You do you

The phrase has been seeping into our family conversations courtesy of K1. A search turned up this delightlful Colson Whitehead article.

Wherever you hail from, you’ll recognize “You do you” and “Do you” as contemporary versions of that life-­affirming chestnut “Just be yourself.” It’s the gift of encouragement from one person to another, what we tell children on the first day of kindergarten, how we reassure buddies as they primp for a blind date or rehearse asking for a raise. You do you, as if we could be anyone else. Depending on your essential qualities, this song of oneself is cause for joy or tragedy. 

You’ve also come across that expression’s siblings, like the defensive, arms-­crossed “Haters gonna hate” or the perpetually shrugging “It is what it is.” Like black holes, they are inviolable. All criticism is destroyed when it hits the horizon of their circular logic, and not even light can escape their immense gravity. In a world where the selfie has become our dominant art form, tautological phrases like “You do you” and its tribe provide a philosophical scaffolding for our ever-­evolving, ever more complicated narcissism. 

William Safire, writing in these pages in 2006, coined a word for these self-­justifying constructions: “tautophrases.” This was in the midst of his investigation into the ubiquity of “It is what it is,” as evidenced in its use by cultural specimens as disparate as Britney Spears and Scott McClellan, a press secretary for President George W. Bush. (Pause to reminisce.) Whether the subject is an imperfect situation to be endured (“The new coffee in the break room is the pits”) or an existential conundrum (“My body is a bunch of atoms working in brief harmony before death returns them to the universe”), “It is what it is” effectively ends the discussion so that we can stop, nod in solemn agreement and move on. 

According to Safire, “It is what it is” has many tautophrasal relatives and ancestors. “What’s done is done,” “What will be will be.” The striking thing about his examples is how many of them preserve and burnish the established order. When God informs Moses, “I am that I am,” he is telling the prophet, “Look, get off my back, I’m God.” I’ve never argued with a bush, burning or otherwise, but I imagine they’re quite persuasive. “Boys will be boys” and “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” excuse mischief and usually worse, reinforcing the dominant masculine code. It’s doubtful that “I just discovered penicillin!” or “Publishing Willa Cather’s ‘My Antonia’ was the most satisfying moment of my career” elicited a gruff “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” but perhaps I am cynical. Popeye’s “I yam what I yam,” however, remains what it has always been — the pathetic ravings of a man who claims superstrength, when it is obvious to everyone else in the room that spinach merely ameliorates the symptoms of an undiagnosed vitamin deficiency. A scurvy dog, indeed. 

While the word “tautophrase” didn’t take off, the phenomenon it described blossomed, abetted by hip-­hop. Sure, philosophical resignation has been a part of the music as far back as 1984, when Run-­D.M.C. reeled off a litany of misfortune — “Unemployment at a record high/People coming, people going, people born to die” — and underscored it with a weary, “It’s like that/and that’s the way it is.” But grandiosity, narcissism and artful braggadocio have also been integral to hip-­hop from the start, whether they were the fruit of a supercharged sense of self or a coping mechanism for a deleterious urban environment. As with everything interesting in black culture, hip-­hop’s swaggering tautophrases have been digested and regurgitated by the mainstream. Last year, Taylor Swift somewhat boringly testified that not only are “Haters gonna hate,” they’re gonna “hate hate hate” exponentially, presumably in direct proportion to her lack of culpability. Instead of serving the establishment (monotheism, patriarchal energies), the modern tautophrase empowers the individual. Regardless of how shallow that individual is.

More at the link. The article should also have mentioned that the original source for "What's done is done" is none other than Lady Macbeth.

Things I never knew

Authorities warned of minor flooding along the Sacramento River in Tehama County and Cache Creek in Yolo County.

From the Pineapple Express. After all, YOLO.

On misreading "mending wall"

Possibly, the most famous line in the poem is "good fences make good neighbors".

How should it be interpreted or more generally is there a wrong interpretation? When trying to interpret a poem is there even a wrong interpretation? According to Andrew Sullivan, yes. In his post, Sullivan quotes a comment from one of his links:

The narrator of the poem is annoyed by his neighbor’s insistence that there has to be a fence between them. If only his neighbor would get beyond his father’s beliefs –originating in an old proverb –and reconsider his thinking.

Reading the poem, I actually don't detect any annoyance - puzzlement, perhaps, and even some mischievous questioning of why "good fences make good neighbors". Yet the speaker in the poem continues to participate in the annual ritual of rebuilding the wall.

An even more over the top critique of the positive interpretation of the phrase that good fences indeed make good neighbors is from Eleanor Barkhorn who appears not to have read the poem at all. She writes:

"Mending Wall" is a polemic against building walls that separate us from our neighbors—the poem opens with the line,"Something there is that doesn't love a wall" and goes on to describe the narrator's attempts to talk his neighbor out of putting one up.

Polemic? Hardly. Clever, yes. And the speaker never really tries to talk his neighbor out of rebuilding it. However barkborn has pointed out another often quoted line: "Something there that doesn't love a wall". Every year, the wall falls down - why? The cold New England winters and the frost buildup between the cracks as well as the expansion and contraction due to temperature changes is the something that doesn't love a wall. Yes, the speaker does seem to indicate that the natural state of the wall is for it to fall. There is a sense that the rebuilding of the wall is an annual ritual that he participates in despite his concerns - perhaps an acknowledgment that the wall is necessary - necessary for what?

Possibly this is the only time he sees his neighbor so the wall allows them to get together to rebuild it every year.  Possibly the wall delineates not only their property lines but also delineates each other's responsibility toward each other and the act of rebuilding the wall is one that reestablishes the unwritten responsibilities and rules.

There is no wrong way to interpret a poem although I don't really see Sullivan and Barkhorn arguing persuasively that good fences do not make good neighbors. Another comment comes from a defender of the humanities who says parenthetically:

In a like manner, how often has Frost’s “The Mending Wall” been quoted out of context in debates about immigration reform? “Good fences make good neighbors,” indeed.

His disdain for the line good fences make good neighbors is clear - yet he does not argue against it since that is not the point of his article. His argues why Dead Poets Society is such a bad movie because the students do not take part in careful reading or analysis of the texts that are in the movie. He writes:

In a hackneyed speech about resisting conformity that he seems to have delivered many times before, Keating invokes that oft-invoked but rarely understood chestnut, “The Road Not Taken”: “Robert Frost said, ‘Two roads diverged in a wood and I / I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference.’” 

Wha—? Has Keating actually read the poem from which he so blithely samples? For Robert Frost said no such thing: a character in his poem says it. And we’re meant to learn, over the course of that poem, that he’s wrong—that he’s both congratulating and kidding himself. He chooses his road ostensibly because “it was grassy and wanted wear”; but this description is contradicted in the very next lines—“Though as for that, the passing there / Had worn them really about the same,” and—more incredibly still—“both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.” He wants to claim to have taken the exceptional road, if not the spiritual high road; but he knows on some level that it’s a hollow boast. 

Keating hasn’t actually read “The Road Not Taken” in any meaningful sense; rather, he’s adopted it, adapted it, made it his own—made it say what he wants it to say. His use of those closing lines, wrenched from their context, isn’t just wrong—it’s completely wrong, and Keating uses them to point a moral entirely different from that of Frost’s poem. (In a like manner, how often has Frost’s “The Mending Wall” been quoted out of context in debates about immigration reform? “Good fences make good neighbors,” indeed.)

As a student of poetry should know - sometimes there can be multiple interpretations of a poem each just as valid as he shows in his analysis of The Road Not Taken. Yes, Keating was wrong in that Frost didn't literally mean what he said. On the point that while the speaker of the poem may not have said something - it doesn't mean that the poet isn't the speaker of the poem - nor is the poem always about what it seems to say it is about.

In the end the all article really ends up showing is that the author decided to interpret it one way:  "He wants to claim to have taken the exceptional road, if not the spiritual high road; but he knows on some level that it’s a hollow boast." Although there are different interpretations as well:

"So the point of the poem is that everyone wants to look back and think that their choices matter. But in reality, s--t just happens the way that it happens, and it doesn’t matter."

In the end, both the author and Dead Poets Society are about equal in their defense of the humanities.

Fog of war

It's easy to be confused during traumatic events.

During the shooting at the Naval Yard, there were conflicting reports as to whether there was one, two, or even three shooters. Even after killing the shooter an hour after the rampage that began at 8:30 am, authorities weren't sure if there was a second shooter. Consequently, people who were in hiding did not leave until almost midnight.

Yesterday, media reports and eyewitness testimony of shootout at the US Capitol seem to conflict that it leaves some doubt as to what really happened.

Here is one report:

The driver of the black Infiniti had a toddler with her, confounding everyone who watched the car crash through barriers and lead police through the heart of high-security Washington.

Here is another:

“Whoa! Whoa!,” Secret Service officers were shouting at the car, according to a witness, Shawn Joseph, 29. “It looked liked [the driver was] scared or lost. I thought they might have been a tourist.”

But then, witnesses said, officers tried to place a barrier in front of the car. The driver swerved. The officers moved the barrier. She hit it, and a Secret Service officer was thrown up on the hood and then off the car.

In one the driver crashed through it, in another she merely hit it. Of course I described this as a shootout in the preceding paragraph which of course it wasn't.

This is definitely a mystery: why would a seemingly normal person behave the way they did? Did the authorities overreact by shooting here? At least one was close enough to see that it was a woman and possibly with a child in the car. Could it no have been interpreted as a hostage situation? It's hard to know in the fog of war.

Talking and writing

Andrew Gelman wonders why no one exclaims with a ‘Why!’ anymore. I concur that it mostly has to do with talking versus writing. Likewise, I would write ‘concur’ but would say ‘agree’. One word that has been striking me in the face is raconteur. I first encountered this in Emily Fox Gordon’s Book of Days: Personal essays. She points out that these aren’t memoirs or autobiography and again, I concur. I enjoyed them and I can see why they won’t work as blog posts since there are many blog posts that can work as personal essays as well, especially those in Happiness Project.

For instance, at a wedding she congratulates a relative for being such an excellent raconteur. It would be a strange to say to someone, “Excellent raconteuring, dude!”

I encountered the word again in Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed although I thought the word was overused. At least twice he described someone as a raconteur. Another tired phrase in the book was ‘swing for the fences’.

Things I don’t understand

1. The Great Gatsby Curve: Looks like a straight line to me.
2. Tablet: How did the iPad and similar devices end up being labeled a tablet? To me, this had always been a tablet. Or this.

The new culture?

What can I possibly think about this?

Meet Sophia Pinto: the 21st century's standard-issue, all-American perfect 10.

The 5-foot-5 Minnesota native -- a sly, funny, 22-year-old natural blonde who spends every summer bikini-clad on the shores of Lake Minnetonka -- works out five days a week. Her slim waist and megawatt smile hearken back to the polyvinyl glamour of the original Barbie doll.

In fact, if Mattel were to redesign Barbie based on the new millennium's ideal woman, she would likely resemble Pinto. Healthy, athletic, alluring, and smart (Pinto will graduate early this month from Northwestern University), she's both a role model and a sex symbol.

And if you were to undress Pinto, you'd find she embodies yet another trademark characteristic of the plastic glamour girl-turned-careerwoman: Like Barbie, Pinto has no pubic hair.

We used to date but now it’s hookups.

Herbenick [Indiana University researcher] recalls one encounter in which a popular, well-liked college student in a class she taught openly professed that he had never hooked up with a girl who had pubic hair, and would frankly be disgusted to undress a woman and discover a veil of genital fur.

We used to go steady but now its …

"I personally find myself a little more attractive when I don't have it," Pinto explains. "But one time I had a consistent hookup and he told me, 'Either way, you're attractive. You're a naked girl, and you're in my bed. Doesn't matter.'"

Consistent hookup?

Fracking (Frakking) Republicans

This NYT article was probably written to demonstrate that it is a myth that Republicans are pro-busines:

As energy companies move to drill in densely populated areas from Pennsylvania to Texas, battles are breaking out over who will have the final say in managing the shale gas boom.
…
The battle is playing out in Pennsylvania as the Republican-controlled legislature considers bills that would in their current form sharply limit a community’s right to control where gas companies can operate on private property. Critics say the final bill could vastly weaken local zoning powers and give industry the upper hand in exchange for a new tax, which municipalities badly need.
The legislation has struck a nerve in a state where land control has long been considered quintessentially local.

“I’m a conservative Republican, and this goes against all my principles,” said Brian Coppola, the chairman of the Board of Supervisors of Robinson Township, in Washington County west of Pittsburgh. The pending legislation, he said, “is an enormous land grab on the part of the industry. He added, “Our property rights are being trampled.”        

The brouhaha is over the following:

Local governments argue that drilling is an industrial activity, just like that of a gas station or a cement factory, that should be subject to zoning. Dozens of towns, cities and counties across the country have enacted rules on drilling noise, lighting and the distance from homes and, in some cases, outright bans. In New York State alone, there have been at least 70 such actions.
…
The flurry of local rules comes as the federal government inches forward on a national study of hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, the process used to extract previously inaccessible natural gas from shale deep underground.

Frak, I was familiar with from BSG. But it’s a little funny to see how a simple character difference has carried the word into the mainstream media.

What makes a headline

Dow average plunges 513, worst drop since 2008

or, its equivalent

Dow average plunges 4.3 percent, worst drop since 2008

Does faith=trust?

Faith in:
1. Markets
2. Government intervention
3. The justice system
4. The constitution, the founding fathers

Now replace the above with trust.

What does an organization in disarray mean?

The BBC reported the following today:

The arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn over charges of sexual assault has thrown the International Monetary Fund (IMF) into disarray.

What does it mean for an organization to be in disarray? Or in turmoil? If I were to walk by the IMF today would I see the signs of disarray? Or turmoil (or whatever word the press chooses to describe)? Disarray means disorder or confusion, which in an organizational setting would mean that the IMF does not really know how to act or acts erratically.

If the press describes an organization as being in turmoil or in disarray can an employee of that organization also make the same claim? “Geez, boss I can’t really work today because our company is in disarray.”

Race and Ethnicity

Reading Rehman Rashid made me wonder what this term/phrase really means. It's on Census forms and various other official and school documents for K1 and K2. In the US I would fill in Asian and when working with public use data I've seen Filipino or even Malaysian as a race/ethnicity usually in the 'Other' category.

Curiously, in Malaysia where this question is always mandatory in all official forms (including religion!) I would have filled in Chinese. So race/ethnicity is relative to where we are, but does where we are define who we are, and does it also define who we are supposed to be as well what our roles are depending on where we are? Or is this question just another useless item on a questionnaire?

Over-active voice

The passive voice seems to have fallen out of favor over the years and I don't really know why.
When I was in school, the passive voice was encouraged among other reasons, it conveyed the humbleness of the writer. These days, the passive voice has even carried over to scientific and technical writing.

For instance, it is also advocated here (note the use of passive voice is to sound less accusatory). It is also encouraged here for the following reasons:

We find an overabundance of the passive voice in sentences created by self-protective business interests, magniloquent educators, and bombastic military writers (who must get weary of this accusation), who use the passive voice to avoid responsibility for actions taken. Thus "Cigarette ads were designed to appeal especially to children" places the burden on the ads — as opposed to "We designed the cigarette ads to appeal especially to children," in which "we" accepts responsibility. At a White House press briefing we might hear that "The President was advised that certain members of Congress were being audited" rather than "The Head of the Internal Revenue service advised the President that her agency was auditing certain members of Congress" because the passive construction avoids responsibility for advising and for auditing.

Yet, the active voice when used can lead to criticism such as this where Tyler Cowen is apparently reprimanding John Taylor for his over-use of I in Taylor's memoir Global Financial Warriors. My theory is that the rise of the use of the active voice coincides with the rise of the Internet, reality TV and in essence the ME generation.

The strength of our convictions

In a previous post I said:
We are not always arguing from evidence but from the strength of our convictions - or for lack of a better word, our faith.

The example I used was from Krugman:
Economists who didn’t go down this path, who didn’t flush everything the profession had learned between 1936 and 1973 down the memory hole, aren’t especially baffled by the situation we’re in now; on the contrary, it looks like an extreme version of a fairly familiar event, and policy recommendations aren’t hard to make.

The policy recommendations I am assuming are the following:
1. More fiscal stimulus.
2. Keep nominal interest rates low.
3. Austerity is misplaced.

My reading of this is that the policy recommendations are not purely model based nor are they based on overwhelming evidence. Reasonable economists can argue as to how large a fiscal stimulus could be, the effectiveness of nominal interest rates at the zero bound or that austerity measures in a recession can lead to a more severe contraction if x,y,z conditions are met.

Yet the policy recommendation as stated is based more on conviction (my read of it, that is) and analogy than on anything that we have really learned from the Great Depression. Yes, we may have learned all of the above, yet as economists and so-called scientists we are required to ask ourselves whether these policy recommendations can backfire. One thing that economists do not lack is humility. When we are wrong we brag about how wrong we are and how we cannnot do anything about it - recall Easterly's "economists did something even better than predict the crisis. We correctly predicted that we would not be able to predict it."

The role of the blogosphere seems to be to drown out its critics (or to serve as advocate) rather than as a place to debate the nuances of disagreements. Moreover, it serves to accentuate my claim that arguments on the blog are either shrill-based on faith or hunch-based. An example of the latter is Tyler Cowen (and I don't mean to pick on him - just as an example):

If monetary policy is sufficiently accommodative, I do not see that we are risking a 1937-8 repeat. In 1936-7, monetary policy was not just insufficiently expansionary, it was absolutely draconian.

Again, the language matters - what is "sufficiently accommodative" and "insufficiently expansionary" and "draconian" and how do they translate in terms of policy?

Arguments for a policy that I would like to see would go as follows - again, using the above example (and I'm making this up as I go along):
If monetary policy is sufficiently accommodative, I do not see that we are risking a 1937-8 repeat. In 1936-7, monetary policy was not just insufficiently expansionary, it was absolutely draconian. By sufficiently accomodative, I mean that M1 is expanding at 5% each quarter for the next 3 quarters while by insufficiently expansionary I mean that M1 begins to slow to 3% each quarter for the next 2 quarters. I assume that monetary policy in 1936-37 was draconian because interest rates rose by more than x percent and M1 slowed to y percent. And so forth. Yes, I'd like to see these numbers even if they are just pulled out of thin air. (Some would call it hand-waving economics even with the numbers, but then I think its a lot better than without the numbers.)

Biased summary

In an earlier post, I complained about the following:
"I also dislike the fact that while Krugman can be biased and does occassionally say so, the strength of his convictions can drown out opposing points of view in his 'digested views of academic literature' ."

The claim calls for an example and this is one (and perhaps not a good one since I am in agreement with him):

1. Lucas and his disciples agree that the economy looks Keynesian — that is, it surely looks as if monetary and fiscal policy have real effects — but argue that an equilibrium approach with imperfect information can explain why, while rejecting Keynesian policy implications. And they ridicule Keynesian economics.
2. By 1980 — three decades ago! — it is already clear that the Lucas project has failed. Equilibrium models with imperfect information cannot, in fact, explain key facts about business cycles, especially the way recessions persist even though everyone knows that they’re in a recession.
3. Rather than admitting that they went down the wrong track, however, the advocates of freshwater macro double down; they decide to forget about what they used to know about the apparent effects of demand shocks, and explain the business cycle in terms of real shocks.
4. This approach also falls short; in an attempt to rescue the models, ever more epicycles are added, and whatever clarity may once have existed gets lost.
5. Freshwater economists declare that the business cycle is deeply puzzling, and that we need much more research before we can make policy recommendations.
In short, what we’re looking at is learned helplessness. Economists who didn’t go down this path, who didn’t flush everything the profession had learned between 1936 and 1973 down the memory hole, aren’t especially baffled by the situation we’re in now; on the contrary, it looks like an extreme version of a fairly familiar event, and policy recommendations aren’t hard to make.
It’s only if you’re committed to a failed research project — a project that failed a generation ago, but refused to admit it — that you’re baffled.

I would characterize this as a very strong (and negative) summary of the state of "fresh-water economics" and indirectly, of neo-classical economics and DSGE. While not completely inaccurate, the strength of his arguments are in the rhetoric, e.g.

- By 1980 — three decades ago! — it is already clear that the Lucas project has failed.
By using a date of 1980 and emphasizing that economists wasted 30 years he is emphasizing the fact that these economists were beating a dead horse. To me it isn't clear that the "Lucas project" failed by 1980. Reasonable arguments could be used to date this at 1990 or even as late 2000.
- Rather than admitting that they went down the wrong track, however, the advocates of freshwater macro double down...
The use of the phrase "double down" here implies desparation on the part of these economists. Again, I would disagree (mildly I suppose since I think that real shocks aren't very compelling) but one can also argue that these economists essentially contributed to the field by taking real shocks as far as they could go before "turning back" and deciding that "fresher avenues" can be found in price stickiness. Isn't the nature of science (something economics tries to lay unsuccessful claim to) and scientific discovery be to explore all avenues regardless of where they lead?
- Economists who didn’t go down this path, who didn’t flush everything the profession had learned between 1936 and 1973 down the memory hole, aren’t especially baffled by the situation we’re in now; on the contrary, it looks like an extreme version of a fairly familiar event, and policy recommendations aren’t hard to make.
Again, the phrase "flush everything" seems to indicate that these economists stubbornly clung on to the real shocks hypothesis (to the extent that Ed Prescott declared business cycles were explained). True, some might have but it is misleading to claim that the entire fresh-water school rejected price stickiness or fiscal stimulus effects (or whatever we were supposed to have learned between 1936 and 1973).

In some ways, this last fragment is also an example of what I had claimed in the post:
"We are not always arguing from evidence but from the strength of our convictions - or for lack of a better word, our faith." More on this later.

Words that I rarely encounter

But seemed more common when I was growing up:

1. Fag: I'm fagged out from running all those errands.
2. Queer: The queerest thing happened to me this afternoon.
3. Gay: I woke up and was greeted by a gay morning.
4. Whinge: After all those errands, I started whinging about how tired I was.

Most of these words are mainly British use. Perhaps they are still common on the Continent.

Tranche

Andrew Gelman wonders why "fancy" financial products use the word "tranche" rather than slice. I suspected the reason was historical - perhaps related to loan tranches by the IMF post Bretton Woods. Thus, I was surprised when a Google News Search using "loan" and "tranche" turned up entries as early as 1930 referring to the Dawes Plan which was an attempt by the Triple Entente (basically Great Britain, France and Russia) to collect war reparations from Germany.

The use of tranches for securities came later. The search for "security" and "tranche" gave results as early as 1980.

Getting nasty as a regulator

Again, from David Leonhardt:

It [Canada] relies more on blunt rules than the United States does. Canada requires any mortgage with a less than 20 percent down payment to be insured, and those mortgages are much less common there. It also sets a standard leverage ratio of no more than 20. As Julie Dickson, the chief financial regulator in Canada, told me, “We become nasty when banks get close to it.”

What does becoming nasty mean? Do the CEOs get waterboarded? Do the banks get nationalized? Does Ms. Dickson don her dominatrix outfit and get the CEOs to lick her boots?

Malaysian English

This post on evolving English reminded me about the Malaysian/Singaporean brand of English:
1. I don't want to friend you anymore. (This is before Facebook!)
2. Can I follow you home? This requires some elaboration. It actually means to get ride with you, i.e. Can I get a ride with you to my place?

The use of "I"

Edward Tufte's - see earlier post - criticism of David Galenson's book included Galenson's use of the word "I" (or rather too much use of the word "I"). I think that the main reason for this has been the move away from using the passive to the active voice:
"The hypothesis tested is ..." versus "I test the following hypothesis".
On a similar note, I also see articles where, instead of "I", the author uses, "We". This works fine when there are multiple authors but I also sometimes come across these even though it is a single-authored paper. I find it a little disconcerting but am willing to let it go.

Personally, I've always preferred the passive voice but at work, we are constantly being urged to write using the active voice. I'm not sure why there is a trend toward the active voice - I feel like I'm writing my resume or something.