The Elusiveness of Value

Economics used to be so much easier when things were about growing food and bending metal.  When we were trading sheep for grain and grain for horseshoes, the more sheep, grain and horseshoes we made for each other, the better off we were.  As we’ve worked our way up the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs, figuring out what’s valuable and what’s not gets wickedly complex.

Thought experiment:

If you have $10, there are all kinds of things you can do with your hard-earned, Federal Reserve-endorsed, green portrait of Alexander Hamilton.  If you use it to buy a sandwich (sure, an expensive sandwich), you’ve engaged in a transaction that has benefitted both you and the gal selling you the sandwich.  Everyone’s happy.  Economic value has been created.

But if instead a gal steals your $10, we can all agree that no economic value was created.  It’s simply a wealth transfer; no one has created anything and you’re certainly not happy.  The act of stealing also has the negative externality of reducing your trust and thus future economic activity.

These are the extremes on either side of a value continuum; there are a whole lot of fuzzy stuff in-between.  Consider gambling.  Let’s say you play the slots in Vegas with your $10 for an hour and eventually lose your money.  Was economic value created?  Hard to say.  Casino gambling combines two functions: entertainment and insidious wealth extraction.  The casino can argue that they provided you an entertaining service, which included drinks and time in their ornate, oxygenated room protected from the sun’s harmful UV rays and all distracting indications of time.  You can argue back that you thought you were going to make money — do a little wealth extracting of your own — and you did not intend to lose your $10.

How about spending $10 to see a movie?  Remember, economics is the system of how we provide for each other the things that will enhance our well-being.  If you find the movie highly enjoyable, it has enhanced your well-being as much as a sandwich, and the people who sold you the movie are happy you saw their film.  Everyone’s happy.  Economic value has been created.

But what if the movie was bad?  How about if it was really, really bad?  It’s hard for me to say if economic value was created, though GDP did go up as a result of that transaction.  How about if you paid $10 for a movie, but when you went into the theater, it wasn’t a movie at all, just a blank screen for two hours?  Isn’t that the same thing as a gal stealing your $10 bill?  Or more interestingly, how’s the blank screen different from a bad movie?  Or… how, in a very technical economic sense, is a blank screen that’s supposed to be a movie even different from a great movie that enhanced lives?

The difference is people’s well-being.  I submit that economic value is created only if everyone involved in the transaction is satisfied with what they got out of it.  Unfortunately, traditional economic metrics just measure the back-and-forth activity regardless of how much lives were enhanced.  I.e., economics treats the blank screen and the good movie the same.

I’m not arguing for some type of goofy Bhutanesque gross national happiness index, and I’d rather see GDP go up instead of down.  I’m arguing that as economies become less about feeding, clothing, and sheltering people, goods become more about improving people’s mental and emotional lives.  For poor countries that are hustling to make more sheep, grain and horseshoes, GDP is a wonderful proxy for the well-being of a nation.  But as rich countries’ economies become more about the exchange of ideas that make us feel better, the exact percentage of year-to-year changes in GDP aren’t nearly as important.  We shouldn’t pretend it is.

I Love the Internet

Because:

1.  An anonymous blogger can convert his thoughtfully written, opinionated, chortle-inducing emails to some friends into thoughtfully written, opinionated, chortle-inducing blog posts and collect a readership of hundreds of daily readers in under a year.  I started out as one of a handful initial readers (maybe on a couple of early days, the only one) of blogger Taunter.  Through trackbacks and comments on larger blogs, Taunter collected a few more handfuls of readers and wrote an excellent post on health-care rescission that caught the attention of the majority of economics bloggers who write on health care, from Kling to Kwak to Krugman.  With about 69,000 page views, Taunter likes to describe it as “a bit like getting the crowd at Lambeau Field to listen to me for a few minutes.”  It’s hard for me to believe that his post didn’t have at least some impact on the anti-rescission measures in the health-care bill.

He’s now retiring from the blogging game, and the comments from his final entry are endearing and a little wistful:  “And then, depression set in.”  “You are a great teacher and writer.”  “I’m depressed that you are going to give up the blog for a while. I always made sure I stopped in at least once a day.” “This is the one blog I visit daily. The only one.  You write one of the best blogs on the web and I’ve read every single one of your posts.”

Even one of my favorite economics bloggers Steve Randy Waldman pipes in: “I’m really sorry to see you go. I hope that you come back.  Your writing is kind of brilliant.”

He will be missed.

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2.  In my last post about the ten best articles I read in the past year, I mention Douglas McGray’s New Yorker article on the charter school Green Dot as one of my favorites.  And kind of like saying Beetlejuice three times, into my inbox pops a message from McGray saying thanks for the shout out.  He also called my blog “interesting, thoughtful.”  Obviously, I’ve since ordered Idea Locker posters that say, “The blog that The New Yorker calls ‘interesting, thoughtful.’”

(For the San Franciscans, McGray is also the editor-in-chief of a live “magazine” event known as Pop-Up Magazine.  Though the next show’s date isn’t set yet, I’m likely to attend.)

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3.  Funny shit like this.

Ten Best Articles of 2009

The ten best articles I’ve read this year:

10.  “Gladwell-Simmons II: Ultimate Rematch,” by Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell, ESPN.  A hilarious back-and-forth between two of the best, popular-nonfiction writers talking sports, with a heavy dose of celebrity references.  The best part about it is that it reads like two guys just having a ton of fun bantering with each other over email — which is exactly what it is.

9.  “Wall Street on the Tundra,” by Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair.  Finance’s most entertaining writer visits Iceland in the middle of the financial apocalypse.  My favorite moment in the article is when Lewis visits Iceland’s head of state, who, as head of a country with 300,000 people, is more like a mayor of a small-ish US city.  “‘I’m here to see the prime minister,’ I say for the first time in my life. He’s unimpressed. Anyone here can see the prime minister. Half a dozen people will tell me that one of the reasons Icelanders thought they would be taken seriously as global financiers is that all Icelanders feel important. One reason they all feel important is that they all can go see the prime minister anytime they like.”

8.  “Tent City,” by George Saunders, GQ.  Saunders spends about a week in the ad hoc homeless encampment in Fresno known as Tent City, now defunct.  Part anthropological, part comedy, party tragedy, the article looks at the grisly details of poverty and its intractability without the default, cliché, binary views that people tend to bring to the topic: it’s their fault they’re homeless; or the homeless are great people and it’s society’s fault.  Saunders, a liberal guy, who’s touchingly sympathetic to many of the characters he meets, challenges his own initial view toward the end of his week, calling his misconception The Cratchit Confusion.

Bob Cratchit, the hero of Charles Dickens’s novel A Christmas Carol, is poor yet virtuous. He is honest, forthright, hardworking, clean, and articulate. He loves his family and is forgiving of those who oppress him. He is, in other words, easy to sympathize with. In the real world, however, the unfortunate may not be so likable. They may be stupid, dishonest, lazy, or mean. They may obfuscate, they may attack those weaker than themselves, they may claim their poverty is the fault of an unfair world, they may invent lives for themselves in which they are heroic sages, ahead of the curve. These negative qualities, in fact, may be the root cause of their misfortune.

7.  “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?” by Paul Krugman, New York Times Magazine.  Krugman makes a little too much of the battle between “fresh water” economists and “salt water” economists, i.e. a proxy for conservatives and liberals, but makes the bold — and I believe accurate — case that some core assumptions in today’s economic models are wrong.  “As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.”

6.  “Trial by Fire,” by David Grann, The New Yorker.  A chilling, in-depth piece on how Texas likely executed an innocent man, Cameron Todd Willingham.  Equally chilling is what’s happened since: The judge in the case wrote a logically incomprehensible defense for his actions in an op-ed, which was easily picked apart by Grann (Kottke’s link has a good summary).  Texas Governor Rick Perry removed three members of the Texas commission that initiated an investigation into the execution, which was spurred on by the story, 48 hours before testimony was supposed to start.  Yes, this happens in America. Today.

5.  “How American Health Care Killed My Father,” by David Goldhill, The Atlantic.  It’s best piece I’ve read to date on why the American system of health care is so expensive and so poor.  It’s a must-read for anyone who wants (or needs) a deep understanding of our health-case system.  Atul Gawande’s New Yorker piece is a close second.

4.  “The No-Stats All-Star,” by Michael Lewis, New York Times Magazine.  Lewis, chronicler of the underappreciated and champion of the sports nerd, turns his superb storytelling skills to basketball.  Through the story of Shane Battier, he details the gross imperfections of traditional basketball statistics.  I.e., Moneyball for basketball.

3.  “The Instigator,” by Douglas McGray, The New Yorker.  In the dismal world of California’s public schools, Steve Barr’s charter school Green Dot shows how real, meaningful change for the better is possible.  Green Dot has taken a surprisingly aggressive stance with its district “competitor” Los Angeles Unified School District, basically forcing LAUSD to hand over to Green Dot California’s most troubled high school, Locke High.  The early results are promising.  Also this year in The New Yorker, Steven Brill covers New York City’s Rubber Rooms, rooms where the district’s worst teachers show up to do nothing, some making $100,000 to specifically show up, and do nothing.

2.  “The Unfinished,” by D.T. Max, The New Yorker.  I told you I was a little obsessed with David Foster Wallace.  D.T. Max tells the story of DFW, his last days, and his unfinished novel, The Pale King.  Also mandatory reading for DFW fans is David Lipsky’s piece for Rolling Stone, “The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace.”

1.  “What Makes Us Happy?” by Joshua Wolf Shenk, The Atlantic.  The choice for my favorite article of the year wasn’t that close; it’s that good.  In the 1930s, Harvard researchers started studying 268 undergraduate men and followed them for the rest of their lives, chronicling their personal, intimate narratives (one of the subjects was John F. Kennedy, whose files are sealed until 2040).  While the premise of the study shifted as it went through multiple caretakers, the result is the broadest longitudinal study we have on lives and happiness.

In one of my early conversations with [the study's current director George Valliant], he described the study files as hundreds of Brothers Karamazovs. Later, after taking a stab at answering several Big Questions I had asked him—Do people change? What does the study teach us about the good life?—he said to me, “Why don’t you tell me when you have time to come up to Boston and read one of these Russian novels?”

Indeed, the lives themselves—dramatic, pathetic, inspiring, exhausting—resonate on a frequency that no data set could tune to. The physical material—wispy sheets from carbon copies; ink from fountain pens—has a texture. You can hear the men’s voices, not only in their answers, but in their silences, as they stride through time both personal (masturbation reports give way to reports on children; career plans give way to retirement plans) and historical (did they vote for Dewey or Truman?; “What do you think about today’s student protesters, drug users, hippies, etc.?”). Secrets come out. One man did not acknowledge to himself until he reached his late 70s that he was gay. With this level of intimacy and depth, the lives do become worthy of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.

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I track the all articles that I want to keep track of on my page at Delicious, which along with an RSS reader, has become an indispesible tool for me.  Also, thanks to Ben Casnocha for helping me with this list.

Addenda on Bling, Biology, and Books

A hodgepodge of updates on a hodgepodge of recent posts:

• Regarding my post on a potential gold bubble, the WSJ ran an article about the run-up in gold prices which notes the last gold bubble peaked at $2,300 and subsequently dropped to $298 in today’s dollars.  It goes on to say, “Gold may see a sharp pullback at some point, but prices could climb much higher before then.”  It quotes an investment manager who currently owns gold: “Ultimately, this ends in tears… But it doesn’t have to end anytime soon.”  Yikes.  At least he knows what game he’s playing.
• Following up on my nature-nurture post, another WSJ piece raises the possibility that some of us are more genetically predisposed to violence.  Our knowledge of genetics is so nascent that it’s inevitable that we’ll only learn more about how DNA impacts our character.  I don’t believe the realization that people have different natural tendencies impairs the moral argument for equality.  Ignoring science and pretending we’re all born exactly the same would.
• A few days after writing my post on What Fiction is For, I quasi-coincidentally read Jonathan Franzen’s essay “Why Bother?,” his rumination on the current state of literary fiction in American culture.  He interviews Shirley Brice Heath, a Brown anthropology professor who studies the audience for literature.  In a gonzo-journalism-like method, she rode public transportation in 27 different cities and roamed book stores, accosting people who had “substantive works of fiction” under their arms and earnestly asking them why they read.

With near-unanimity, Heath’s respondents described substantive works of fiction as, she said, “the only places where there was some civic, public hope of coming to grips with the ethical, philosophical and sociopolitical dimensions of life that were elsewhere treated so simplistically… And strong works of fiction are what refuse to give easy answers to the conflict, to paint things as black and white, good guys versus bad guys.”

Franzen reproduces a line he says to Heath on his evolving view of fiction: “A friend of mine keeps telling me that reading and writing are ultimately about loneliness.  I’m starting to come around.”  It makes me happy believing he’s talking about David Foster Wallace.

What Fiction is For

Nate Bolt points me toward an article by Jason Fried of 37Signals, one of those pieces on how people structure their days and personal management that I seem to have an insatiable appetite for.  Fried has a throwaway line in the article about what he chooses to read: “I don’t read fiction. I find it a waste of time.”  Nate also includes a tweet from his colleague Tony Tulathimutte who highlights the quote and says, “Jason Fried, paragon of brazen S. Valley philistinism.”  Philistinism.  Zing.

A number of otherwise intellectual people I encounter, particularly males, tend to have this same mildly denigrating attitude toward fiction.  It’s often not as explicitly stated as Fried’s comment, but the smug “I only read nonfiction” mantra carries the implicit opinion that fiction is just entertainment, in the same way an Adam Sandler movie might be one way to pass the time.  I’ll confess now that I carried this attitude for years; I once read 30 nonfiction books consecutively over a span of more than a year without reading a single novel.  I’ve since come around; a bit less than a third of what I read now is fiction.

As people, we’re capable of such an enormous range of thought and emotion, and fiction and art in general are mechanisms to engage those elements of what it’s like to be human.  For me, the written word has a precision that can achieve a depth I don’t get from other art like music or imagery.  Some people choose other means to achieve that — be it religion, intimate relationships, probing conversations — but to be utterly devoid of at least an understanding for what fiction is for is a signal of a lack of curiosity of what it’s like to be alive.

I like David Foster Wallace’s thoughts on the matter.  As I wrote in my review of DFW’s Infinite Jest, Jonathan Franzen and DFW defined fiction as “neutral middle ground on which to make a deep connection with another human being.”  In an interview with DFW from 1993 (HT: Ben Casnocha; who else?), there’s more.  And it’s beautifully said. (Emphases mine.)

I think all good writing somehow addresses the concern of and acts as an anodyne against loneliness. We’re all terribly, terribly lonely. And there’s a way, at least in prose fiction, that can allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can’t be in the real world. I don’t know what you’re thinking. I don’t know that much about you as I don’t know that much about my parents or my lover or my sister, but a piece of fiction that’s really true allows you to be intimate with… a world that resembles our own in enough emotional particulars so that the way different things must feel is carried out with us into the real world. I think what I would like my stuff to do is make people less lonely. Or really to affect people. I think sometimes what I’m doing, if I try to be particularly offensive or outrageous or whatever, is just being really hungry for some kind of effect.

…

What fiction and poetry are doing is what they’ve been trying to do for 2,000 years: affect somebody, make somebody feel a certain way, allow them to enter into relationships with ideas and with characters that are not permitted within the cinctures of the ordinary verbal intercourse we’re having here, you know: you don’t see me, I don’t see you. But every two or three generations the world gets vastly different, and the context in which you have to learn how to be a human being, or to have good relationships, or decide whether or not there is a God, or decide whether there’s such a thing as love, and whether it’s redemptive, become vastly different.

Shameless Plug: San Francisco Panorama

Similar to my last Shameless Plug for the movie The Hangover with my brother-in-law, the actor Ken Jeong, this unabashedly promotional post is for another family member, my sister Katrina Dodson.

In the Internet world, Katrina (who’s not the sister married to Ken) goes by the nom de légume Kale Daikon as the co-author of the blog Weird Vegetables. (Here’s a recent profile of her and her co-author Erin Klenow, aka Eggplant Kohlrabi, on KQED’s Bay Area Bites blog.  My favorite quote of my sister’s in the article: “People are more okay with weird fruit. They’re sugary, luscious, and voluptuous. Fruit is meant to seduce. That’s its biological function. Vegetables are gross. They have weird outgrowths. They’re all like take it or leave it.”)

This Tuesday, December 8, Dave Eggers’s McSweeney’s is publishing a one-time-only “newspaper,” a full-color, 320-page behemoth of a magazine newspaper they’re calling the San Francisco Panorama that they hope serves as a prototype for a “21st century newspaper.”  They’ve got an all-star roster of 100 or so contributors including William T. Vollman, George Saunders, Robert Hass, Junot Díaz, Stephen King, Michael Chabon, Jonah Lehrer, Bob Porterfield, and… Katrina Dodson.  Katrina’s written a piece on fall produce and the history of farmers’ markets in San Francisco.  The SF Chronicle, The New York Times, and of course, Weird Vegetables have been covering the project.

You can buy your very own copy at SF Gate or from McSweeny’s for $16.  However, I will be purchasing my copy from my sister who will be working the corner (sorry, K.) of 24th and Sanchez streets in San Francisco from what Katrina defines as “the early morning side” to noon on Tuesday.  In addition to seeing my sister hustling newspapers, purchasing a copy that day — either on the street or in stores — has the benefit of only costing $5.

Gold’s Fools

It’s looking like we’ve found our next bubble.  And it didn’t seem to take us very long.

(I wrote in an old post, “In an old issue of Outstanding Investor Digest from 1980s, I was struck by one investor’s comment about the Japan real estate bubble.  He talked about how rare bubbles are, and how he considered himself lucky, from an academic standpoint, to see a real-life bubble in his lifetime.”  I’m no Robert “Bubble Master” Shiller, but anecdotally, it does seem like they’ve become more frequent. The full post has my speculation as to why.)

First, what I don’t know: whether gold will go up or down the next six months, year, two years, etc.  I’m suspicious anyone does.  What I do know: We’re in the middle of a big gold party, people will eventually leave, and some poor fools will be left with the check.

Some very smart people, e.g. David Einhorn and John Paulson, as well as more pedestrian investors (though mutual funds like gold ETFs) are buying significant amounts of gold because they believe the dollar will lose its value and gold will appreciate in comparison.  Fine.  They may be right.  But the major problem with gold is that it doesn’t do anything.  It just sits there and collects dust.  Its quoted price is way out of whack with any type of decorative or industrial use.  Unlike cash in a bank, it doesn’t generate interest and compound, and unlike cattle, gold doesn’t mate and multiply.  Thus, it doesn’t really have an intrinsic value close to its quoted value.  And you can’t exactly use it to buy stuff.  Taunter waxes hilarious when he taunts his buddy for buying gold as a hedge in the event of a Mad Max-caliber catastrophe where paper money is worthless: “Why would some random guy selling gas or food who did not trust the currency accept shavings of your ingot instead?  If he did not trust any institution of government to function, wouldn’t he just steal your ingot?  Or at the very least, not show any more appreciation of shiny gold metal than tattered green paper?”

The catch about gold is that it has to be converted back into currency for it to be of any use.  In theory, a bond, a stock, or a house can at least continue to produce income.  Gold can’t.  Since there’s no intrinsic value to gold, in order for the quoted value of gold to keep increasing, by definition, there have to be greater fools who think the value of gold will go even higher because even greater fools will buy it from them.  But when the greatest fool finally buys in, the market necessarily crashes.  And it’s not like it hasn’t happened before: We had real, honest-to-god inflation in the late 1970s, but gold investors got killed — prices didn’t come back to those highs until recently, about 30 years later.

In order for Einhorn and Paulson to make money on gold, they’re going to have to get out of the burning building faster than most of the other folks at the party.  (Author’s note: They run wildly successful, multi-billion dollar hedge funds.  I don’t.)  And they might pull it off.   But they should recognize that they’re playing a high-stakes game of musical chairs.

The Nature-Nurture Rorscharch Test

Does nature or nurture have more of an impact on who we are?

Always an interesting topic of conversation.  Are we the way we are because of our DNA or because of the experiences we’ve acquired?  Of course, the right answer is “both,” but which one matters more?  Are our personalities more of a result of the genes we inherited or how we were raised?

Despite its ability to be an endless source of conversation, speculation and debate, the question, when phrased generally as it usually is, is meaningless.  The problem is that there’s no single measure of “us” (or “you” or “me”) and thus no linear scale to determine what variable had a larger impact.  We’re made up of many different attributes, and there’s no such thing as a meaningful composite score we can create to “measure” who we are.  Maybe my DNA strongly influences my tendency for salty foods over sweet foods, and maybe my early-stage family environment is more responsible for me being tidy.  But what weights do we attribute these different characteristics?  Does my food preference make up 0.02% of “me,” and my cleanliness make up 0.5%? There is no single data point that measures the entirety of who we are, and so in the absence of more narrow parameters, the question is invalid.

What makes the issue even more complicated is how do you determine what mattered “more” if both nature and nurture are each necessary?  If Albert Einstein was born 10,000 years ago, he’s not coming up with the theory of relativity.  Someone with a severe learning disability and an IQ of 70 isn’t coming up with it either.  In response to the generic nature-vs.-nurture question, psychologist Donald Hebb once retorted, “Which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, its length or its width?”

A nature-nurture question is only valid if both the inputs and the outputs are clearly defined.  For example, an interesting question would be, “How much narrower, if at all, would the differences in IQ be if everyone was raised in the exact same environment?”  Or, “How different would someone be if they were raised in a household in the 80th percentile of IQ/income/happiness/BMI (choose your metric of interest) versus the 20th percentile?”  A well-done Atlantic article covers the revelation that people may have different genetic predispositions to how impressionable they are to their early-stage environments: some are like tenacious dandelions who do fine in most environments and others are like fragile orchids with highly varying outcomes.

Since the simplistic nature-vs.-nurture question is logically invalid, the most interesting part about it is that it reveals someone’s default perspective on human nature — their initial bias.  A “nature” person is more likely to believe our outcomes are predetermined at birth, while a “nurture” person is more likely to believe that everyone would be good, smart people if only they had the right upbringing.  A “nature” person is more likely to being politically conservative; a “nurture” person is more likely to be liberal.

The next time you have a nature-vs.-nurture debate, specify the parameters unless you want to tip your hand.

Brief Addenda on Learning and Cash

Some brief things to add on two recent posts:

• Related to my post Non-Obvious Learning, David Brooks published a piece yesterday titled “The Other Education,” wherein he discusses how important it was to him to learn about the range of emotions as a teenager listening to Bruce Springsteen on the radio — his emotional education.

We don’t usually think of this second education. For reasons having to do with the peculiarities of our civilization, we pay a great deal of attention to our scholastic educations, which are formal and supervised, and we devote much less public thought to our emotional educations, which are unsupervised and haphazard. This is odd, since our emotional educations are much more important to our long-term happiness and the quality of our lives.

Later on:

I’m not claiming my second education has been exemplary or advanced. I’m describing it because I have only become aware of it retrospectively, and society pays too much attention to the first education and not enough to the second.

Right on, Boss.

• On Straight Cash Homey, my post on Asian-American weddings and the preference for cash instead of gifts off the registry, the always well-written and always-with-an-opinion Taunter makes an excellent comment and speculation:

You are actually seeing the absence of a particular cultural norm: in Protestant northwestern Europe, money is never discussed in public.

The rest of the world does not have this norm. The accepted level of ostentatious behavior is so different in Mediterranean Europe that rich Mediterraneans have created the Eurotrash demographic wherever they go, be it home games in St Tropez and Sardinia or away games in London/New York/Miami nightclubs.

Combine the lack of Max Weber issues with immigrant professional class “striver” values and it isn’t surprising that some cultures that are minorities within the US have a more forward acceptance of money. If it is acceptable within a culture to ask an acquaintance how much money he makes, it shouldn’t be surprising to discover a willingness to ask for cash at a wedding.

He also emails me the link to this NYT article on Korean weddings, along with an introductory quip: “This doesn’t happen in Copenhagen…”

Before entering a Korean wedding hall, guests normally line up to hand their offerings to a cashier, who opens the envelopes and registers the givers’ names, and the amounts of the gifts, in a velvet-covered ledger. The practice is such a given that wedding invitations sometimes include bank account numbers so people who cannot attend can still send money…

Families keep records of how much they receive and from whom so that they can reciprocate. Failure to do so can ruin a friendship…

It is generally the parents who, facing the bills, send out the invitations and collect the cash; so, by and large, more guests are there for them than for the bride and groom.

“Hey, what are you getting Yul and Sun for their wedding?”

“Straight cash, homey.”

Some Infinite Thing

I’m more than just a little obsessed with David Foster Wallace.  I had read a number of his pieces and fell in love with his writing before he unexpectedly passed away last year ¹ , but despite my visceral, knee-jerk reaction to cliché, I proceeded to buy more of his books, thus contributing to the recently-dead-author-sells-a-lot-of-books phenomenon.  Mea culpa.

I loved DFW for his essays.  As I said after reading his first books of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, “He took actions and emotions usually taken for granted and deconstructed them so thoroughly that what was left were revealing truisms on human nature.  And these are truisms in the sense that they’re insights that are never quite articulated in your own head, but once you hear them, you immediately know them to be true as if you’ve always known them.”  As an essayist, his work was so striking and above almost everything else out there that some believe he will be known more for his nonfiction essays than his fiction.

DFW enjoyed writing nonfiction, but he considered himself a fiction writer before anything else.  As his best friend and fellow writer Jonathan Franzen elegized, fiction to DFW was “that ‘neutral middle ground on which to make a deep connection with another human being:’ this, we decided, was what fiction was for. ‘A way out of loneliness.’”

Infinite Jest is his magnum opus.  If I wanted to consider myself a DFW-phile, Infinite Jest is required reading.  Published in 1996, it lifted DFW from precociously promising to his generation’s permanent canon of American writers, complete with a consecration by NYT’s Michiko Kakutani: “one of the big talents of his generation, a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything, someone who can write funny, write sad, write serious, write satiric.”  With 1079 pages of a postmodern, shifting narrative structure and an occasionally densely intellectual, disjointed style, Infinite Jest is a pretty intimidating read.  Of the four people I know who have started it, no one ended up finishing it.  And but so when DFW died last year ² , a group of writers and journalists started a project they called Infinite Summer, a coordinated mass-reading for those who always wanted to read Infinite Jest but never got around to it.  I didn’t read along with the group, but it, along with nudging from fellow DFW-phile Ben Casnocha (“If not this summer, Steve, then what summer?”), inspired me to pick it up.

Infinite Jest ³ follows three main plotlines: a fancy-pants, rigorous tennis academy; recovering addicts in a halfway house; and a group of violent, wheelchair-bound, Québécois separatists.  One of the first scenes that takes place in the the addiction recovery house just outside Boston starts off:

If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA’s stat-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts.  You will find out that once MA’s Department of Social Services has taken a mother’s children away for any period of time, they can always take them away again, D.S.S., like at will, empowered by nothing more than a certain signature-stamped form.  I.e. once deemed Unfit — no matter why or when, or what’s transpired in the meantime — there’s nothing a mother can do.

He goes for a few paragraphs with sentences that start with “That” plus a fact one can learn in a halfway house:

That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it.  That loneliness is not a function of solitude.  That it is possible to get so angry you really do see everything in red.  What a ‘Texas Catheter’ is.  That some people really do steal — will steal things that are yours.  That a lot of U.S. adults truly cannot read, not even a ROM hyptertext phonics things with HELP functions for every word.  That cliquey alliance and exclusion and gossip can be forms of escape.  That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.  That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil.  That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person.  That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds.  That you can all of a sudden out of nowhere want to get high with your Substance so bad that you think you will surely die if you don’t, and but can just sit there with your hands writhing in your lap and face wet with craving, can want to get high but instead just sit there, want to but not, if that makes sense, and if you can gut it out and not hit the Substance during the craving the craving will eventually pass, it will go away — at least for a while… That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt.

At times, the book is deceptively humorous, and even the back of the book calls it a “mind-altering comedy.”  But the book’s title might just as well have been, to steal another line from Franzen’s elegy, Infinite Sadness.  Better than anyone else, DFW understood our endless and constant need to be entertained ⁴ and this perpetual desire for entertainment diminishes our ability to achieve one of, if not the, primary elements of what it means to be human: our deep bonds with other people.  A recurring theme in Infinite Jest is the struggles we have to communicate with each other: two brothers on the phone having unrelated, separate halves of a conversation; a character who loses all ability to communicate; a father who’s convinced his conversationally-fully-functional son is mute.  Consider that the average American watches five hours of TV per day and the average household has the TV on for eight hours per day, and the catharsis from endless entertainment is not too dissimilar from an alcoholic’s or a drug addict’s endless escapism.  I think one of the great human tragedies is the disconnect between what people think will make them happy and what actually does.  Our infinite desire for jest self-inflicts anhedonia, numbing ourselves from the real, meaningful bonds with each other — a tragedy of joy over fulfillment.

Towards the end of Infinite Jest, there are some touching moments of caring and affection, but these brief vignettes seem simplistic.  Infinite Jest is a story about some sadder elements of human nature, and I felt DFW didn’t yet have a framework of thinking about what the other side of it looked like.  Ironically, it was in recent years when he started to develop that vision.  His unfinished novel, The Pale King, was intended to be as ambitious as Infinite Jest, but tells a different part of the story, the state of peace and fulfillment he found later in life, having himself struggled with addiction and depression that was the basis for much of Infinite Jest.

His editor, Michael Pietsch, is working on putting together The Pale King from unfinished fragments and describes the book: “The thrust of it is an attempt to look at the dark matter of tedium and boredom and repetition and familiarity that life is made of, and through that to find a path to joy and art and everything that matters. Wallace has set himself the task of making a moving and joyful book out of the matter of life that most writers veer away from as hard as they can. And what he left of it is heartbreakingly full and beautiful and deep. He was looking at how one survives.”

We can see elements of this in his famous Kenyon College commencement speech in 2005 — DFW prose on the beautiful elements of what it’s like to be alive.  I wish he was around to write more of it.

But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

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Notes

1. On September 12, 2008, David Foster Wallace committed suicide by hanging himself in his Claremont, California, home.  DFW battled depression most of his adult life, but was doing well and by most accounts was enjoying the best years of his life before switching antidepressants to reduce gastronomic conflicts.  It didn’t work.  Switching back to the old antidepressant didn’t have the same effect once he was off of it.  In The New Yorker, D.T. Max tells the story of DFW, his last days, and his unfinished novel, The Pale King.  When talking about DFW’s death with people who aren’t familiar with him, I tend to not mention the suicide initially, probably because it’s sad, but I also hate the idea of people introduced to his work through a veil of felo-de-se.

2. Ibid.

3. Towards the end of the book, I started catching numerous allusions to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and I gave myself a literary congratulatory pat on the back for being so clever at making the connection.  After finishing the book, I read that the title Infinite Jest is a famous line by Hamlet to Horatio as he holds up the skull of Yorick: “Alas, poor Yorick.  I knew him, Horatio — a fellow of infinite jest.”  Congratulatory self-pat rescinded.

4. I’m certain it was not lost on DFW that being 1079 pages of an engaging story, Infinite Jest can itself be considered a form of endless entertainment.