After one drink

I think that the problem with my life is that it gives me nothing to talk about. After two, I know that it's that I have no choice but to go home alone tonight.

Belle Paris?

"X is Y, but Paris, Paris is beautiful." A common enough thought in all its variations. But is Paris beautiful? Or, more precisely, is it really as beautiful as they say?

Certainly Paris is pretty. There's no doubt of that. But it's far easier to say whether something is pretty than to say whether it is beautiful - and a good deal of distance separates the two. Paris is also, without question, elegant and stately. And its architecture and city planning - in certain districts at least - form a harmonious whole of a sort one very rarely encounters, especially in a city of Paris' size.

But all of this is not entirely to Paris' advantage. For precisely this elegance, this harmony of elements often lessens one's aesthetic responses. There is something predictable and monotonous about just those features that Paris is most famous for. Something which can deaden, rather than excite, the senses.

Contrast Paris in this respect with New York - a city that is all too seldom thought of as beautiful. New York lacks the harmonious interaction of building with building that characterizes the stereotypically Parisian boulevard. But just this makes New York far more of a feast for the imagination than Paris. For New York is filled with unexpected and unpredictable juxtapositions. It is constantly challenging one's imaginative faculties in a manner Paris seldom does.

To say this - to prefer New York to Paris - to reject a certain sort of theory about what beauty consists in. In particular, it is to reject the classicism that states that beauty simply consists in the harmonious interaction of an object's elements. Or, in other words, it is to insist, against Kant, that beauty is impossible without a certain measure of the sublime.

Of course, Kant also believed that a beautiful object is one which excites the free play of our imaginative faculties. And this seems to me more or less correct. I differ from Kant only in what sorts of objects actually do excite this sort of state in me. What Kant found beautiful, puts me to sleep. And what I find beautiful, would have been enough to paralyze Kant's aesthetic senses - if he is to believed.

No problem here - for Kant is not famous because of his fine sense of taste. But what of Paris? Is there still hope for its beauty? Part of the problem here, I suspect, is that Paris in the past was hardly as harmonious a place as it is now. Hardly as clean. Hardly as neat and tidy and well-organized. Perhaps the Paris of the fin de siecle would been very much to my liking. Thus, my recipe for Paris is simple. A bit of poverty. A bit of bad urban planning. And a bit of day-to-day decay. And Paris will soon be back on the right track again.

Cultural and political success

A common theme in German cultural thought, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is that a group only flourishes culturally when it is lacking in political power or engagement. For example, in Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche writes,

You can't ultimately spend more than you have - that's true of individuals, it's true of peoples. If you spend yourself on power, on grandiose politics, on economics, world trade, parliaments, military interests - if you give away in this direction the quantity of understanding, seriousness, will and self-overcoming that you are, then this quantity is not available in the other direction. .. One lives off the other, one prospers at the expense of the other. All the great ages of culture are ages of decline, politically speaking: what is great in the cultural sense has been unpolitical even antipolitical.

The thought here is that a group or society, given the historical conditions under which it lives, has at its command only a limited amount of creative energy, which may be given either artistic or political expression, but not both. Thus the balance between cultural production and political activity is something of a zero-sum game; increase the level of political activity or engagement and one will invariably decrease the level of cultural productivity to a corresponding degree.

This line of thought, as I noted, can be found throughout German thought about culture and politics. For example, even today one regularly encounters the idea that the flowering of classical German culture that occurred just before and during the Napoleonic wars was a response to the political impotence of the German middle classes, both at home and abroad, during that period. Unable to take political action at home via the democratic means available elsewhere - the thought seems to go - and just as unable to collectively take action (as Germans) until the very end against the might of Napoleonic France, the German middle classes turned their creative energies toward the forging of a German nation, not by political, but rather by cultural means.

At least in the passage above, Nietzsche seems sympathetic to this line of thought. And he suggests that with the rise of Germany to the status of global political power, the creative energies of the German nation will come to be expressed, not in literature and the arts, but rather in more prosaic (and potentially threatening) political forms.

For all its simplicity, this way of thinking of the relationship between culture and politics has some obvious attractions, at least when one focuses one's attention on certain periods of German history. After all, it fits, not just the German experience during the age of Goethe and Schiller, but also the explosion of artistic creativity during the Weimar Republic, quite well. But nonetheless it is obvious that it is not always the case that politics and culture form this sort of zero-sum game. Frequently an increase in political or economic power will also increase cultural productivity to a corresponding degree. In part, this is a matter of simple economics. Very often, political success brings with it means of cultural production that would have otherwise been lacking. Think of the newly independent Netherlands, France under Louis XIV, or America in the first half of this century. Of course, as some of these examples indicate, this sort of cultural production may not be long-lived. But even so, it is surely common enough for an increase in political power and activity to unleash, rather than restrain, the cultural energies of a society.

So the simple formula Nietzsche's comment suggests hardly stands up as a general law, which raises a number of interesting questions:

First, are there any interesting general laws governing when political success dampens cultural productivity and when it encourages it? Is one sort of political success better than others in this regard? Is democracy to be preferred to other forms of government? Or not? And to what degree is it economic success as opposed to political success that matters most here?

Second, is the sort of art and literature that flourishes under conditions of political strength different in kind from the sort of art and literature that flourishes under conditions of political weakness? Here, it is natural to think that even when political success brings forth a burst of cultural activity, this activity is somehow more shallow or less critical than the cultural activity that accompanies periods in which political success is lacking. (Something of this is evident in the quote I began with.) But does this prejudice hold up upon reflection?

Exactly how philosophy should proceed:

The International Kant Interview

It's remarkable how many big names they got to respond. And a given philosopher's answers are sometimes quite revealing, if not of their philosophical views, then at least of their personalities. (For instance, take a gander at Apel's lengthy response to the second question, complete with detailed citations from his own work.)

Still what this webpage needs is a statistical breakdown of the responses. Until I see that, I can't really be sure what Kant's biggest mistake was.

Summer jams

I've been driving around New England a lot over the past few weeks, and have been listening to far too much pop music. Which is fortunate in at least one respect. The summer is starting, it's time to consider what this year's summer jam should be, and for once I'm well informed enough about the possibilities to have an opinion.

Now, just to be clear, the selection of a summer jam is not an opportunity to show off one's knowledge of obscure trends in independent music. A summer jam should be at least mainstream enough for one to have a reasonable chance of hearing it on commercial radio during daylight hours. But, on the other hand, it shouldn't be so all-pervasive that one will be sick of it by the middle of June. In other words, the song that everybody else thinks is this year's summer jam probably won't be it.

So there's a delicate line to toe here, and I'm probably not up to navigating it. But here are three possibilities that came to my mind driving around over the last few weeks:

First, there's Gnarles Barkley's "Crazy". This seems to have been anointed the year's summer jam by the critical establishment, which is surely a strike against it. But, all the same, it has plenty going for it as well. The Danger Mouse / Adult Swim connection, for one. And the way Cee-Lo responds to the question, "Does that make me crazy?", with an especially soulful, "Possibly". Downright philosophical.

Then, and this is a bit embarrassing, there's "Promiscuous" by Nelly Furtado and Timbaland. Now, I'm no fan of Furtado - generally her schtick makes me want to kick some hippy butt. But somehow I kept finding myself hoping to stumble upon this song when scanning my way down the highway. And Timbaland is in hilarious top-form.

But my summer jam, until I hear otherwise, is Ghostface Killah's "Back Like That". It isn't a true Ghostface joint, but if it was it would hardly be in the running here. Plus its got a chorus that gets my atonal sinuses vibrating and a nice little undercurrent of (unintended?) gender-role-reversal as well.

Still, there must be other possibilities out there that I'm missing. Any thoughts?

Why is Manhattan so expensive?

is the title of a new working paper by Ed Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and Raven Saks. The paper is a part of an ongoing research project, in which Glaeser attempts to document the ways in which regulatory restrictions inflate housing prices throughout the US's. Not surprisingly, then, Glaeser et al conclude that the high cost of housing in Manhattan is largely the result of explicit and implicit regulation. More precisely, they conclude that roughly half the cost per square foot of an average Manhattan apartment can traced back to various sorts of implicit "regulatory taxes".

The general thrust of Glaeser et al's argument here is not terribly surprising, although I suspect his study overstates the degree to which Manhattan housing prices are due to regulatory factors. But what interests me here is the further conclusion Glaeser et al draw from these claims: namely, that at least from a social welfare perspective, the level of regulation that Manhattan imposes upon builders is unjustifiable.

Implicit in Glaeser et al's discussion is the idea that the appropriate level of regulation within a market is determined by the various externalities imposed upon current residents of the market by new construction there. So, for example, according to Glaeser et al, if the externalities related to a unit of new construction with a market M impose a net loss of X dollars worth of welfare on M's current residents, it is reasonable to impose implicit and explicit regulatory taxes on new construction within M up to X dollars per unit.

Now there are any number of questions one might raise about this framework for evaluating the appropriate level of regulation within a given market. For, of course, it is often quite misleading to think of even the economic impacts and purposes of regulation solely in terms of an implicit "regulatory tax". But even allowing this point, the question Glaeser et al are asking here seems an interesting one. For if it really is the case that the level of regulatory "taxation" in Manhattan far exceeds the external social costs associated with new construction there, this fact surely will have some significance for the evaluation of such regulation.

The question, then, is whether Glaeser et al have correctly identified the various factors that generate externalities associated with new construction in an area like Manhattan. Glaeser et al's discussion focuses on three potential sources of external social costs: (i) the effect new construction can have on existing views, (ii) the congestion caused by new construction, and (iii) the effects new construction might have on a municipality's fiscal bottom-line. Of these three, Glaeser et al conclude that only the first is likely to the source of considerable externalities in the case of new construction within Manhattan. For, they argue, the effects of new construction on congestion are likely to be minimal, and the effects of it on the city's bottom-line will on balance probably be positive.

But it is natural to wonder whether Glaeser et al have really captured all of the relevant externalities here. After all, when one hears people describe the reasons why they support restrictive zoning regulations in their neighborhood, the primary reason stated is almost always that such regulation is required in order to preserve the current "character" of the neighborhood. And in so far as Glaeser et al's discussion touches on this issue, it does so solely via the question of whether new construction will effect existing views, which hardly seems to capture all the concerns that motivate support for zoning within the actual world.

The question, though, is whether this, admittedly common, vague sense that new construction would negatively impact upon the character of a given neighborhood in other ways actually corresponds to significant external social costs that come with new construction. In some cases, it seems relatively easy to argue that it does. Take, for example, neighborhoods - like the Lower East Side or East Williamsburg - in which new construction threatens to dramatically alter the current ethnic or economic make-up of a neighborhood. In such cases, it seems clear that current residents may have a very real interest in maintaining the current make-up of their neighborhood. And so, at least in cases which involve these sorts of transformations, there may be many externalities associated with new construction that Glaeser et al's discussion simply ignores.

In a related vein, one might point to the ways in which new construction might affect the architectural or aesthetic character of a neighborhood, over and above any effects such construction might have on existing views. So for example, a set of new 20-story buildings of the sort Glaeser et al discuss, even if they do not negatively affect my view, may have a dramatic impact on what it is like psychologically to live in my neighborhood. In more wealthy neighborhoods, it is often - I take it - considerations of this sort that are the source of much of the opposition to new construction. And while it is easy to dismiss these sorts of considerations as insignificant, they are plainly not regarded as such by many Manhattan residents. Which raises the question of why Glaeser et al once again ignore them.

Once again, none of this is meant to suggest that the question Glaeser et al raise are uninteresting. For, quite on contrary, the task of evaluating the social costs associated with new urban construction seems to me a fascinating one. But it is clear that Glaeser et al have not done nearly enough to give us anything like a complete picture of what these costs may or may not involve.

The idea is better than the end result

but the idea is pretty good: Reading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations Considered As Log Entries Of A Failed Expedition to the Antarctic.