G as in Good H as in Happy

The Palace of Forgetting

Economics is spreading its investigation to culture and psychology. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution calls "delusion" the secret to a good marriage. This genially flip description is not fair nor accurate in weighting the importance of this information.

Framing is crucial to our neurological, ethical, and practical evaluation of events. Re-framing is something that coaches and other sensible consultants know will neutralize or transform even bitterly troublesome events nagging in the memory. And thus affecting the future.

Accomplished rather technically, it is an invaluable secret to healthy forgiveness and perspective, demonstrated in a political context by Jay Rosen's description of the time-frame for reporting news events. It is as simple as this. Anyone who wants to know exactly how this is done can e-mail The Chez at good (underscore) and (underscore) happy "at" yahoo-dot-com.

Life is too short to be preoccupied with detritus orbiting the mind.

Update on Reliable Print Publication

Update on a distant island in the MSM:

Martha's batting 2 out of 2 for June, the shredded veggie burger with yoghurt-lime sauce was a test-recipe for breakfast here at The Chez, and it's Another G. T. Don't'cha love magazines that actually serve the reader? Don't claim to know more than they do?  Don't slur anyone? Just add value to life?

Us, too.

Report concluded: Don't bother with the shrimp&cod burgers. But do try the strawberry cake with peaches instead. Lots of peaches. :)

Wealth of Our Little Empire

May 23, 2005

Global Equity Strategies takes time off from bearish investment advice, and provides a market strategy for happiness, noting that the great worth of happiness is the driver for Adam Smith's economics. The founding market economist concluded that for true wealth of nations and persons, "wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility," for which there is always imminent danger that a man will "[sacrifice] a real tranquillity that is at all times in his power" -- "real tranquillity" consisting of "humble security and contentment." *

In fact, the linked power of those ideas brightens our morning and suggests a focus for the week. Humility. Security. Contentment. We cannot confect them. In fact, the ambitious pursuit of humility is a risible and self-contradictory exercise. But we can notice a beautiful thing as it manifests, on the way to the post office, in the next cubicle, or watching those we love, unobtrusively at home. We take note of them, appreciate and thereby have a part, filled with gratitude.

Cognitive, behavioral, intentional ways to happiness. Interweave the list of suggestions in a context set by the virtues, and it's a sure bet, a bull market. Buy low, sell never.

Via Jane Galt.

*(quoted in Adam Smith, Behavioural Economist by Ashraf et al (2004) from the Theory of Moral Sentiments).

Update:
Harvested from an e-mail conversation with Mangan's Miscellany's eponymous proprietor  -- our web of connections is wealth, and he's shown himself interested in these things -- as to the value of little lists like the one here.

Life doesn't come prepackaged, it's like something a little shaky from Ikea in pieces with sometimes a screw missing. But little by little one puts the bookcase together, grows a rose on the patio, is given a vase for a birthday, reads a book that she then returns to the shelf -- and looks up one evening and, behold, there is a breathtaking still-life framed in flickering lamplight. And it is enough.

Coming to Our Senses...

...can mean just that. John Maeda is an exemplary blogger in our estimation for primarily that reason. Close attention to the senses in the moment, and a willingness to let emergence and iteration determine the next thing. We're not alone. He is sought after.

Today he considers the difference between seeing and hearing, the continuous flow of the latter contrasted with the natural and reflexive "blink"-editing by the eye.

We ourselves often think with amazement about the division of time into days. The requirement that animals like ourselves sleep every 24 hours, the perceptual new beginning that springs from that, the re-set of the timer, is miniaturized into the blink. 

Also, his senses and his tasks equal enlightenment.

Go to the dump.
Do not pass go.
Move directly to gratitude.

There is Such a Thing...

...as irony-challenged. It may be the neurology.

Via The Corner

So before you witticize, run a test. Otherwise it's like the color-blind and traffic lights. A good deal of collision comin' on.

Soon they'll have their own parking spaces. And the rest of us, trudging across the asphalt, will have puh-lenty to say about that.

Who Knew? They Still Have Colonies?

The London Times explores the eagerness to participate in the EU vote of "the impressive French portfolio of dominions around the globe from the Pacific to the Amazon jungle." A whiff of White Man's Burden wafts into the description, full of color and astonishment. Cultures collide.

Copies of the EU constitution, shipped at considerable expense on Air France from Paris, and then by helicopter and canoe up the river from Cayenne, the distant capital, will come in handy for wrapping tapir meat and lighting fires.

Via The Corner

Unfortunately, there may be comprehension issues no matter how good their reading French.

The Color of "Redneck"

May 22, 2005

Steve Sailer questions Thomas Sowell's recent anthropological construct, "Black Rednecks," by which "Sowell attributes much in current black culture to the Scotch-Irish, such as a tendency to react tumultuously to being 'dissed.' " That is, he links certain unproductive excesses in both cultures that, compared to Puritans and Quakers, were and are relatively honor-preoccupied and brawl-prone.

Much as we like to look hard at our own low-rent-Celt heritage, this didn't ring true for us, either, admirers of Sowell as we are, when we read his recent essay in the Wall Street Journal.

Sailer thinks Sowell is overlooking more plausible iterations in African-American contexts of the African component, partly because the Scotch-Irish had the least interaction with and influence on historic African Americans. Frankly, the Scotch-Irish were socially and economically too depressed to own slaves, too class-obsessed to work or live with former slaves. For one thing, the northern Alabama branch of the Chez Dilys clan report that in the very early 20th century those Caucasian farm children never saw an African American, so far was that poor hard-scrabble territory from a slave-holding legacy.

Here's the flavor of Sailer's quick anthropological tour based on geography and culture.

Slaves tended to be owned mostly by big slave-owners on the tobacco and cotton plantations of the Southern lowlands. The planters were often descended from the second sons of minor aristocrats in southern England—just as poor whites in the lowland South often originated among the servant and farm worker classes of southern England.

... Outside of the tropics, you have to be the Emperor of China or the equivalent to be able to afford a huge number of wives, along with the eunuch guards and all the other expensive rigmarole that go along with maintaining a harem. But, in systems of tropical agriculture where land was traditionally cheap and most of the work is weeding, which women can do as well as men—as opposed to manhandling draft animals for plowing—you sometimes see handsome men with 50 or more wives.

Sailer offers interesting and unflinching analysis of important social phenomena.  Here's a rueful and irresistible aside in another Sailer essay about the politics of "affordable family formation:"

Despite the explanatory power of the Dirt Gap and the Mortgage Gap, these concepts have not been widely discussed.

The problem limiting their popularity may be that they are too objective, too morally neutral.

What people want to hear instead are explanations for why they, personally, are ethically and culturally better than their enemies.

Now there's a dispiriting party-neutral truth.

We're also reading Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, a profound exploration of the dissolution of art, thought, and truth-telling  that afflicted public, and thus private, life in the Soviet empire. This has heightened our own sensitivity to the instinctive pleasure in clear thinking, in refining systems of explanation, regardless of where that sharper focus leads. One of the humane strengths of the life of the, dare we say God-given, mind.

As Sailer says, "I just assume that the truth is better for everybody....And, besides, at my age, my memory isn't getting any better, and the truth is a lot easier to remember than lies."

Nothing to Understand Here, Move Along Now

Giving us an opportunity to update an earlier energetic bias-in-media discussion of which we were the head-banging beneficiary, Jay Rosen quotes a review of his recent conversation with Christopher Hitchens on the BBC about the Newsweek Koran story. Hitchens too wonders about the scatter of data along the line.

Without directly endorsing the comment, Hitchens also noted that the American right was convinced that this case was evidence of “a propagandistic agenda on the part of the liberal media” to undermine the American war effort.

But when Rosen interrupted to reject this as part of “an ideologicial agenda to discredit and decertify the press” by the American right, Hitchens replied this way:

I think that a story with such — as we now know — scant basis to it would be much less likely to appear if it made the adminstration look good. I do think that. I can’t tell you how I know it; I read the press with great attention, I think I know when a reporter is slightly nudging me in one direction or another.

Jay declines to share the wonder. However, his genuinely Fine Mind at Work visible in almost every post at PressThink does frame the framing this way:

[The issue] involves the punctuation of events: when do you start the story, and what are the effects of beginning it where you do? 

Unfortunately, this "scope/frame" can as easily, consciously or unconsciously, be manipulated or distorted to edit a predetermined plausibility of effect. But at least a real effort to contextualize could move the discussion to debating the appropriate scope, and surface a lot of relevant, weighable data in the process.

And that's a Good Thing. BTW, thanks, Martha. The strawberry cake in the current issue turned out great, accurate proportions, evidence of careful testing and editing. Though we could cut back on the sugar.

Long Tails Invade the Land of Rocking Chairs

Even if we'd rather read recipes, "the long tail" and "powerlaws" are inescapable. Memes we hear more & more of. Why success builds success, Pareto's predictable imbalance... see comments also on the other side of it:

the value of “solidarity goods” – of reading the same blogs as your friends – reveals a lot about why audiences cluster around a small number of available information/entertainment products.

When talking about media, especially electronic media, the “currency” value of sharing the same media experience at the same time has substantial social and commercial cachet.

Via Virginia Postrel, whose work on "the variety revolution" is related.

Jorge Luis Borges...

..."the other one that things happen to," arrived in Austin in September, 1961.

A readers' Borges is often like a hall of mirrors with tilting floors that cannot be escaped, that is more real than the reassuring reality outside. Here he is, in comfortingly straightforward if kabbalistic mode, on quiet virtue.

THE JUST
A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.
Two workmen playing, in a cafe in the South,
a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a color and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well though it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.

(translated by Alastair Reid, quoted by Chandrahas Choudhury)

Via armavirumque

And here is what at The Chez we venerate as The Passage on The Leopard -- Inferno, I, 32

From each day's dawn to dusk each night a leopard, during the final years of the twelfth century, beheld a few boards, some vertical iron bars, shifting men and women, a thick wall, and perhaps a stone gutter stopped with dry leaves. He did not know, he could not know, that what he longed for was love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing things apart and the wind carrying the scent of a deer. But something in him was smothering and rebelling, and God spoke to him in a dream: "You live and will die in this cage so that a man known to me may look at you a predetermined number of times, and may not forget you, and may put your shape and your symbol in a poem which has its necessary place in the scheme of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem." God, in the dream, illumined the animal's brutishness and he understood the reasons, and accepted his destiny: but when he awoke there was only a dark resignation in him, a valiant ignorance, for the machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of a wild beast.

It pleased Borges to add this gloss:
Years later Dante lay dying in Ravenna, as unjustified and as alone as any other man. In a dream God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and his work; Dante, filled with wonder, knew at last who he was and what he was, and he blessed his bitter sufferings. Tradition has it that, on waking, he felt he had been given - and then had lost - something infinite, something he would not be able to recover, or even to glimpse, for the machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.

--Jorge Luis Borges