Semischolastic

NaPoWriMo #1

2010-04-02T23:19:00.001-07:00

I believe the nervous twitch in your fingers,
as you sit there, hands neatly folded.
There is nothing like a polite truth; it seethes
and elbows and shouts, paints garishly on walls.

The streets outside are drowned in water,
dirtily entombed, reefs of fences accumulating
trash and silt, makeshift currents carving out their paths.
I don't know how many graves the water makes.

I see the claims time has made on your thinning wrists,
your watery eyes. I don't trust them.
We are not your bodies, you and I.
This is not what you have sown.

The silence, thick and stupid, is stretched out between us.
We are divided like continents. My words
mean as much to your ears as the sound of an unanswered telephone,
or the cries of a stranger's baby.

It's the wailing truth:
The flood waters will not recede for me.

These visits to you have tightened my grip on this world.
I horde memories, stack them up in my basement,
fill my bathtub with conversations and sunset.
I look in the mirror often, flex my fingers, grit my teeth.

But I have not yet furled my dreams.
I don't ask for much resurrection, anymore.
Only enough to fill up a knapsack, or a purse, or a basket;
to pray over and break and share until my hands lie empty.

Link Blog

2009-03-30T13:57:00.000-07:00

- Prison reform is a thankless job. It will get him few votes in Virginia, but Jim Webb is doing it anyway. Remarkable. Makes me even more glad that Obama didn't choose him as VP - he's been doing some good work in Congress. Glenn Greenwald goes over some of the details here: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/28/webb/index.html

- Simon Johnson has an article in The Atlantic about the financial crisis that applies some of the lessons he learned about emerging markets to our current economic crisis. His conclusions are sort of terrifying, and the article is a must read: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200905/imf-advice

- Esau Mwamwaya is a singer from Malawi who moved to London and opened a secondhand furniture shop. Radioclit are a London based production team whose studio is on the same street as the furniture shop. A chance meeting turned into a collaboration, and now they are The Very Best. They released a free mixtape last year. It is unadulterated joy, and it is available here: http://electrorash.com/esau-mwamwaya-radioclit-are-the-very-best/. If you don't hear at least one song that makes you smile from ear to ear, I have some bad news for you: your soul is dead.

- If The Very Best makes you too ecstatic to go about your day, you can feel free to listen to Brooklyn MC/producer El-P's free mixtape: "WeAreAllGoingToBurnInHellMeggaMixx2", which will definitely ruin your whole day.

- On the free mixtape tip, you can also download the new mixtape from Themselves, entitled theFREEhoudini, which is available in exchange for your email address at anticon. Bizarre and noisy and not for the faint of heart.

SCHOLASTICS IS THE MARK OF THE BEATS

2009-03-19T15:39:00.001-07:00

Scholastics returns after a hiatus of about a year and a half! It isn't a perfect mixtape, but I've dedicated about as much time as is warranted to it - it's too nice of a day outside. Unfortunately, if you don't like hip hop, blog house, or radio pop, there probably won't be much for you here. (But listen anyway! Who knows, you could be surprised.) Conceptually, the mixtape is divided in half, with the first half being dedicated mostly to backpackers and conscious rap, and the second half being radio pop fluff. A parental advisory is probably warranted as well, especially for tracks 8 and 12.

SCHOLASTICS IS THE MARK OF THE BEATS [Download Link]

1. Liquid Swords (GZA)

2. Electric Swords - (music: GZA - Liquid Swords, words: Aesop Rock - NY Electric)

3. NY Heartless (music and hook: Kanye West - Heartless, verses: Aesop Rock - NY Electric)

4. Get With the Times (Cool Calm Pete)

5. Runaway Too (music: Clipse - Mr. Me Too, words: Ludacris - Runaway Love)

6. Battle for Beef - (music: Cannibal Ox - Battle for Asgard, words: Mos Def - Beef, GZA - Publicity)

7. What Goes Around - (music: Books On Tape - Unidentified, words: Nas - What Goes Around)

8. Ignorant Ladies - (music: Beyonce - Single Ladies, words: Jay-Z and Beanie Sigel - Ignorant Shit)

9. Womanizer Rink - (music: Wiley - Ice Rink, words: Britney Spears - Womanizer)

10. Maneater Autodrive - (music: Kavinsky - Testarossa Autodrive, words: Nelly Furtado - Maneater)

11. Countach URAQT - (music: Franz and Shape - Countach, words: MIA - URAQT)

12. Danger Kids - (music: Danger - 11h54, words: Ghostface and Raekwon - Apollo Kids)

13. Make You Mine (Miami Horror)

Best Records of the Year

2008-12-19T20:12:00.000-08:00

Well, finals are over, so it's that time of year: top 10 music list time! This year actually wasn't too difficult to rank, for some reason. Either I'm decisive, careless, or my preferences mostly complete and transitive (I really hope it isn't the last - homo-economicus are really boring). All the usual disclaimers apply: I didn't hear all the records that came out this year, some of them, like Bon Iver, I heard too late to really put in a top 15 list, etc. I'm not trying to act as a critical gatekeeper here, or an objective arbiter of taste - this is just my favorite stuff I've heard this year.

1. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes

2. The Foxglove Hunt - Stop Heartbeat

3. TV On The Radio - Dear Science

4. Son Lux - At War with Walls and Mazes

5. Bodies of Water - A Certain Feeling

6. Portishead - Third

7. Joy Electric - My Grandfather, the Cubist

8. The Black Keys - Attack and Release

9. Subtle - ExitingARM

10. The Walkmen - You and Me

11. Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours

12. Starflyer 59 - Dial M

13. Kanye West - 808s and Heartbreak

14. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

15. Hercules and Love Affair - Hercules and Love Affair

Some Favorite Songs Not Already Represented Above, Unranked

Byrne/Eno - Strange Overtones

Santogold - LES Artistes

m83 - Skin of the Night

Cannibal Ox - Mecca and the Ox

Department of Eagles - No One Does It Like You

Music Go Music - Reach Out

My Brightest Diamond - Inside a Boy

Beyonce - Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)

Lil Wayne/Jay-Z - A Billi

Movies to Watch After Finals

2008-12-12T10:30:00.000-08:00

Sorry I haven't posted in awhile. It's been pretty busy, ya know, trying to avoid flunking out of the first year. I've not had much time, and I've wanted to avoid posting things that weren't substantive. But, I thought it would be fun to list some movies I've acquired through various means to watch after finals are done. The starred ones are ones that I haven't seen before.

Old Joy*

Annie Hall

Crimes and Misdemeanors

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeosie

Snow Angels*

Shotgun Stories

Wall-E

The King*

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly*

Brick*

Making lists of things I get to do after finals are through is one way I cope.

The Audacity of Nerd

2008-11-07T14:43:00.001-08:00

The moment that it sunk in was not when they announced Ohio. It wasn't when the networks called the race for Obama. It wasn't when McCain gave his speech, or when Obama gave his. It wasn't when I saw Jesse Jackson cry, or upon reading one of the campaign post-mortems. It was when I saw this.

Real reflections on the election to follow.

Stop Me Before I Blog Again

2008-10-20T22:37:00.000-07:00

Remember in my last entry, how I spoke of not feeling as if I was a PhD student? Well, scratch that. I've been submerged in economics for the past few weeks, and I'm only now coming up for air. My last midterm of this semester was today, in econometrics. All in all, although I haven't received any grades for any of the midterms, I'm already disappointed in my performance on them. I feel like I could have done better, but I'm not sure how. Paradoxically, though, I don't feel as thought I've reached the limits of my capabilities. I guess I'm just going to start studying more efficiently.

***

While I was gone the Nobel Prize in Economics* was awarded to Paul Krugman. It's sort of funny, because the week before, I was assuring some of my colleagues that he would never win a Nobel Prize. Just more evidence of my profound ignorance of economics. I'm a big fan, actually, of Krugman. He's among the best economics writers out there, and his popular writing in economics is clear for the layperson, but even enlightening for academics. I have a couple of compilations of his columns and articles, and each of them is very good. Of course, not his popular press columns, but his academic work for which he won the Nobel Prize. One of the two pillars of his economic project is "the new economic geography", and that's the work of his with which I am most familiar, because of my interests in urban and spatial economics. He helped write the standard introductory graduate text on the subject (you can read the introduction here). Anyway, this has been a long introduction to a relatively simple point, which that Krugman became interested in economics for precisely the same reason I ended up falling in love with it - science fiction novels, specifially, the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. Krugman, from "Incidents From My Career":

Admittedly, there were those science fiction novels. Indeed, they may have been what made me go into economics. Those who read the stuff may be aware of the classic Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov. It is one of the few science fiction series that deals with social scientists -- the "psychohistorians", who use their understanding of the mathematics of society to save civilization as the Galactic Empire collapses. I loved Foundation, and in my early teens my secret fantasy was to become a psychohistorian. Unfortunately, there's no such thing (yet). I was and am fascinated by history, but the craft of history is far better at the what and the when than the why, and I eventually wanted more. As for social sciences other than economics, I am interested in their subjects but cannot get excited about their methods -- the power of economic models to show how plausible assumptions yield surprising conclusions, to distill clear insights from seemingly murky issues, has no counterpart yet in political science or sociology. Someday there will exist a unified social science of the kind that Asimov imagined, but for the time being economics is as close to psychohistory as you can get.

I don't have much to add to Krugman's comments on Foundation, except that the imaginary "psychohistory" has the scientific rigor, importance, and predictability that economics wishes it had (and sometimes pretends to have). The psychohistorians of Asimov's Foundation were able to model human behavior on the long-run macro scale with all the exactitude and precision of Newtonian physics; able to predict the evolution of society. They always seem to have perfect data, and they are able to rescue their models even when some of their fundamental assumptions go awry. Barring some miracle or cataclysmic paradigm shift, we'll not get something even approaching psychohistory in my lifetime (or ever), but I can think of worse ways to spend my working than trying to sketch out a first approximation.

***

Although I have had a lot of work to do, and little time or intellectual capital to spend on things not directly related to my classes, I've tried to maintain vestiges of other pursuits. It's hard to find time to sit down and read for an extended period of time, so I've been reading longer articles and essays. Here are some of my recent favorites:

George Orwell - "Notes on Nationalism" and "Politics and the English Language" - These are both classic essays by Orwell - clear, insightful, and timeless. They are both extremely relevant for our current rhetorical and political environment, and I highly recommend both of them. The most salient part of Notes on Nationalism is the first part, which discusses the impulse in general. The second half, in which he categorizes prevalent types of nationalism, is more of a historical interest.

David Foster Wallace - Federer as Religious Experience - Since his death a few weeks ago, I've been revisiting a lot of his old essays and articles. This article in particular does something at which DFW was unparalleled - elevating and broadening a subject of limited interest to a general audience (in this case, tennis), to something universal, profound, and enlightening. He did this not by taking a laypersons attitude, but submerging himself in the details and nuances of the subject, by observing a series of little things and drawing lines between then, a sort of lyrical pointillism that illuminates at the same time that it informs. (Also, if you haven't, you should go read his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, probably the only commencement speech worth reading.)

Jeffery Goldberg - The Things He Carried - A quirky, funny, frightening piece in The Atlantic about the bumbling trainwreck that is airport security. He shows how someone with even a minimal level of intelligence and forethought can exploit the gaping holes in airport security, and ultimately concludes that we'd probably be better off spending the majority of the funding for TSA elsewhere, if we're really interested in stopping terrorism.

George Packer - The Hardest Vote - Packer uses the 2008 presidential campaign as a frame for talking about the cynicism and disillusionment of the working class. Sympathetic and touching, but without the condescending pity that sometimes pervades these types of articles. Packer approaches the subject brilliantly, simply set up the historical and sociopolitical context, then essentially allow his subjects (the white working class in Ohio) to tell their stories with a minimum of punditry. Their story turns out sad, even depressing, but not without hope. A useful corrective to the frothy, ignorant rantings of the commentariat during this political season.

I think I had more to say, but I think this entry is too long already. If you've made it all the way to the end, I admire your perseverance.

*This isn't a "real" Nobel Prize, as it wasn't one of the five originally established by Alfred Nobel. It is actually officially called "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel", although most people just call it "The Nobel Prize in Economics". I don't see that the distinction is especially important or substantive.

FDA Warning

2008-10-03T19:31:00.001-07:00

A curious side effect of procastination is its remarkable ability to produce exhaustion without exertion.

Odds and Ends

2008-09-29T20:57:00.000-07:00

I feel sort of petty writing about personal minutae in this blog, given the state of the country politically and economically. But those of you who talk to me on even a semi-regular basis bear the full brunt of my political positions (neuroses?) And as I've alluded to before, I have no intention of broadcasting my profound ignorance of economic matters. Still, I feel like I should at least tangentially mention these two salient topics before moving on:

1. On the financial crisis - I find it hard to believe that people whose jobs and careers are staked on seeing and avoiding this kind of thing in advance didn't, well, see it and avoid it. Even ignoring the apparent failure of the regulatory system in place, it seems fairly clear that the inflation of the housing market in a way that didn't reflect underlying fundamentals of the economy couldn't last forever. This ostensibly simple realization seems to have never occured in the minds of various portfolio managers and investment bankers. Strange.

2. On the election - I will be traveling to Nevada to campaign the weekend before the election. That weekend is in the post-midterm lull, so I think it is a relatively opportune time to go. And if this election was lost, and Nevada could have changed the outcome, it would be hard to forgive myself. And I have to do something.

***

I keep waiting for that moment when I'll start geniunely feeling like a PhD student. As of yet, it hasn't happened yet. I think it might be because I've had a fairly gradual transition from undergraduate to the PhD program, at least, for an American (foreign students generally enter with a much higher level of preparation that domestic students): the AEASP program, then interning at the Fed, then the AEASP again, and then the MA before entering the PhD program. I don't mean that the material is easy, or that I'm crusing through it - far from it. The feeling of non-reality doesn't really come from the difficulty of the material, but more because the structure of my life and thoughts haven't changed all that much. Class, problem sets, the occasional seminar, going to the computer lab, study groups, procrastination blogging, listening to music - the furnishings may have been shifted around, but the architecture remains the same.

If the moment comes, it will probably come with my 3rd year, when I switch my focus from classwork to research, a more fundamental shift than what has happened so far.

***

The new TV On The Radio album, "Dear Science," is really fantastic. In lieu of posting a review of it, I'll just slightly edit something I wrote in the comments section of a blog I read:

This is probably, all told, the best TV On The Radio full-length yet (I still say that Young Liars is the best thing they've released so far). It isn't just that Sitek has stripped back the layers of noise and production to reveal their pop hooks and soul sensibility, it is that the songs themselves are better and more melodic. Tunde and Kyp dovetail rather than tug of war on the shared lead vocals, which makes for sharper, tighter harmonies. The rhythm section hits with refreshing clarity, too, and I think that they have finally completed the transition from a bedroom 4-track-and-a-laptop project to a full-fledged capital R rock band, and haven't lost their soul in the offing. They've managed to work the tension between uncompromising and accessible beautifully. I think my favorite song so far is actually "Love Dog", which I haven't seen mentioned in any of the reviews of the album, but I don't think there's a weak track there, although the drum beat and production on the latter half of "Shout Me Out" leaves something to be desired.

Metacritic has it as the album of the year so far, and I think I probably agree.

***

It was time to go do some work when this blog began, but now I'm actually going to do it.

Someday

2008-09-17T08:48:00.000-07:00

Someday, someone is going to look back on this blog and say "what did the John Bates Clark award winning economist Frederick Ghansah have to say about the shocking events in the economy in fall of 2008?" And then they will look back on this blog, and think to themselves, "not much".

One of the things I should probably do is explain what it is that an economist actually does, or more specifically, what I intend to do as an economist. This is a question that I get asked very frequently, and I am seldom able to give an answer that is satisfactory to either myself or my audience. People assume I know about what everyone thinks of as "the economy": stocks, Wall Street, investment, dividends, all that. But of course, I profess a layman's knowledge at best of the above topics, which leads people to ask "then what do you do?" At which point I construct a sort of ad hoc explanation, which generally references the topics of the last few papers I've read or something.

What is a more satisfactory answer? I'm not entirely sure yet. I'll have to get back to you on that.

A word on the election.

2008-09-15T20:56:00.000-07:00

Balderdash.

Denouement

2008-09-10T12:39:00.000-07:00

I used to have a lot of respect for John McCain.

Procrastination blogging

2008-09-08T20:24:00.000-07:00

I should probably be studying, so that is why I am writing in this blog. This is after successfully delaying dinner in order to avoid studying. (I said to myself, "I'll start studying after dinner." Thus if I never eat dinner, I never have to study. The logic is impenetrable.) That strategy failed, (I am composing this blog while chewing a mouthful of burrito) so here I am. Anyway, enough with the meta blog, on with the blog:

As I went to get a burrito for dinner, admitting the futility of plan Never Eat Dinner, I was working on my backup plan, which was writing a blog entry about why I had started reading Harry Potter, with connections to postmodernism, niche marketing, and formative childhood experiences. If you think that sounds like vintage self-congratulatory, narcissistic blogging, well, you're probably right. Anyway, at the burrito place, I ordered a huge burrito and a quesadilla to go along with it, in the full knowledge that finishing both of them tonight would be a difficult, inglorious task. But I was hungry, so my brain wasn't fully functional. On my way back, I walked past an old homeless woman on the sidewalk, who was preparing her own dinner - cold green peas out of a can. Her back was facing me, which I was thankful for; I would feel impossibly guilty looking her in the eye, knowing I had an overabundance of food. About 10 steps after I walked past her, I groaned, knowing that there was essentially no possible justification for me to not share my food with her. The usual reasons either didn't apply (I couldn't exactly claim that she would trade food for alcohol), or sounded weak and tinny.

So I dug out the quesadilla from the bag and headed back to the lady, who was still rummaging through her things. She was still facing away from the street, and didn't respond when I said "excuse me", probably because it has been awhile since someone has spoken to her without her speaking first. I held out the plastic box with the quesadilla in it wordlessly, and she responded with a surprised, muted "oh". She took the box carefully out of my hands, waiting for me to let go before pulling it towards her, in the same way that cashiers do so that you don't feel like they are snatching your money from your hand. When she said "Thank you", she sounded like someones kindly grandmother, no traces of the roughness or grit that comes with sleeping on sidewalks. I didn't know what to say, so I said, "Have a good evening", which sounded perfunctory and empty, and walked away.

I didn't feel good about it at all. I hadn't shared my food out of self-righteousness, exactly, perhaps more out of a sense of duty. It wasn't out of love, probably, and although that would be the ideal, maybe duty isn't so bad a substitute sometimes. But at the same time, the utter futility of the gesture hit me pretty hard. She ate a warm meal tonight, but she'll be back to cold peas tomorrow and the day after that. In the long run, I haven't done anything to improve her life at all. And worse than that, it is not entirely clear to me what I could have done. It is times like these when the vast majority of economics seems totally irrelevant and pointless - the times when it should be most salient and operative. I don't know what to make of that (re)realization, so I guess I'll end this blog here.

Observation

2008-09-03T23:20:00.000-07:00

Is it just me, or is it a flat contradiction to pledge to decrease carbon emissions and dependence on oil while simultaneously promising to drill for more oil? Am I missing something obvious?

One Thing That Worries Me

2008-09-03T09:24:00.000-07:00

My goal is to maintain this blog regularly and indefinitely, under my real name. The problem with that is the fact that such a blog lasts forever. Since I'm trying to maintain an "honest" blog, chances are that eventually I'll say something stupid that will become embarrassing to me in the future. On the off-chance that I actually achieve my goals of finishing graduate school and the like, presumably, my students will be easily able to access this blog and read some ridiculous statement from the past.

A grown-up blog

2008-09-02T19:36:00.001-07:00

I figured that now that I'm an adult and everything, I might as well start a grown-up blog, so this is it. I'm not entirely sure what it will be like, but I was tired of all that extraneous stuff that comes with other blogs, like friends, interests, listing what you're listening to and all that. I would call it "juvenile", but I was happily participating a matter of months ago.

I'm not entirely what this blog will be "about" exactly. Probably just things I'm interested in at any given time. I guess we'll see how it goes. I guess my only rule is that I intend to have as little pretension as possible.