Month: December 2022

It’s that time of the year.  Before the time for the giving of gifts comes the time for the making of lists.  What were the best twenty books of the year, the best ten tv shows, the best five art exhibitions, and the top three recordings of baroque music on period instruments.  I try to avoid spending time reading through such lists, although as I write this sentence it occurs to me that perhaps I should pay more attention, allowing me to compile my own list of the Best Lists of the Year.

Part of the problem is the calendar.  The advent of the year’s end seems to provoke within us the desire to review the current and then to make resolutions for the next.  The prevalence of this desire should not blind us to its oddness.  For most of human history the “year” that mattered was the crop-cycle for basic food supply.  In Europe these cycles are annual, with a season for planting seeds, a season for tending the growing plants, a season for harvesting crops, and a season when it is too cold for arable farming, during which the preservation of stored food supplies is paramount.  In other, warmer climates there are two or three crop-cycles each year, but these countries had little influence on the development of the Western model of annual thought. 

Continue reading “Slow Train”

In a perfect world, the game coming up on Wednesday would be played in the Free French garrison in Brazzaville – but we’ll have to settle for Bayt Stadium in Qatar.

Morocco was one of the holdouts in the imperialist game; it only lost its independence in 1912 when the Germans spooked the other European powers and led to its carving up as a “protectorate” (what a farcical term) of France, losing its southern areas to Spain. If you’ve not been to Morocco, you’re missing out; the food is good-ish – way too sweet for my palate – but the tea is amazing, and the people are just fun. Some of them even drink, which is a plus.

But in the last week, Morocco’s young soccer team has defeated the Spanish side, and to complete the Iberian humiliation, today beat Portugal.

Becoming the first African team to make the semifinals of the World Cup.

Facing off against France on Tuesday.

Its highly cynical, highly egotistical, and underrated as a racist post-colonial power former imperial overlord, France.

The ones who folded like a cheap deck of cards to the Nazis, making Casablanca – the neutral port, the haven of resistance, and most importantly the inspiration for the movie, possible.

The French.

Again, one always hopes for the best possible settings for when those who have been wronged get a chance to show up those who have done the wrong. My son’s friend wasn’t allowed to go to court yesterday to testify against his father, who beats him as a course of being, and because of that silence he’s still at risk, but I long for him to have his day in a proper court, to say what needs to be said. It would be better if the game on Wednesday were in Brazzaville for the young men of the Morocco team – to beat their former oppressors on African soil – but I have no doubt they’ll speak up solidly in a small autocracy in the Arabian Gulf next week.

I don’t think it takes much imagination to guess which team Rick, and Ilsa, and Sam – and yes, even Louis, despite his police loyalties – would be pulling for.

Round up the usual suspects, and let’s watch some footie next week.

One of Gertrude Stein’s most famous quotes – and she has many of them – is about Oakland, the other city by the bay in Northern California. She was born outside of Pittsburgh, but her father – wealthy and well-connected – moved the family to Oakland so he could run streetcar rail companies. Asked later about being from Oakland, she said in essence, why should I say I’m from there, because there is no there there.

The quote came to me vividly while listening to the pundit class – and many of my friends – talk about the collapse of FTX recently. What occurred to me is that all of the conversations have, at their core, a fundamental belief that there is something real, something something, at the core of cryptocurrencies. But there isn’t, and the more people behave as though there is, the more glaring the absence becomes.

Oakland, by the way, was always a town in search of a purpose. The problem, really, was that San Francisco was so perfectly situated for a pre-railroad era: a narrow peninsula that guarded the best anchorage on the west coast of a continent. As long as sail and steam ships were the supreme ways of communicating with the outside world – say, the way Santiago, Chile or Lima, Peru lived – then San Francisco was self-sufficient, even after gold was discovered at Sutters Mill. But then the world changed, railroads trumped all, and San Francisco was a pain in the ass: it was stuck on a narrow and difficult to access peninsula for iron horses. And so Oakland was invented: a convenient end point to the eastern rails, with decent (if not perfect) harbours, and a good spot to send ferries to the real place anyone really cared about, San Francisco.

Cryptocurrencies – we’ll call them “crypto” because it’s a pain in the ass to type the whole word – are much the same as Oakland. The real destination already exists: it’s called “the real economy”, which uses dollars and euros and pound sterling and yen. It’s the economy that most of the readers of The Essence of Water will recognise as “their economy”: a world where we trust contracts, and therefore trust the money denominator of those contracts, and on the basis of that trust, we innovate things like new semiconductors, and new derivative contracts, and new craft beers, and new brands, and new electric vehicles, and so on and so forth. What enables all of this clever innovation – some of which is real, some of which is just silly human imagination – is trust, not so much in the currency we use but in the social underpinnings of everything we use, namely contracts, agreements, and because of that, yes, the currency we use to denominate those contracts and agreements.

In the nineteenth century, contracts existed but if you wrote one in San Francisco – say, at the Carlton Hotel – you’d be hard pressed to know whether it would be honoured in Pittsburgh, which is where Gertrude Stein was born. Ideally you’d find some way to guarantee the contract – say, with gold, held in escrow by a trustworthy law firm in San Francisco or in Pittsburgh, who had a correspondent in the other city that could be used to vouch for the guarantee. In other words, you probably wouldn’t have trusted dollars back in the day – you would have trusted something else, but that something else wasn’t really what you trusted. You trusted the agents: law firms, banks, the Wells Fargo Company, or once the wires were up, the Western Union Telegraph. At no point did you really trust the units – those were just temporary proxies. What you trusted were the agents.

Today, you trust your bank, which is a lot like living in San Francisco back in the day. You probably have money back east, but you also have trusted agents – indeed, trusted agents make up much of your life, because you live remotely from the main sources of value exchange and creation. You and I don’t live closely to how value is defined – and, interestingly, no one does; value is defined in money markets whose only participants are insanely, incomprehensibly large institutions who exchange billions every minute and on the basis of those exchanges is how value is defined. We all live in San Francisco: a place where we depend on agents, on whom we trust – and against whom we hold contracts which protect us – to preserve and hold our value, even as the define it in their activity as banks, as brokers, as speculators on their own behalf even as they trade on our behalf.

In our brave new world of crypto, though, we give you an option of living in Oakland: a place where value only exists with relation to San Francisco, but isn’t really San Francisco at all. You can trust your agents – who, by the way, will only accept payment in the currency of Pittsburgh and San Francisco and, more importantly, Washington DC, to whom we all owe the burden of tax assessments – or alternatively, you can try your luck in Oakland’s currency, which is variously dollars, or community bank notes, or bad whiskey, or gold dust. Not so different from Tether – community bank notes, as it were – or Solana -bad whiskey – or gold dust – which, interestingly is the same thing as it always was, gold dust.

Crypto is a means of redefining society, where trust among agents and the power of enforcing agreements among them and us, to be on the basis of a fundamental lack of trust. Where the railroad ends, in other words, is where we fight and wrestle to redefine value which was obvious on the New York end of the iron trail. If you think trust is wrong, if you think trust is impossible, by all means, go to Oakland. There is no there there. There is nothing there. No trust, and by no means is there value. But crypto lives there and is traded actively. If you wish to turn your back on trust, on civil society, by all means, take the ferry. See you in Oakland. But if you want to enjoy the promise of a future, of a place which not only looks out towards the future represented by the Pacific horizon but also imagines new horizons on our shores, might I suggest you head to San Francisco. And keep your bank account denominated in the currency of the continent, which trusts Pittsburgh as much as anywhere else.

When it started, seventeen days ago, there were thirty-two teams drawn from all over the world: four from Latin America; four from North, Central America, and the Caribbean; five from Africa; six from Asia (which includes the Middle East and Oceania); and thirteen from Europe.  The playing styles and levels of experience on show were highly diverse, the fans uniformly raucous, and there was plenty of early entertainment blended with a few surprise results. 

Now, we are down to the final eight teams, and it is evident that FIFA’s world rankings are reliable predictors of World Cup success.  Six of the remaining eight teams are ranked in FIFA’s top ten: these are Brazil (1), Argentina (3), France (4), England (5), Netherlands (8) and Portugal (9).  They are joined by Croatia (12) and Morocco (22). 

Of the five teams ranked above Croatia that are not contesting this year’s quarter finals, Belgium (2), knocked-out in the group stage after losing to Morocco, were weakened by several of their “golden generation” carrying recent injuries and one or two others looking slightly past their prime.  Italy (6) very surprisingly failed to qualify for the tournament finals, coming second in their qualifying group behind Switzerland (15) and then losing to North Macedonia (65) in the semi-final of the second-round tournament for second place group teams (the North Macedonians losing to Portugal in the final).  Denmark (10) failed to progress beyond the group stage after losing to Australia (38), as did Germany (11) who lost to Japan (24).   Spain (6) made it through the group stages but lost their last-sixteen game to Morocco, who are the surprise package of the tournament. 

Despite these upsets during the qualifying process and the group stages, the composition of the last eight suggests that FIFA rankings are good indicators of success in tournament football, where consistency matters, along with the ability to take penalties (as Japan and Spain have found to their cost).  International football is basically predictable, which does not mean that it is not exciting.  Over ninety minutes, quality trumps effort and secures its reward.  The delight of the games for the fans is provided by the way that the top teams find the route to victory.  There is nothing dull about watching the best players in the best teams, searching for glory on the biggest sporting stage.

Continue reading “Pieces of eight”

It’s been an odd year, no two ways about it. Here in the states, the pandemic has been quietly but no less officially declared to be over: either you have your booster shots, and you’ll be as fine as anyone can make you, or you haven’t, and you’ll get sick soon enough to prevent you from voting Republican in the next election, and that’s all fine, as the midterm results proved out. On the home front, the boy is doing beyond great in fifth grade despite his mom moving to Maine. All other systems are go.

But I haven’t been writing, and it’s been bothering me because I haven’t quite known why. It’s not the day drinking – hell, that’s been here since I started the blog more than five years ago – and it’s not the general amount of spare time I have on my hands, which also hasn’t changed much since I stopped travelling around the world on a weekly basis for Barclays Group Treasury (and yes, for those who know me, that means that the amount of actual time required to run Barclays Restructuring Group was roughly twenty hours a week).

I think I’ve figured it out, and I have to thank Stuart Kirk, the former editor of the Lex column for the FT, for helping me. He wrote a savagely idiotic essay in this weekend’s edition which is wrenching me back to a reality in which it’s worthwhile to talk about the moral consequences of one’s daily choices – which, after all, is the whole point of this blog, and the whole point (to me, at least) of all intellectual and aesthetic choices.

Mr Kirk’s thesis, essentially, is that the only thing that matters is the now. He presents a straw man of what he claims preoccupies the world, the improvement of some future space – which we must prevent from being 1.7C warmer than today, with not too many people who will be potentially harmed – and posits an imaginary future state of today in which potholes exist, where real people who we could know (if we got on a plane and went to find them) are dying, which is far more – 100% certain, to use his verbiage – reliably existent as moral cases to be solved.

That’s not it at all, though.

It’s not to say that Kirk is wrong about the existence of immediate, tangible examples of horror against which we should be railing. He’s right in that sense: there is a high percentage chance that New Delhi will be uninhabitably hot in 50 years, but there is a 100% certainty that a decent greater than 25% ish proportion of its population is living in indecently horrid conditions today. If we focus on the future non-100%-but-close-to-95% likelihood of New Delhi’s future complete failure at the expense of today’s 100% certain failure to help somewhere between 25% and 50% of its population live at a base standard of hygiene and health and education, we are in essence privileging the future potential humans of earth at the expense of the actual current citizens. He’s right to point that out.

Mr Kirk, interestingly, is “former head of responsible investment at HSBC Asset Management and previous editor of Lex“, Lex being the premium column discussing corporate doings in the FT. In other words, it’s not like he’s just coming out of nowhere: this is the kind of thing that bubbles within someone who’s otherwise churning out pablum for institutional investors and occasional columns on random company quarterly earnings. This is his columnist cri du coeur.

But he is guilty of exactly the problem that I think is preventing us from being able to move out of the Enlightenment trap, which is to say, he fails to see human culture as a continuum. The Enlightenment – from Voltaire to Smith to Ricardo to Marx – see the human landscape as a series of set pieces, a series of time scapes, transitioning from one to another. Even Darwin does this: his tree of life concept allows for – indeed depends upon – the idea that you can take a slice of the tree at any moment across the aeons and see “what is”. Darwin does the best of the bunch in that he doesn’t pretend to predict the next step, but the rest of his age are more arrogant, and assert in various ways what must occur, the predictable linear path that must be drawn given the snapshot we capture of today and the strings of the past we observe behind us.

Kirk doesn’t fall for this but he does fall for a related intellectual rabbit hole, the notion that the inherent randomness that impacts our ability to predict the future from the combination of our past “certainties” and our current snapshot ensures that efforts to steer towards future good states or avoid future bad states has too much volatility to bother with, so let’s simply focus on today. He’s inching closer to a better solution, but he’s still caught up in a dangerous separation of the past – which in both his view and in the classical Enlightenment view is “known” – and the present, which is a photographic image, somehow imagined as being complete and precise – and the future, which is a collection of linear extensions of the current state process which vary only by degrees, because they are still just processes.

That view, though – that we live on a process surface, and simply choose between different pathways via the intersection of our choices with those of others – while at the core of most of post-Enlightenment thinking (be it east, west, or post-colonial – there isn’t a real differentiation any more if we’re honest with ourselves), is false. We do not live on a process surface; we are embedded processes, acting both individually, acting within agglomerations of others, acting as part of a species with certain consumptive and reproductive imperatives, acting in the broader drama of life as a process on a mineral and gaseous and aqueous planet, acting in the broader drama of stellar evolution, acting on the background of quantum processes which are (to all intents and purposes to us) infinitely constant and yet wholly unpredictable in the background. Our perception of history as a timeline is false – the timeline seen by someone in Botswana is unrecognisable to me in Maine, let alone how stunningly beautiful and incomprehensible the historical timeline of a Metis in northern Quebec would look to me – but Kirk and others still live and, indeed, their lives depend on positing that simple differentiation of time past, known; time today; knowable; and time future, uncertain.

Accuracy, meanwhile, would hold that the past is knowable, but diverse and irreconcilable. It would hold that the present is no where measurable because there exists a lag in communication even in having my brain know what my toes experience in the moment. And the future is not a process from the past and the present; it is a both perfectly unknowable, and at the same time, we exist as sentient beings on a certain level to sort and compare and choose what future we will construct. That is to say, the future isn’t a process drawn from us: it is a constant choice, made instantaneously by an effectively infinite number of actors – subatomic, mineral, living, sentient – and crunched, waveform-collapsed, and reinitiated every single moment, and since every moment is across space, occurring with effects that also require the time movement of events as they ripple across the cosmos.

The potholes and the indigent and the sickly that Kirk points out are all deserving of our individual concern – but that isn’t to downplay or ignore the future generations who will be crying out from thirst or disease or heat on a warming Earth. And it’s not to ignore or move past those who came before us and were enslaved or ignored or oppressed or kept in silence. Thinking holistically as a moral individual requires thinking not just across spaces – not just being concerned locally – but also to be aware of the dynamics of time and space in motion, and to avoid the easy privileging of any one frame of either time or space.

Does this make it simple? Of course not. Does this give any of us individually the opportunity or hope to effect real change? Of course not. Does this excuse any of us from the effort of doing our best, given the tools and opportunities that come to hand? No, of course not.

We don’t get to focus on the potholes and congratulate ourselves, which is effectively what Kirk tells us. We get to fix the potholes and realise the inadequacy of our efforts, and we get to view the whole and give ourselves only the damning certainty that our efforts will always be in vain. We get to step away from the concept of glamorous self-congratulatory virtue, and step into the shoes of Sisyphean effort which has no end. In a universe which is, essentially to us within it, infinite, we have only the promise and the reward of infinitesimal improvement. There is no solace, and yet, the opportunity to be part of the adventure is what we have – all we have.