Clearly any country wishing to exit the eurozone would have to nationalize or take temporary control of the banks and reintroduce controls on the movement of capital. The government would also need to reintroduce stringent border controls to stop people leaving the country with euro notes and coins in their luggage or in their underwear! In countries like Greece, where taking to the streets is part of the political way of life, the population would probably react by attempting to physically remove their savings, breaking into the banks -- and then for good measure attacking Parliament. So in Greece a euro exit could easily end with troops on the streets and...

"And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues- every stately or lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge- pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes hi...

As I wrote here last week, TV finance pundits regularly tells us that price moves are the result of "momentum," or "bargain buying," or "profit taking." Together, these labels are so widely applicable as to drain themselves of any real significance. So let us put themn aside and try some other route forward. On Tuesday, after the market closed, the wire services carried the following, “Morgan Stanley downgrades XYZ.” On Wednesday, nobody could be found to buy XYZ at the previous day’s price. Is that an answer to the question “why”?   This is complicated. One line of argument would contend that the words “Morgan Stanley downgrades XYZ” didn’t tell the market anything the market didn’t already know. The headline allusion is actually to what some researcher paid by Morgan Stanley has said in a 30-page report. That report itself is most likely the compilation of publicly available data: John Smith (as we’ll call the analyst) with admirable industry ...

Much of the world knows that in 1959, two drifters murdered four members of the Clutter family at the Clutters' home in Holcomb, Kansas. The reason much of the world knows this is that Truman Capote fixed upon and immortalized that crime in his 1966 "non-fiction novel," In Cold Blood. The phrase I quoted above is Capote's own. There have long been critics, both of the idea that forcing those two words together in that way makes any sense and of the presumption specifically that Capote was scrupulous about the "non-fiction" part. There is a new source of light on this now, and it comes from an unlikely source. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the late Harold Nye, a one-time agent for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, brought a cache of records on the Clutter investigation home with him at some point. The Journal report is a bit vague on when and the circumstances in which this occurred, but it says the son of Mr. Nye has the papers ...

Ozick has a well-wrought story in the February issue of Harper's. "The Bloodline of the Alkanas" introduces us to a protagonist, Sidney Alkana, who grew up as the daughter of a poet. Sidney didn't in the process become an admirer of poetry as an art. Nor did she come to admire the 19th century poetic diction that her father would employ in certain conversations. In her voice we learn: "I did not understand my father's talk. I sensed only that there was some undeniable connection between these enigmatic outbursts and the mundane truth that we were always worrying about money. I was by then a demanding fifteen, shamed by the way we lived in a three-room flat of the fifth floor of a Bronx walk-up." I'll leave it there, 'lest the IP goblins pursue me. With such a de minimis quotation, I am surely guarded by the shield of "fair use." I like the story in some small part because Ozick dares do something experts routinely warn aga...