Flowing South

On the way to the Florida Keys: As Michigan fell behind yesterday, a question soon arose and then grew ever more insistent. Where is the Great Recession? The more we saw the country's bigger picture, as revealed by life's flow along I-75 South, the more we remembered another trip, that from Detroit to Seattle taken several recessions earlier. Back then we'd lifted out of Michigan's decades-deep gravity well and beheld what was then one of the peaks of Silicone Mountain. We left yesterday under gloomy skies and drizzle, but the skies grew blue and the sun rose. Ohio unfolded as the well-remembered industrial colossus still--but the very mass of trucks and cars, while threatening to those no longer used to the vast flow along such arteries, signaled economic activity on what seemed an undiminished scale.

The Spread of Fuzz

Fuzzy logic had its beginnings circa 1965, the invention of Lotfi A. Zadeh. I remember it well because a most memorable colleague of mine, Howard Gadberry at Midwest Research Institute, introduced it to me. Howard, who was my elder by two decades or more, and very impressive, yet had a child’s delight in the new. He used to appear in the door of my office, stare at me at length, and when he had my attention begin: “What do you know about sharpness?” Then—after the second or third such event I knew what was coming next—I knew that I would now hear things about “sharpness” I couldn’t have predicted in a hundred years. So here was Howard: “Ever hear about fuzzy logic?”

In a nutshell fuzzy logic is based on probabilities, so in contrast to standard logic which produces True or False—and nothing else—fuzzy logic gives you Maybe and can also quantify it. That’s another way saying that this Whatever is neither this nor that. Everything blends.

Monique is leading a project at present which gives her team, and I’m a member, an opportunity to look at U.S. economic sectors once more in revealing detail. And in conversation after conversation, the same theme keeps emerging: the spread of the fuzz. Trying its absolute damndest to keep the more and more rapidly morphing institutions coherent, at least for statistical reporting purposes, the Bureau of the Census still valiantly clings to concepts like Retail, Wholesale, Manufacturing, and Services, but in a kind of slow-motion shapeshift, our institutions will not, repeat not, hold their forms.

Now statistics, of course, are the tool by means of which we resolve the images of collective reality. Numbers are the photons that bring the information. If outer physical reality were behaving as the economy does, we would have begun to panic quite a while ago. That dog is morphing into something else. But what is it. No sooner do we say “fire hydrant” than it has shifted shape again and now looks—believe it or not—like a running bush.

It’s everywhere. The phenomenon of fuzzing is most easily noted by seeing journalism morphing into entertainment-propaganda-advertisements-for-myself-gossip-as-an-industry. But lordy, lord. When you see wholesale melting into communications, and manufacturing exploding into a hive of bees, why then you wonder. But we are trying our best to help Monique put the pieces together again. After all, when the subject is pharmaceuticals, people do tend to think, reading our compilations, that we are talking about drugs, not some new forms of semi-monopolistic distribution.

Formal Chaos

My attempt is to give a suitable name to a contradictory tendency. It is contradictory to aim for Virtuous Vice, Dirty Cleanliness, Clear Murky Windshields, or the Still Small Uproar. Our culture, however, is forever trying to achieve this tottering balance. For a long time now I’ve chuckled over the Informal Formality of dress when thirty-something celebs appear on some show in a formal jacket, buttoned white shirt, maybe even wearing a tie—but they’re also sporting artfully cuffed and torn ancient blue jeans and a day’s growth of beard.

                

Order and disorder are clashing. We want both. We believe in artful compromise. We believe that nature knows best, read “free market,” but we also need certain degree of predictability. So we create stock markets with strict opening and closing hours, bells that ring, trading rules, and very tight qualifications for those who may play. Meanwhile these markets are ruled by collective emotions and panics—but the television pictures of trading from up close reveal that it’s a deadly serious business: not a smile anywhere in sight. But sometimes quite conscious collective efforts shape the behavior. Yesterday the markets were quiet. Why? Well, this morning at 8:30 am (it is now 8:26 as I write), the Bureau of Labor Statistics will reveal January employment numbers. And traders stayed inactive yesterday awaiting this news. Institutionalized emotions. Today it will be time to roar and rage. (Indeed I’m writing this to fill the time until 8:30. On the first Friday morning of each month, I post those unemployment numbers on LaMarotte.)

It is true, is it not, that the promises of a presidential candidate are entirely dependent for fulfillment on another body, the Congress. Yet we treat campaign promises as meaningful. If we were serious, we’d institute a parliamentary democracy where the “president” becomes a function of a party’s victory. In our case we have Institutionalized Contradiction. Chance may deliver a president and a Congress of the same party, but then the party may be so interlaced with Blue Dogs or Tea Drinkers that the outcome still remains random.

Well, it’s 8:35. Enough of this. Time to see what Randomness has Wrought on the Employment Front last month.

Pilgrimages in our Future?

Notions like “dilution of culture” need parsing. We’re awed by massive powers in our time and march around with anxious eyes glancing at such ephemera as The Economy or The Culture. Sometimes useful insights just roll out of the fingers and I don’t realize their utility until I’ve read what has just “happened.” A phrase like that came the other day. “Experience is sovereign, of course,” I typed, “whereas the objective is just statistics.” That translates into the obvious, but the obvious is sometimes novel.

The Economy is getting, holding a decent job. One job. I am a carrier of culture. Whatever values of the past I actually embody, have at my fingertips, and permit to guide my behavior, that is culture. “Dilution of culture” therefore means loss of values in individuals by generational change. By whatever mechanism. Culture is lost when parents or education fail individuals, when distractions overcome them. It matters—at the individual level. When we extend it and speak of phenomena in general, we mean “on average,” and that’s just statistics. That is why vast up-swells of activism deceive both those who participate in them as well as to those who merely  watch and think that they’re beholding change. The activists intend to change others. Meanwhile those actions that actually improve the lot of individuals—say creating one or two jobs in efforts to implement a good product useful to others or grasping something by effort and thus illuminating a single person’s understanding—they remain invisible.

Not all collective movements have this useless character. I’m now thinking of great pilgrimages—going on these we intend to change us.