Month: June 2014

The end of the rainbow: Eyes Wide Shut analysis

Eyes Wide Shut is probably my favorite film, but it didn’t acquire this distinction until quite a long time after I had first watched it. A second viewing was followed by the nuances of the film creeping up in my mind and demanding a share of my daydreaming. When I watched it a third time, and the rest was history.

I am in some pretty good company – Stanley Kubrick considered it to be his greatest contribution to the art of cinema. Before the film was released, Kubrick died, leaving this enigmatic film for viewers to ponder without its creator to chime in. But the film was not a sudden act of inspiration that came to the auteur, but a culmination of decades of meditation and influence that provided Kubrick with a capstone that ultimately summed up his vision as a filmmaker. Kubrick had been envisioning a film about sexual relations since early in his career, and upon reading the early 20th century novella Dream Story, he decided to buy the rights to it in 1971. For almost 30 years Kubrick held the rights, and the ideas that were to become his final masterpiece took shape throughout that time.

Kubrick’s exploration of the dream world of the film that the audience is part of is ultimately manifested in Eyes Wide Shut. The diegesis of Kubrick is a dream in which the audience is invited to take part in. Kubrick stated early in his career,

The representation of reality has no bite. It does not transcend. Nowadays I am more interested in taking up a fantastic and improbable story…. I always enjoyed representing a slightly surreal situation in a realistic way. I have always had a penchant for fairy-tales, myths and magical stories. They seem to me to come closer to our present-day experience of reality than realistic stories, which are basically just as stylized.

To this end, Kubrick’s films walk the line between the dream and the reality even within his films. Mixture of the diegetic and non-diegetic sounds are a tool used throughout his filmography, at least since 1957’s Paths of Glory, over four decades before his final film. We hear a non-diegetic percussion piece when the soldiers are sent into No Man’s Land from the trench. Later, when being executed, a percussion piece plays again, only this time, we learn that the drummers are in the reality of the film. In A Clockwork Orange, the main character Alex is both the main character and the narrator; he is both the gaze and the object of the gaze. By walking this line, Kubrick recognizes that dream-state of film that always exists in the medium whether creators intend or address it or not. Films are necessarily believable and internally consistent absurdities that echo the mental filtering of reality. In a film, characters are funnier than reality; the passing of time is more perfect than reality. This is because our gaze is restricted to the narrative that is relevant to the auteur’s vision. In real life, our idea and memories of our friends are funnier than reality. Our idea of Christmastime is more wonderful and cozy than can be. Our real life gaze conserves details by only cataloging those details that are relevant to our personal narrative.

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Armed civil disobedience and the patriot movement

I wrote a column this week over at TheDC about the Las Vegas shooters, and how, after the media has gone to great pains to trump up any connection between spree killers and the right, they’ve finally got one that seems to fit the profile:

For Sunday morning’s shooting in Las Vegas, in which Jerad and Amanda Miller allegedly shot two police officers and a bystander before the latter took both of their lives, no such dissembling is required. We appear to have on our hands a pair of bona fide right-wing terrorists — cosplaying Cliven Bundy supporters, Mickey and Mallory with a head full of meth and Alex Jones. Amanda Miller even claimed on her Facebook that she worked for Hobby Lobby. They’re just perfect.

Read the whole thing, it goes into some other cases and notes another shooting with a Gadsden motif. Dishonest movement bloggers like the neocon Jim Hoft react to this news by sticking their fingers in their ears and going ‘nyah nyah he was a socialist.’ But in this case, at least, it doesn’t appear that way.

One of the more interesting wrinkles in the story is their apparent support for the III Percenters — so named because that is supposedly the percentage of American colonists who took up arms against the crown. We can’t necessarily infer the significance of the connection from the fact that they ‘liked’ them on Facebook — I do too, for one thing — but they were supposedly Adam Kokesh fans too, and made it down to Cliven Bundy’s ranch, so there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that they’ve taken up significant parts of III Percenter ideology.

Who are the III Percenters? Well, have a look at this speech in Connecticut by the man who created it, Mike Vanderboegh:

I’m fascinated by Vanderboegh, for a lot of reasons. He broke the Fast and Furious scandal to Sharyl Attkisson and introduced her to the whistleblowers, for one thing. For another, when he speaks, he says very radical things, but doesn’t come across as hateful or crazy, unlike, say Adam Kokesh’s bizarre libertarian headspace in which killing cops is implicitly an act of self-defense. For what it’s worth, it’s also hard to see him abide the Millers’ fanboy bullshit; the far right is unbecoming when clothed in V for Vendetta slogans and Batman haberdashery. This isn’t about fame, or martyrdom, or the new world order, or any of that. It’s about letting those in government know that their is a limit to what the armed populace will take lying down, telling them, in the hope that it will make them change their minds, that “if you try to take our firearms, we will kill you.”

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Filling in the incentive void of democracy

It’s clear that democratization is not the panacea for the problems of developing countries. Elected leaders even lack some of the incentives for good leadership that unelected leaders have, since their terms are limited and their rule is a short saga in the history books. Problems that demand solutions that exceed the term of the elected executive can easily be ignored. Sudanese-born telecommunications billionaire Mo Ibrahim seems to have have a solution to this: his own Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. An African himself, it is easy to see that Ibrahim wants to to see his continent prosper. For maximum impact, he has made a monetary surgical strike: paying the leaders themselves to actually care about their country’s prosperity and future. A generous sum, $5 million US plus a $200,000 US yearly payment, is awarded to leaders of African nations who have recently left office, and who:

  • Have developed their countries, lifted people out of poverty and paved the way for sustainable and equitable prosperity
  • Are exceptional role models for the continent
  • Ensure that Africa continues to benefit from the experience and expertise of exceptional leaders when they leave national office, by enabling them to continue in other public roles on the continent

All of these criteria are apparently geared towards incentivizing leadership that is focused on the good to come after the statesman leaves office. Kicking the can down the road, which is de rigeur for elected officials, is no longer possible with the independent oversight of the Ibrahim Foundation. Politicians normally serve the interests of their parties or themselves. In poor countries governments are at their most predatory, being, as Mark Lutter pointed out, the major culprit behind third world squalor. Spinning, rhetoric, and political grandstanding, which work on the voting public, presumably do not work for the award committee of the Ibrahim Foundation, which is entrusted with handling millions upon millions of dollars.

What exactly is the subtext of this award? It is that political systems, on their own, are not built to act in the interest of the nations that they control. The much vaunted democratic political system has not brought African nations to the promised land. So why does the Foundation require that leaders who receive the award to be democratically elected? To the naive, this might be seen as an encouragement of democratic leadership, which is certainly a better alternative to dictatorship. I would guess that Ibrahim also wants to in fact fix democracy and all its misplaced incentives, having the requirement of a democratic election in order pinpoint these problems, and using his wealth to tip the scales from favoring government to favoring society.

How private cities can help the poor

A piece on private cities I wrote was published today in the Freeman. This sentence captures the idea, perhaps the most unappreciated idea in economics:

Proprietary communities offer a solution to a host of problems commonly assumed to justify government intervention. Private property internalizes externalities. Proprietary communities take advantage of that fact by creating private property over land spaces traditionally thought of as public domain. They work by creating a residual claimant in the provision of public goods. That is, proprietors keep as income the rents collected through leases after costs are deducted.

Here’s another important point:

An additional advantage of private cities is that they incentivize institutional change. Institutional change is rare because of the logic of collective action. While the gains outweigh the costs of protecting private property rights, the gains are dispersed and the costs are concentrated. Those benefiting from such change have an incentive to free-ride, letting others agitate for the change.

Poor countries are poor because their governments are predatory. Proprietary communities concentrate the benefits of economic liberalization, increasing the likelihood of success. Honduras is the closest to achieving private cities. About one year ago, they passed a law allowing for ZEDEs (zonas de empleado y desarollo economico). ZEDEs can opt out of Honduran civil and commercial law, bringing in a legal system of their choosing. In order to internalize the gains from such changes, some companies have expressed interest in creating private cities similar to the ones described in my essay.

Orwell identifies ‘neo-reactionaries’ in 1943

A big h/t to Brad Birzer on Facebook, for pointing out this column Orwell wrote for Tribune in 1943:

Reading Michael Roberts’s book on T. E. Hulme, I was reminded once again of the dangerous mistake that the Socialist movement makes in ignoring what one might call the neo-reactionary school of writers. There is a considerable number of these writers: they are intellectually distinguished, they are influential in a quiet way and their criticisms of the Left are much more damaging than anything that issues from the Individualist League or the Conservative Central Office.

T. E. Hulme was killed in the last war and left little completed work behind him, but the ideas that he had roughly formulated had great influence, especially on the numerous writers who were grouped round the Criterion in the twenties and thirties. Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Malcolm Muggeridge, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene all probably owe something to him. But more important than the extent of his personal influence is the general intellectual movement to which he belonged, a movement which could fairly be described as the revival of pessimism. Perhaps its best-known living exponent is Marshal Pétain. But the new pessimism has queerer affiliations than that. It links up not only with Catholicism, Conservatism and Fascism, but also with Pacifism (California brand especially), and Anarchism. It is worth noting that T. E. Hulme, the upper-middle-class English Conservative in a bowler hat, was an admirer and to some extent a follower of the Anarcho-Syndicalist, Georges Sorel.

The thing that is common to all these people, whether it is Pétain mournfully preaching ‘the discipline of defeat’, or Sorel denouncing liberalism, or Berdyaev shaking his head over the Russian Revolution, or ‘Beachcomber’ delivering side-kicks at Beveridge in the Express, or Huxley advocating non-resistance behind the guns of the American Fleet, is their refusal to believe that human society can be fundamentally improved. Man is non-perfectible, merely political changes can effect nothing, progress is an illusion. The connexion between this belief and political reaction is, of course, obvious. Other-worldliness is the best alibi a rich man can have. ‘Men cannot be made better by act of Parliament; therefore I may as well go on drawing my dividends.’ No one puts it quite so coarsely as that, but the thought of all these people is along those lines: even of those who, like Michael Roberts and Hulme himself, admit that a little, just a little, improvement in earthly society may be thinkable.

The danger of ignoring the neo-pessimists lies in the fact that up to a point they are right.

Birzer has written a fair bit about Hulme.

Entrepreneurs and the informal economy

Here is a very interesting new paper on the informal economy by Andrei Shleifer and Rafeal la Porta. It is great to see two prominent economists write on the subject. The abstract gives an overview of the first half of the paper:

We establish five facts about the informal economy in developing countries. First, it is huge, reaching about half of the total in the poorest countries. Second, it has extremely low productivity compared to the formal economy: informal firms are typically small, inefficient,  and run by poorly educated entrepreneurs. Third, although avoidance of taxes and regulations is an important reason for informality, the productivity of informal firms is too low for them to thrive in the formal sector. Lowering registration costs neither brings many informal firms into the formal sector, nor unleashes economic growth. Fourth, the informal economy is largely disconnected from the formal economy. Informal firms rarely transition to formality, and continue their existence, often for years or even decades, without much growth or improvement. Fifth, as countries grow and develop, the informal economy eventually shrinks, and the formal economy comes to dominate economic life.

I found the second half more interesting. They critique Hernando de Soto, who argues informal economies are an untapped reservoir of potential constrained by regulations. Because of the need for business permits and government recognition of property they are unable to enter the formal economy. Shleifer and la Porta find that most informal businesses are constrained by finance, not regulation, and fail to enter the formal economy. This suggests the problem is not regulation. Instead, they conclude:

The evidence suggests that an important bottleneck to economic growth is not the supply of  better educated workers; indeed, at least on many observable characteristics the workers are rather  similar in informal and formal firms. Rather, the bottleneck is the supply of educated entrepreneurs –  people who can run productive businesses. These entrepreneurs create and expand modern businesses  with which informal firms, despite all their benefits of avoiding taxes and regulations, simply cannot compete.

This is largely consistent with my experience during the last week in Honduras. I was interviewing with a firm run by an Italian. In his words, the firm imports business models from middle income countries, Mexico and Argentina, to low income countries, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. His success, without substantial changes in economic freedom, suggests the problem is not institutional, but entrepreneurial. I very much look forward to more research along these lines.