Villa Medici, Rome

Built 1544, now the French Academy; old photograph from Archi/Maps.

Categorize Yourself

Drug Overdose Deaths Still Rising

Preliminary data for 2017, from the CDC, shows about 72,000 deaths from drug overdoses nationwide, up more than 6 percent from the year before. As you can see from the graph above, synthetic opioids (mainly Fentanyl) are the main culprit. What struck me about this graph was the big rise in deaths from cocaine and methamphetamine ("psychostimulants"). I thought that was old news, but according to this graph more than 20,000 Americans died from those drugs last year.

We have so many ways to poison ourselves.

Tariffs and American Industry

The latest on Trump's tariffs:

Alcoa, one of the largest American manufacturers of aluminum, is asking the government for relief from tariffs that were supposed to help American aluminum manufacturers.

It turns out that businesses that make aluminum also have to buy things made of aluminum—and those purchases are now more expensive, thanks to Donald Trump's 10 percent tariff on aluminum imports.

Alcoa filed five requests for tariff exemptions with the Commerce Department this week, Bloomberg reports. Three of those requests are for types of aluminum that the company says are not available from American suppliers, and two are for aluminum products that are not produced in sufficient quantity by domestic sources. The Pittsburgh-based company wants exemptions so it can import those products and components from a Canadian subsidiary.

The reason I posted this is not just for the chuckle, but to think a little harder about trade wars. It seems to me that in the short term, Trump's tariffs are sure to be nothing but trouble, because American companies are set up to use parts and raw materials from all over the world. They are globalized, so impediments to the free movement of goods disrupt them. Nor can they magically increase the supply from domestic sources overnight to compensate.

But if there ever was any logic behind economic nationalism, it would have to be a long-term strategy: by improving the competitiveness of American factories it would create pressure for American companies to buy from them rather than from overseas. It might take years, but I don't see any logical reason why such policies might not increase American manufacturing of the protected goods. We might all end up a little poorer, but manufacturing workers and manufacturing towns would benefit.

Economists say that the costs are always greater than the benefits, but I don't put much faith in economists. Economists, after all, never lose their jobs to foreign competition, so why should they care? They like to talk about competitive advantage: under free trade each country or region specializes in what it is good at, leading to greater overall efficiency. But what if your region (Appalachia, say) has no competitive advantages? What if the industries in which the US has a competitive advantage are all those employing few workers without college degrees? What if a globalized economy means that managers and researchers in the US do great but workers suffer? It seems very clear now that China's entry into the WTO hurt a lot of American workers. Do we just say, too bad? Actually that is what we did do, and so we got Donald Trump and his trade wars.

Maybe there is nothing we can do for American workers at a price we would consider paying. But it baffles me that in my lifetime the only competitive presidential candidate to dissent from free-trade orthodoxy is a wrestling promoter with orange hair.

Erlend Haarberg

The male half of my favorite wife and husband photography team, the Haarbergs.

The Barnum Effect, or, It's Like You're Reading my Mind

The Barnum Effect, aka the Forer Effect, is the tendency of people to think that generic statements about humankind describe them in particular. This is how mediums and psychics generally work. The science of this was further developed by psychologist Bentram Forer, who came up with this lest of questions that invoke the effect.

1. You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.
2. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.
3. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.
4. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.
5. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.
6. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.
7. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.
8. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof.
9. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.
10. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.
11. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.
12. Security is one of your major goals in life.

In Forer's original experiment, his subjects said those items described them well, rating an analysis that included those twelve items 4.3 out of 5.0 for accuracy. Incidentally this only works when the experimenter focuses mainly on positive traits.

Obviously this is to some extent culturally determined, and this particular list would not work nearly as well for people who are not 20th or 21st century Americans.

Pebble Mosaic from 4th-Century BC Greek Bathhouse

Recently uncovered in Arta, northwest Greece. Below is a detail showing the technique. More at the History Blog.

Frascati, Villa Falconieri, 1924

A Statement of Belief

From a letter to William James from a friend, which James discusses in Lecture 8 of Pragmatism:

I believe in pluralism; I believe that in our search for truth we leap from one floating cake of ice to another, on an infinite sea, and that by each of our acts we make new truths possible and old ones impossible; I believe that each man is responsible for making the universe better, and that if he does not do this it will be in so far left undone.

And from the same lecture, William James summation of his own beliefs:

But this talk of rationality is a parenthesis and a digression. What we were discussing was the idea of a world growing not integrally but piecemeal by the contributions of its several parts. Take the hypothesis seriously and as a live one. Suppose that the world's author put the case to you before creation, saying: "I am going to make a world not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional merely, the condition being that each several agent does its own 'level best.' I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world. Its safety, you see, is unwarranted. It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win through. It is a social scheme of co-operative work genuinely to be done. Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and trust the other agents enough to face the risk?"

Should you in all seriousness, if participation in such a world were proposed to you, feel bound to reject it as not safe enough? Would you say that, rather than be part and parcel of so fundamentally pluralistic and irrational a universe, you preferred to relapse into the slumber of nonentity from which you had been momentarily aroused by the tempter's voice?

Of course if you are normally constituted, you would do nothing of the sort. There is a healthy-minded buoyancy in most of us which such a universe would exactly fit. We would therefore accept the offer -"Top! und schlag auf schlag!" It would be just like the world we practically live in; and loyalty to our old nurse Nature would forbid us to say no. The world proposed would seem 'rational' to us in the most living way. . . .

Of course as human beings we can be healthy minds on one day and sick souls on the next; and as amateur dabblers in philosophy we may perhaps be allowed to call ourselves monistic pluralists, or free-will determinists, or whatever else may occur to us of a reconciling kind. But as philosophers aiming at clearness and consistency, and feeling the pragmatistic need of squaring truth with truth, the question is forced upon us of frankly adopting either the tender or the robustious type of thought. In particular this query has always come home to me: May not the claims of tender-mindedness go too far? May not the notion of a world already saved in toto anyhow, be too saccharine to stand? May not religious optimism be too idyllic? Must all be saved? Is no price to be paid in the work of salvation? Is the last word sweet? Is all 'yes, yes' in the universe? Doesn't the fact of 'no' stand at the very core of life? Doesn't the very 'seriousness' that we attribute to life mean that ineluctable noes and losses form a part of it, that there are genuine sacrifices somewhere, and that something permanently drastic and bitter always remains at the bottom of its cup?

I cannot speak officially as a pragmatist here; all I can say is that my own pragmatism offers no objection to my taking sides with this more moralistic view, and giving up the claim of total reconciliation. The possibility of this is involved in the pragmatistic willingness to treat pluralism as a serious hypothesis. In the end it is our faith and not our logic that decides such questions, and I deny the right of any pretended logic to veto my own faith. I find myself willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore backing out and crying 'no play! I am willing to think that the prodigal-son attitude, open to us as it is in many vicissitudes, is not the right and final attitude towards the whole of life. I am willing that there should be real losses and real losers, and no total preservation of all that is. I can believe in the ideal as an ultimate, not as an origin, and as an extract, not the whole. When the cup is poured off, the dregs are left behind forever, but the possibility of what is poured off is sweet enough to accept.

As a matter of fact countless human imaginations live in this moralistic and epic kind of a universe, and find its disseminated and strungalong successes sufficient for their rational needs. There is a finely translated epigram in the greek anthology which admirably expresses this state of mind, this acceptance of loss as unatoned for, even tho the lost element might be one's self:

A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast,
Bids you set sail.
Full many a gallant ship, when we were lost,
Weathered the gale.

Giovanni di Paolo

The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise, 1445

The Consequences of the Crash

Interesting note about the political fallout from the 2008 financial crisis; this is Fareed Zakaria reviewing a book by economist Adam Tooze. According to Zakaria and Tooze, one of most important things to remember about the crash is that the intervention staged by the US Federal Reserve and the Bush and Obama administrations worked pretty well:

Before the rescue and even in its early stages, the global economy was falling into a bottomless abyss. In the first months after the panic on Wall Street, world trade and industrial production fell at least as fast as they did during the first months of the Great Depression. Global capital flows declined by a staggering 90 percent. The Federal Reserve, with some assistance from other central banks, arrested this decline. The Obama fiscal stimulus also helped to break the fall. Tooze points out that almost all serious analyses of the stimulus conclude that it played a significant positive role. In fact, most experts believe it ended much too soon. He also points out that large parts of the so-called Obama stimulus were the result of automatic government spending, like unemployment insurance, that would have happened no matter who was president. And finally, he notes that China, with its own gigantic stimulus, created an oasis of growth in an otherwise stagnant global economy.

The rescue worked better than almost anyone imagined. It is worth recalling that none of the dangers confidently prophesied by legions of critics took place. There was no run on the dollar or American treasuries, no hyperinflation, no double-dip recession, no China crash. American banks stabilized and in fact prospered, households began saving again, growth returned slowly but surely. The governing elite did not anticipate the crisis — as few elites have over hundreds of years of capitalism. But once it happened, many of them — particularly in America — acted quickly and intelligently, and as a result another Great Depression was averted. The system worked, as Daniel Drezner notes in his own book of that title.

But therein lies the unique feature of the crash of 2008. Unlike that of 1929, it was not followed by a Great Depression. It was not so much the crisis as the rescue and its economic, political and social consequences that mattered most. On the left, the entire episode discredited the market-friendly policies of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Gerhard Schroeder, disheartening the center-left and emboldening those who want more government intervention in the economy in all kinds of ways. On the right, it became a rallying cry against bailouts and the Fed, buoying an imaginary free-market alternative to government intervention. Unlike in the 1930s, when the libertarian strategy was tried and only deepened the Depression, in the last 10 years it has been possible for the right to argue against the bailouts, secure in the knowledge that their proposed policies will never actually be implemented.

The thing that puzzles me most about America over the past fifteen years is that the mood of the people has consistently been worse than circumstances seem to warrant, and our rage has been directed in all sort of strange directions. You will recall that the Tea Party began as a protest, not against Wall Street misbehavior, but against plans to help out homeowners who had lost big because of that misbehavior. Since then quite a few conservative intellectuals have tried to make the whole thing into a parable about government overreach, railing against federal mortgage guarantees and trying to shift the blame from Wall Street to the Federal Reserve. The bailouts have been the object of more ranting than the crisis itself. Fear of Middle Eastern terrorists somehow metamorphosed into panic about the Mexican border, with local officials in Texas and Arizona demanding help against al Qaeda forces they feared would sweep through the desert and attack them. Obama's stimulus plan caused outrage on the right and a sense of unease among many of the apolitical who felt in their guts that the response to such a crisis out to be belt-tightening and retrenchment, not expansive new government programs. As the economy has improved, the mood has hardly gotten better at all. More than a third of Americans think we are still in a recession, and as I often note people on both the left and the right think that their side is losing most of the battles.

I can think of a few explanations. One is the continued decline of manufacturing employment, which slowed for a while in the 1990s but accelerated after China joined the WTO in 2001. Many small cities really have been hit hard by these losses, and many workers have seen their livelihoods yanked away. Another is the news industry, which has been pumping out ever darker stories in a desperate battle for viewers and readers. In this they are only echoing many of our politicians, who talk darkly about the nation sliding off a cliff. Maybe terrorism contributes, and the epidemic of mass shootings, especially in combination with the constant news coverage of everything bloody and bad. Lately there has been a lot of focus on the absence of wage growth, which I am sure is a contributor. It is also a puzzle; so far as I can tell, economists have no clue why wages have not risen at all over the past two years of impressive economic growth. My own take on this comes from experience in my own company, and it is that wages are being held down by savage competition; the thought of my own salary going up mainly makes me worry that I won't be able to win any more projects.

But whatever the reason, the facts are stark: we didn't get an economic depression, but we did get a psychological one.

Hellenistic Earrings

Elite women of the ancient Greek world loved elaborate earrings, and this love reached its peak in the Hellenistic era, 330 to 100 BC. A sample of what museums have online.

The detail on this one is astonishing.

Ganymede.

A pair from Ptolemaic Egypt, with a different look

The Poles of Life

I heard another story this week of a kind that we all know: child of a middle-class family refuses to knuckle under to the demands of education, job, and marriage, ends up at 25 a wreck of drugs and desperation, possibly on the way to prison.

It made me think about these poles of existence that seem to define our age: a disciplined life of getting up and going to work every day, minding your manners, cleaning up as you go, vs. a break for freedom that ends with a slide into the abyss.

Serious American literature, the kind written by men who win prizes, is at least half about this dilemma: Philip Roth, John Updike, Richard Russo, Jonathan Franzen, all have obsessed over the demands of middle class existence and the longing to break free. I remember trying to read one Updike novel that made the suburban life of a middling office worker seem so bleak and horrible that one wondered how it could possibly endure, and why revolution did not break out tomorrow. One of Philip Roth's prizewinning books, Sabbath's Theatre, is about a man who poses as an artist and a revolutionary in order to avoid work and be taken in by sympathetic, left-wing families, the better to seduce the bored women behind their staid husbands' backs.

Most people who feel this conflict have ways of managing it. Some of the men I play basketball with used to head off every winter for away football games that turned into three-day benders. People go to the beach, read sexy romance novels, watch superhero movies, climb mountains, ride motorcycles, write blogs, have affairs, fantasize about retirement. Something, anything, to make us think we are not just rule-bound creatures of the hive, to make us feel wild and free.

I have a sense that responses to all of this undergird a lot of our politics: liberals are people who worry more about the oppressions of the system, conservatives those who worry more about the slide into chaos. Think about people in the 60s and 70s who admired young hippies and defended the violent excesses of radicals: surely part of the underlying motivation was dislike of our hyper-ordered, tightly constrained world and admiration for those who burst its boundaries. Or people who defend the police no matter what and think school children should say "yes ma'am" and "yes sir" to their teachers: this is necessary, they think, because the alternative is drug-addled, slum-shack purgatory and an early grave. And the tolerance of those same conservatives for the "gentleman's clubs" outside every southern city: here is one of the safety valves that helps people keep their lives under control the rest of the time.

One thing that seems to unite millions of Americans is a desire to escape from the regimentation of the system: to make your own rules instead of following somebody else's; to follow your own agenda, or your own dreams; to do what is good or fun rather than what is required. We idolize rock stars, gangsters, off-the-grid survivalists, anyone who is able to break free of the bounds that hold us to the suburban earth. Even those of us who like what we do for a living fantasize about saying to hell with the rules and the bureaucracy and the paperwork and just doing it.

Yet here we are, getting ready to go back work again tomorrow, because for most of us the alternative is ruination.

You may think I'm being overly dramatic, and ok, maybe so, but this is exactly the tone of the person who told that story I started from: follow the rules, go to school, go to work, pay your bills, keep on the straight and narrow, or end up in drug rehab hoping the judge is in a merciful mood.

Meanwhile in Washington

The Post reports:

Amid heavy police presence, about two dozen participants in the Unite the Right 2 rally headed for Lafayette Square. . . . The rally goers were met by thousands of anti-racist protesters and activists.

Toy Cart from Anatolia, c 2000 BC

From the Dallas Museum of Art.

The Celtic Chariot Burials at Attichy

In 2009, French archaeologists were exploring the site of a new gravel mine when they uncovered a Gallic cemetery dating to the third century BC. Twelve graves were found and excavated: six adults, five children, and one cremation.

Most spectacular were two chariot burials (top and above), both men buried with swords.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to find out much about this site, since there are as yet no scholarly publications and on its web site INRAP has, instead of text I could read, a video in which people speak French too rapidly for me to follow. Here's a picture from the video; notice how the upper parts of the two iron wheel rims were broken off by the plow and lost.

Another of the adult graves.

And a child. A spectacular site.

Eipgram

A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast,
Bids you set sail.
Full many a gallant ship, when we were lost,
Weathered the gale.

–Theodorides

Truth and the Truth

William James:

What hardens the heart of everyone I approach with the view of truth sketched in my last lecture is that typical idol of the tribe, the notion of the Truth, conceived as the one answer, determinate and complete, to the one fixed enigma which the world is believed to propound. For popular tradition, it is all the better if the answer be oracular, so as itself to awaken wonder as an enigma of the second order, veiling rather than revealing what its profundities are supposed to contain. All the great single-word answers to the world's riddle, such as God, the One, Reason, Law, Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the Dialectic Process, the Idea, the Self, the Oversoul, draw the admiration that men have lavished on them from this oracular rule. By amateurs in philosophy and professionals alike, the universe is represented as a queer sort of petrified sphinx whose appeal to man consists in a monotonous challenge to his divining powers. The Truth: what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind! I read in an old letter - from a gifted friend who died too young - these words: "In everything, in science, art, morals and religion, there must be one system that is right and every other wrong." How characteristic of the enthusiasm of a certain stage of youth! At twenty-one we rise to such a challenge and expect to find the system. It never occurs to most of us even later that the question 'what is the truth?' is no real question (being irrelative to all conditions) and that the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truth in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase like the Latin Language or the Law.

–Pragmatism, Lecture 7: Pragmatism and Humanism

Refugees and the Syrian End Game

The civil war in Syria is winding down across much of the country, because the government has won. As you can see from the map above, the government (red) now controls all the inhabited areas in the south and center of the country and is slowly constricting the remaining rebels in the north. What remains of Aleppo is in government hands. The yellow area is under the control of Kurdish militias and their American advisers, and so far the Kurds have remained mostly at peace with the government.

So especially in the south those communities that have been hosting thousands of Syrian refugees are eager to see them go home:

Seven years of war in Syria has displaced more than half the country’s population, leaving millions of refugees shipwrecked between the wasteland of home and the void of exile. Among the many Lebanese and Jordanian towns that received them was Arsal, where rented rooms and tent cities overflowed at one point with 120,000 Syrians — quadruple its Lebanese population.

But with the Syrian government closing in on victory, President Bashar al-Assad declaring the country safe for Syrians again and their reluctant Lebanese hosts pressing them to leave, the Syrian refugees are now beginning to set out on the fraught road home.

Over the past month, convoys carrying nearly 2,000 Syrians have crossed the border, returning families to the homes they had abandoned years ago — though few knew whether those homes had survived the bombs and shells.

I consider this great news. On the other hand certain other news shows why so many Syrians hate the Assad regime so much, and why western governments keep saying that the problem can't be solved so long as Assad remains in power:

But many may be stuck in Lebanon. Thousands of Syrians in Arsal have applied to return, only to be rejected by Mr. Assad’s government. Many more say they believe that if Mr. Assad remains in power, the outcome tacitly accepted by the global powers haggling over Syria’s future, they have only arrest, torture, death or forced conscription to return to.

“Here, I’m a refugee,” said a former Syrian soldier who asked to be identified by his nom de guerre, Abu Fares. “In Syria, I’m a traitor.”

So at least for the next few years, many refugees will be unable to return even if they want to. I suspect that European countries in particular will put pressure on the regime to change this policy as the central plank in any peace settlement, but for notorious regime opponents there won't be anything they can do.

The other big question to be resolved in any peace settlement will be the Kurdish areas. The government can't conquer them so long as thousands of Americans remain in place, nor will the US support outright independence for the Kurds. So I suspect a stalemate like the one in Iraq is inevitable. Since right now the Kurds and Americans control big areas where the people are all Arabs, maybe a deal can be worked out in which the Kurds withdraw from the Arab areas in return for recognition of their autonomy in the areas where they are the majority. I hope so.

Chess Piece from Pineuilh, France, c. 1000 AD

Pineuilh is an archaeological site in southwestern France. Around 979 AD a knightly family built a house there on an artificial platform surrounded by ponds and marsh, and they lived on that platform for about a century. The choice of such an uncomfortable but easily defensible site tells you something about life at the time. Because the whole platform eventually sank into the marsh, many wooden and bone artifacts were preserved, including this amazing chess piece. Below, a view of the excavations in progress. More at INRAP.

American Efficiency in the Soviet Union

Perhaps you have some time idly wondered how the Soviet Union was able to industrialize so successfully despite civil wars, communist ideology, and a central planning apparatus that failed spectacularly in so many other areas. Obviously this is a complex question with a complex answer, but part of the explanation was Lenin and Stalin's embrace of American manufacturing methods. The Soviets were much enamored of the "scientific management" of Frederick Taylor, who used stopwatches and other tools to refine manufacturing processes and make them more efficient:

In the Soviet Union, Taylorism was advocated by Aleksei Gastev and nauchnaia organizatsia truda (the movement for the scientific organisation of labor). It found support in both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Gastev continued to promote this system of labor management until his arrest and execution in 1939. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet Union enthusiastically embraced Fordism and Taylorism, importing American experts in both fields as well as American engineering firms to build parts of its new industrial infrastructure. The concepts of the Five Year Plan and the centrally planned economy can be traced directly to the influence of Taylorism on Soviet thinking. As scientific management was believed to epitomize American efficiency, Joseph Stalin even claimed that "the combination of the Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency is the essence of Leninism."

To build their new factories the Soviets also turned to Americans, specifically Albert Kahn, who had already designed the enormous River Rouge Complex for Henry Ford:

On May 8, 1929, through an agreement signed with Kahn by President of Amtorg Saul G. Bron, the Soviet government contracted the Albert Kahn firm to design the Stalingrad Tractor Plant. On January 9, 1930, a second contract with Kahn was signed for his firm to become consulting architects for all industrial construction in the Soviet Union.

Under these contracts, during 1929–1932, Kahn’s firm operated from its headquarters in Detroit and the newly established design bureau in Moscow to train and supervise Soviet architects and engineers. The bureau Gosproektstroi was headed by Albert Kahn’s younger brother, Moritz Kahn, and 25 Kahn Associatese staff were involved in Moscow in this project. They trained more than 4,000 Soviet architects and engineers; and designed 521 plants and factories under the first five-year plan.

I suppose I must have known about this, since I once read a whole book on the first five-year plan, but I had forgotten and I was deeply impressed a few minutes ago reading about Kahn's work in Russia. It is one of those unexpected connections that undermines all simple narratives and dichotomies. It reminds us that technology has its own imperatives, and that the building of cars and tanks was in practice much the same in Stalingrad and Detroit. It may also explain something about why it was the US and the Soviet Union that emerged as the dominant powers; in our world it is those who best master the key technologies of the age that rise to the top.

The Laniscat Treasure

The Laniscat Treasure is a horde of Gallic coins found in Brittany during rescue archaeology before the construction of a new highway in 2007. The 545 coins are all electrum, an alloy of gold and silver; 58 are staters and 487 are quarter staters. The horde was buried in the first century BC, probably at the time of the Roman conquest.

Aerial view of the site, which was a large farm or villa enclosed by a bank and ditch (and probably once a hedge). The larger rectangle is the Gallic estate. It measured 7500 square meters, so about 275 feet on each side. The smaller rectangle in the lower right corner is the later, Roman villa that replaced it.

Site plan, which is hanging on the wall during part of this video.

The coins had been plowed up and were found scattered in the plowed soil, but they are in such good shape that this must have happened just a year or two before the archaeologists moved in.

The horde includes coins from several mints, and several very rare types are represented. The two coins above are staters. Below is a sample of the 1/4 stater coins, including some strange and obscure images. Lots more at the INRAP web site. Narrative of the excavation (in French) here.