"new perspective on things by looking at your fundamental assumptions"

March 13, 2024 10:10 AM

Continuing my series curating work by finance expert Daniel Davies, some of his commentary on travel, Ezra Pound, coffee, and the culture of the Internet and how to manage one's equanimity while writing for strangers.

Cultural commentary

"Wall Street" (2003): Davies analyzes the 1987 film Wall Street to propose: "very few of the actions which bring down the whole house of cards on Bud Fox and Gordon Gekko were actually illegal under securities law at the time. In fact, I’d make a case that any sequel to this film would have to start with the premise that Gordon Gekko was acquitted on all charges of securities fraud."

"The Economics of Pound's Canto 45" (2003) is an analysis of the poem "With Usura". "Canto 45 is clearly not just an economic argument, but equally clearly it is an economics argument. It makes a difference in one's reading of the poem and its imagery if you know the kind of economic worldview that it is supporting." [Note that, in arguing against Pound's anti-Semitism, Davies has a sarcastic sentence or two that don't read well; Davies has acknowledged that some of his pre-2014 writing doesn't reflect his values & understanding now.]

As mentioned in comments in yesterday's post, in 2003 Davies reflected on having spent a while reading and summarizing another blogger's work. He says some interesting things about Starbucks and the role of coffee culture in current political thought, and:

I found myself ruminating about geek culture, science fiction and right wing politics a lot over the last couple of weeks. One thing I'd note is that the defining characteristic of science fiction is that it's escapist; it invites the reader to imagine himself in the place of the characters in the novel. Compare that to, for example, Jane Austen, where the invitation is to empathise with the reactions and feelings of one of the characters as themselves, rather than imaging how you might react if you were Elizabeth Darcy. This is at the root of my dissatisfaction with even left wing techno-types; they don't seem to have developed the capacity to imagine a scene or way of life without putting themselves in it; to consider what it would be like to see the world through someone else's eyes, rather than being in someone else's situation with their own set of values and judgements. And I think that this failure of imagination, or something like it, is at the root of the problem of what I find bothersome about USS Clueless.....

Cultures have, as a matter of extermely arguable historical fact, been brought down by overindulgence in their drug of choice... I really worry, on quiet nights with a glass of wine in my hand and looking out at the stars over London ... am I going to be part of the generation that ends up having to deal with the geopolitical consequences of the world's greatest superpower (a superpower which has always had a very problematic relationship with drugs) finally finding a chemical it truly wants to get fucked up on?

Travel

Around 2014-2015 Davies and his family travelled together for, I think, about a year, around the globe. He wrote some travelogue posts and never quite finished the series, I believe. From Europe through the Polynesian Islands:

"One thing that you tend to pick up pretty soon when working for a Swiss company, unless you are very unobservant indeed, is that the senior Swiss guys all know each other because they’re all in the Army together."

"On the Italian side of Mont Blanc, there is a smaller monument than the official one to the tunnel fire victims."

"I can work out Greek words phonetically, as long as they stick to using letters that are also the names of important physical constants or option pricing parameters."

"I wonder what the Nabateans would have said about the sunk-cost fallacy, because heaven knows, there are some majestic sunk costs there."

"Having grown up next to the seaside in North Wales, the South Pacific was something of a culture shock."

"One of the things that originally got me interested in the subject of economics was asking the question 'How come they’re able to send lamb and butter all the way from New Zealand and still sell it cheaper than Wales?', and never being very satisfied with the answer."

"If you’re reading about Easter Island at all, you quickly find yourself realising that you’ve got to make your mind up about the 'Jared Diamond Question'. That question being, whether the view of Easter Island’s development and history in his book Decline bears any resemblance to reality at all."

(Relatedly, "The lazy man’s way to business success" (2007):

If you are a young man or woman of fair-to-middling ability, or even a borderline dullard, but you want to get a reputation as an uncommonly bright and perspicacious thinker, it’s really not that hard to do. The secret weapon is this: take an interest in what happens in other countries.
...Even in situations which look purely domestic, you can often get an entirely new perspective on things by looking at your fundamental assumptions in the light of what happens overseas. There are few sights sweeter than the look on someone’s face after they’ve confidently proclaimed something to be impossible, only to be informed that they’ve been doing things that way in Australia for the last twenty years....
It’s also a great way to generate ideas; it’s both easier than coming up with something yourself, and more likely to succeed, to plagiarise something that’s already worked well in a different time zone....
So my advice to a young businessperson is to save ten minutes a day by not reading the domestic news, and spend them on reading the international news properly.

Reflections on writing on the Internet

"Abuse: A coping strategy" (2006, in The Guardian), guidelines on how to deal with negative feedback from commenters, informed by his years being yelled at within the finance industry: "operate a graduated response. In general it makes sense to be a bit more polite than your critic up to a certain threshold, and a bit ruder thereafter."

In Crooked Timber comments in 2013, Davies writes a reply to a critic that includes the line "Have a bloody word with yourself, will you? Your ideas about the relative obligations of the world to provide you with exactly what you want, versus your own obligation to be polite or pleasant to other people, are very badly calibrated."

"The Verjus Manifesto" (2015, on Medium):

When it comes to readership, quality matters at least as much as quantity....

It’s much better to write the piece that you want to read yourself, which usually means pitching the technical content at a level slightly higher than you were comfortable with when you started thinking about it. That doesn’t mean using jargon or writing dull sentences, but it does mean refusing to dumb down, and it definitely means keeping all the complexity in the article which you were able to wrap your own head around.

You get fewer readers this way, but more of them email you. And if you do it right, some of the ones that email you are real professionals — people who you never imagined having a conversation with when you started writing stuff on a website. Rather than sifting through a thousand comments section bores, you attract an audience that is more likely to be sufficiently interested in the subject to make an effort to carry on a conversation, and exponentially more likely to have an interesting point when they do so.

posted by brainwane (10 comments total)

brainwave, thank you for this series of posts! Davies is new to me -- and so far, I love what I have read!

(Note to mods: can we get "Have a bloody word with yourself, will you?" added to the masthead? It's a really great line.)
posted by wenestvedt at 11:36 AM on March 13 [3 favorites]

New to me as well. Thanks!
posted by Bella Donna at 1:18 PM on March 13 [1 favorite]

Thanks for this, it really is a treasure trove.

I was amused to see his piece on Ez. Pound. A lot of people bend over backwards to retroactively absolve Pound of anti-Semitism, what he called a "suburban prejudice." The most ridiculous try I've run across is A. David Moody's exegesis, which is focused on the same Canto that Davies works on in the linked article: "I find that the evidence leads to the clear conclusion that Pound came to his anti-Semitism by way of his economics, more exactly through his war on usury. It comes with that war, grows with it, and is inseparable from it. But when not engaged in that war Pound was not anti-Semitic. Hence our persistent difficulty: Pound was anti Semitic; but at the same time he was not."

Yeah, no. You want Pound, you have to take him as he was: Poet, Anti-Semite, Fascist.

(Davies gets it right in the end, I think, with the final note: Pound was an anti-Semite, which has famously been described by Engels as "the socialism of fools". He was also a follower of Social Credit, which could be described reasonably accurately as the Keynesianism of fools. All of which is rather puzzling, since the man clearly wasn't a fool.)
posted by chavenet at 1:25 PM on March 13 [5 favorites]

Thanks for undertaking this project.

Davies came to my attention 20 years ago now, with his contributions to Crooked Timber, his comments on Brad DeLong's blog - and especially with his explication of "The Crazification Factor" on his own blog.

He's been much less prominent in the years since, but I'm always glad to hear what he's thinking.
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 2:07 PM on March 13 [2 favorites]

Glad people are liking this series!

chavenet -- indeed, btw, in another post Davies does call Pound a fascist.

AsYouKnow Bob: yeah, he came to my attention about 20 years ago, too! In the last 10 years I think he's been concentrating more on his book projects, and I've read some of those books and they are worth reading. He has a new book coming out next month on the industrialization of decision-making.

Just in case this wasn't clear to other people: it's screenwriter John Rogers who, with his friend Tyrone, articulated the "crazification factor", but Davies did joke about it (2007), and sort of prefigured it in a 2003 analysis of local council election voting patterns (caution for ableist language).
posted by brainwane at 3:54 PM on March 13 [2 favorites]

Heymann essentially comes the same conclusion that the root of Pounds anti-semitism lies within the Canto 45 and the social credit movement. It was A.R. Orage who postulated July 1920 "We should be the first to admit that the subject of Money is difficult to understand. It is 'intended' to be, by the minute oligarchy that governs the world by means of it.". it seems that Douglas, Orage, and Pound all latched on to this dilapidated idea. one could postulate that Pounds prodigious publishing in which he started complaining about how the publishing system had become degenerative and as much that the publishing house has catered to commercial interests at the expense of more creative writers alluded to in 'Salutation' and addressed in 'Salutation the Second.

"Here are your bells and confetti.
Go! rejuvenate things!
Rejuvenate even 'The Spectator.’
Go! and make cat calls!
Dance and make people blush,
Dance the dance of the phallus
and tell anecdotes of Cybele!
Speak of the indecorous conduct of the Gods!
(Tell it to Mr. Strachey)

Ruffle the skirts of prudes,
speak of their knees and ankles.
But, above all, go to practical people
go! jangle their door-bells!
Say that you do no work
and that you will live forever."

from salutation the second.
but we see the anti-semitism in canto 35, 52 74 etc. After 45 the cantos were filled with hate. it's interesting that writers will go to lengths to try and justify or fully understand Pounds anti-semitism. even he tried.

"I've tried to write Paradise
do not move
let the wind speak
that is paradise.
let the gods forgive what I
have made
let those I love try to forgive
what I've made'

-Notes for CXVII et seq.
posted by clavdivs at 6:59 PM on March 13 [1 favorite]

(Tell it to Mr. Strachey)

"I do not like the Jewish voice," wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary. "I do not like the Jewish laugh." Lytton Strachey wrote to Virginia's husband, Leonard, himself Jewish, condemning the "placid, easy-going vulgarity of your race",
posted by clavdivs at 7:04 PM on March 13

brainwane - Thanks for the correction. I can blame only a lack of caffeine and the 20-year remove for my mix-up.
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 8:13 PM on March 13 [1 favorite]

AsYouKnow Bob: Glad to help, and I totally understand why you might have mixed them up!

Somewhat connected to Davies's "Verjus Manifesto", from 2006, on post titles that attract or repel readers, and how off-putting titles can be a virtue:

what would be the most off-putting title in the world? So far, my suggestions are “Insurance Accounting in the Communist Countries”, “Comitology in the EU” and “The Role of Telecommunications Standards in the WTO Negotiations”....

A possible theme for a future MetaTalkTail thread or weekly free chat thread here.
posted by brainwane at 8:49 AM on March 14

what would be the most off-putting title in the world?

Famously: "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative"
posted by chavenet at 9:24 AM on March 14