When Davos wasn't magical

When we think of Davos, the city atop the regal Swiss Alps, we think of glamor, money, and of a center where the world's richest gather together to decide the economic fates of the multitude.

From the Davos economic forums emerge new labor laws and new ways to make productivity the center of our lives. 

But if we think of Davos in the context of the setting of Thomas Mann's 1924 epic novel, The Magic Mountain Der Zauberberg), we would get a different picture of Davos.

In Mann's novel, Davos is home to The Schatzalp, a "luxurious" sanatorium to which Hans Castorp, the hero, travels to visit his sick cousin. Instead of three weeks, Castorp ends up spending seven years in The Schatzalp.

No sooner than Castorp arrives, he falls ill and can't leave. The doctors collude with the hospital administration to prolong Castorp's stay. In fact whoever comes to the sanitorium, sickened by the pressures and drudgeries of modern, workaday, bourgeoisie life, doesn't want to leave, because the ethos of The Schatzalp is anti-bourgeois.

The doctors of The Schatzalp believe that the interest of culture and life at large will not be served if modern man devoted all his time and energy to mindless office work. Castorp is plunged into a culture of botany, extravagant meals, love affairs, walks in the woods, philosophical discussions, the arts, opera, and the goal is to render him unfit for the world of office work. 

I wonder if the pilgrims of today's Davos, who epitomize both 21st century ethos of capitalism and bourgeois values, are aware of this piece of Davos' literary history. 

A bit of the fictional Davos can be found here.

Chinese Farce?

The Chinese government is planning to engineer yet another migration of its population. Within the next few years, China intends to "move" around 250 million people from the countryside to the cities. The idea is to push farmers from self-sustenance to an economy of consumerism.

China hopes that this will give its economy a humungous boost.

Not too long ago, the Chinese, under Mao Ze Dong, were forced to migrate from the cities to the countryside, so as to teach the urban intelligentsia the "lesson" of self-sustenance, because the Mao regime thought of them to be "parasites" living off the labor of the producer-class, including farmers.

As Marx is said to have said, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

It's all Greek

The above is the image of a homeless woman in Athens, Greek.

The economy in Greece, as well as in other parts of Europe, we are told, is reaching a level of precarity that is unprecedented. Economists predicts that nations like Greece are slipping slowly but surely into long-term poverty that will be very hard to recover from, even when the Euro rebounds.

Not everything Greek is slipping and sliding into disaster though: Take for instance, the mad popularity of Greek yogurt within the United States. A total of 35% of all the yogurt we buy today is Greek, up from a market share of a mere 1% in 2007. 

I was in the yogurt aisle of my local supermarket today and was struck by the monopoly of greek yogurt. even yoplait has a greek yogurt in its kitty. In fact, god forbid, if I didn't want Greek yogurt, I would probably have to go yogurtless.

It's a pity and reflective of the harsh reality of the global economy, that while the brand "Greek" is minting billions, the real Greece oikos--the household or the family in Greek--is falling apart.

Orwell inverted

In George Orwell's Animal Farm, Napoleon, the totalitarian pig says "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others." 

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz turns the Orwellian dictum on its head by saying that "Some Are More Unequal Than Others" in America:

While rags-to-riches stories still grip our imagination, the fact of the matter is that the life chances of a young American are more dependent on the income and wealth of his parents than in any of the other advanced countries for which there is data. There is less upward mobility — and less downward mobility from the top — even than in Europe, and we’re not just talking about Scandinavia.

He means to say that inequality, like totalitarianism (where those in positions of absolute political power assume moral superiority above the rest), is not only a moral problem for our society, but a problem of social justice as well.

Unequal distribution of wealth intersects with unequal distribution of political power, as in contemporary America, according to Stiglitz, money holds the key to political power:

The fabric of our society and democracy is suffering. The worry is that those at the top are investing their money not in real investments, in real innovations, but in political investments. Their big contributions to the presidential and Congressional campaigns are, too often, not charitable contributions. They expect, and have received, high returns from these political investments. These political investments, exemplified by those the financial institutions made, yielded far higher returns than anything else they did. The investments bought deregulation and a huge bailout — though they also brought the economy to the brink of ruin and are a source of much of our inequality.

Timon of Athens

When I read Shakespeare's Timon of Athens for the first time, I thought it was too loud to be Shakespearean. 

The play could have come out of a Bollywood studio, so shallow it's storyline was and so bombastic were its dialogues.

Theatre critic John Lahr points out the un Shakespearean traits of Timon well:

The play in which the well-heeled Timon gives away so much money to his so-called friends that he ruins himself, can't decide if it's a comedy or a tragedy; its characters have humors but lack depth; the plot is thin, with few dramatic reversals, and Timon's trajectory from philanthropy to misanthropy is a precipitous straight line. 

There is a saying that Shakespeare was a bit embarrassed about staging Timon. It was thus never staged during his lifetime.

Perhaps it was the subject matter that made the play ahead of its time. As Lahr praises a recent revival of the play by London's National Theatre, he makes it look like Timon was written for a time of global economic meltdown. 

The play opens with an onstage replica of the tents of the Occupy London protesters, and ends with a view of the logo of HSBC, the bank that was caught laundering money for Mexican drug cartels and Middle Eastern terrorists.

According to Lahr:

In its gaudy shadows, Timon's tale of collapse catches not only the fragility of the British economy but the unnerving immanence of the collapse of its ruling elite.

Shakespeare must have written a recession play in an era when economic systems were in a very nascent stage.

India and freedom: oxymoron?

I had wished "happy birthday" to a cousin of mine on Facebook.

I noticed that others had posted the same on his "wall".

But the birthday boy never thanked anybody back till very recently.

He said he had been in China and he wasn't able to access Facebook because "Facebook is banned in China."

The tone in which my cousin mentioned the fact of banning was normal, as though he were reporting the absence of bananas in Alaska.

My cousin's nonchalance in this matter didn't perturb me in and of itself. After all Indians are phlegmatic where the question of human rights violation, or threats to autonomy and freedom--abstract stuff like that--is concerned. But threaten the urban middle class with a ban on malls, then Indians would be up in arms.

What perturbed me was what the cousin said in conjunction with the "ban". He said that "China is a magnificent country."

How could a member of thriving democracy (then again, India is a poster child for democracy without being really democratic in any meaningful sense of the term) commit the sin of such a blatant oxymoron?

"Facebook is banned in China. China is a magnificent country." The utterance has two separate parts not joined by a "but" or "however" to highlight a contradiction. It's as though the observer were looking at two different parts in the same thing and is deaf and blind to the contradiction.

I'm not saying that my cousin is politically obtuse; it's just that he is being characteristically Indian in his observation of China. He notices the presence of Beijing's beauty--the gorgeous malls, the clean roads, the overall architectural splendor, cleanliness and efficiency. In this aesthetic and infrastructural sense, China is the obverse of India.

The beauty of China has obviously mesmerized the Indian visitor, as it had mesmerized the American visitors back in the day of the 2007 Beijing Olympics.

But the absence of freedom did not register as a significant lacunae in China's apparent perfection. He didn't express shock at the fact that Facebook is banned in China. Nay, he overrode the concern for freedom and democracy and a lack of both in China as frivolous and went on to tub thump about the nation's "magnificence."

I believe that Indians in general are comfortable living with violation. There are low and high level violations of all kinds everyday in India. Take freedom or rights away from Indians--they won't mind is my guess. But take the guarantee of a monthly wage away from them, they'll faint in horror. Trade security (of a monetary kind) with freedom and Indians will be un-protesting to the hilt.

In light of the recent power blackouts in large parts of India I noticed a queer sentiment among my Indian brethren (and sisterhood) on Facebook. Many were "fed up" with living under Indian governance, marked as it is by inefficiency and grave corruption. Some yearned for a recolonization of India. The argument was that Indians fared "better" under the British Raj.

Perhaps Indians don't quite care for freedom-"shreedom" and such non-material garbage.

What do they care for? I don't know; maybe a flat far removed from the stench and squalor of everyday Indian reality? To attain that they might be willing to forego freedom and many rights.

As my favorite fictional servant Balram Halwai had noted in The White Tiger, Indians are born to be ruled and if ever they are in the market looking for an invader/ruler, China would be the nation of choice.

The biological market

The vicissitudes of the market now have a biological explanation.

John Coates, a former derivatives trader who retrained himself as a physiologist and neuroscientist, connects the disparate realms of economics and human physiology. He says:

Under circumstances of outrageous success or terrifying failure, our biology can overreact; and when this happens to traders and investors, they suffer an irrational exuberance or pessimism that can destabilize financial markets and wreak havoc on the wider economy.

The "molecule of irrational exuberance" that flood the bloodstream and brains of traders poised to make the proverbial kill (the winning trade) is testosterone, while that of irrational pessimism is the stress hormone cortisol. Under the influence of a high level of testosterone a normally prudent trader can morph into an inexplicable risk-taker. Likewise, cortisol drives traders into a mode of risk-aversion, and in the process, a bear market into a crash.

If human biology effects the market thus, then to ensure greater stability in the market a biological strategy ought to be implemented:

One way to do that would be to encourage a more even balance within banks among men and women, young and old. Women and older men have a fraction of the testosterone of young men, so if more of them managed money, we could perhaps stabilize the markets. We could also look to sports scientists for guidance, for they are the ones with the most skill at managing biology in the interests of performance, at developing a resilience to exuberance, fatigue and stress.

First it was technology, whose ability to change the ecology of the human brain was fiercely argued by Nicholas Carr in his book The Shallows. Then neuroscience invaded literary studies, as professors of literature scribbled into contention a connection between cognitive science and literature.

Finally it's the market! The human brain has never been so valorized without being traded on NASDAQ.

Natural and economic disasters

Economics is everywhere. Its omnipresence is so pervasive that it "sucks".

Now, even the world's most famous, end-of-the-world terminologies, that used to have at least a quasi, if not pure, religious connotation, have been co-opted by economics.

The word "deluge", for instance, is now part of the parlance of the much publicized doomsday scenario of an imminent global economic disaster.

What would future deluges and tsunamis of currencies look like? An avalanche of currencies untethered to any nation, and hitting the shores of countries in a state of loose untetheredness, and rendering the economies of nations weaker and weaker.

Who are the Noahs? The Goldman Sachs? And whom will they take aboard their ship? the 1%?

Silent Greed

Eric Stroheim's silent film (1924) on America's obsession with money was a 10 hour long odyssey. MGM producers managed to slim it down to an hour and forty minutes.

From The New Yorker ("Critic's Notebook"):

[The film] magnifies one California couple's striving rise and craven fall into an inferno of American madness. [Stroheim] moves Frank Norris's 1899 novel--about McTeague, a gold miner turned unlicensed dentist, and Trina, his best friend's girl, whom he makes his fluttery bride--to 1908 and the years before the liberating agonies of the First World War and Hollywood's universal pageantry. Showing the masses at their most unwashed, Stroheim captures a heaving, struggling, stinking world of rugged labor, precarious comfort, and primitive naivete. the ladder of social mobility goes both ways, and the terrifying decline that ends in one of the greatest of all cinematic set pieces--a struggle over gold, under the hellish sun of Death Valley--is set up by a banal catastrophe, unemployment. In the bare wild, Stroheim saw an old world--but not its evils--end.

Market Fundamentalism

Nicholas Kristof reminds us of a concept that was floated by George Soros some years ago: Market fundamentalism.

A very unique and potent--more likely to become the dominant system of governance globally than other forms of fundamentalisms--kind of fundamentalism that writers like Hamid Mohsin (The Reluctant Fundamentalist) and Hari Kunzru alert our attention to.

[Market fundamentalism] is related to the glorification of wealth in the past two decades, to the celebration of opulence, and to the emergence of a new (global) aristocracy. Market fundamentalists assume a measure of social Darwinism and accept that Laissez-faire is always optimal.

But, as Kristof writes, market fundamentalism is also helixed together with the other kind of fundamentalism and together the two produce a particular kind of dystopic landscape, best represented by Waziristan:

And anyone who honestly believes that low taxes and unfettered free markets are always best should consider moving to Pakistan’s tribal areas. They are a triumph of limited government, negligible taxes, no “burdensome regulation” and free markets for everything from drugs to AK-47s.

Oh, Shut Up, Tom

Indians like Tom Friedman.

They have liked him since he wrote "The World is Flat," announcing the emergence of a technology-driven multipolar world, where there are many economic centers.

Friedman saw India as one of the centers. So Indians thought, Friedman was pro-India.

I don't like/dislike Friedman, but having followed his train of thinking for years, I have ascertained that he is a place-holder, a mouthpiece, if you will, for this thing called global neoliberalism.

He is a neoliberal. There have been old American liberals galore who have praised India, albeit with a sting of condescension/patronizing. Imagine Senator Patrick Moynihan as an example.

Senator Moynihan would speak of the need to uplift India, through the machinery of aid and education.
The neoliberal like Friedman says India is not only uplifted, but it also is poised to overtake America as an economic powerhouse.

Well, he said that years ago and his prediction hasn't quite materialized. But the point is what Friedman says in praise of India, is really not a praise of India. It is a propaganda for the virtue of a particular kind of economy--the free market type.

Any nation that opens itself to the free market receives Friedman's praise.

Besides, in "The Flat World," it isn't India as a whole that caught Friedman's attention, but only an itty bitty part of it--the technology corridor of Bangalore. Friedman managed to blow that part into a whole.
In other words, Friedman's India in the book is Infosys Inc, not a nation per se, but an outsourcing giant that enabled American corporations to do business cheaply.

Tom Friedman and his ilk value one thing--the expansion of American business abroad, because they believe that a free-market economy and the wealth that it generates, is good for world peace. When people are busy making money or "innovating" something or the other (with an eye to making money), then they don't have time to do fight.

So, once upon a time, Friedman's solution for violence in the "Arab Streets" was to introduce the free-market into the street.

It didn't work, because as the Arab Spring showed, Arabs wanted more than peace and affluence, especially because the affluence wasn't trickling down to the general population.

When India and Pakistan were almost on the point of conflict, Friedman said that General Electric, not General Powell will prevent the border war. And the rumor is that General Electric did prevent the conflict from escalating: Some multinational bosses went to the Indian Prime Minister and said they would not be able to do business in a country with unstable, "warlike" conditions. India, it is said, went for peaceful negotiations.

Arabs seemingly couldn't care less for what Friedman says, but Indians do. And they continue to worship Friedman.

Consequently, Friedman visits India frequently and periodically updates us about the progress India has made as an agent of free market economy.

The updates are published in The New York Times and every time I read them, I bristle with the desire to speak back to Friedman.

I can't speak back to him in person because he is a celebrity opinion-shaper, but I have written back in my own small way in the comments section in The New York Times.

In light of the political unrest sweeping up, not only the U.S. but also the rest of the world, Mr. Friedman's insistence that spread of technology will free us to become partakers in the grand free-market economy fest, is tiresome and petty.

One wishes he would stop visiting the little nooks and crannies of an "underhyped" India—the garages and the shanty homes populated by brave new Indian (Americans) who are "returning" to India to serve the poor with cheap cell phones etc.—and spend more time on real political issues plaguing the nation of America.
Indians will remain the uncritical zombies that they have always been--since the colonial times.