Claude Parent: Graphic and Built Works, at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris, features the Église Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay, in Nevers.

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
NY Times Published: March 9, 2010

PARIS — There’s something both touching and disturbing at the heart of “Claude Parent: Graphic and Built Works,” a marvelous exhibition at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris’s architecture museum, and it has to do with what the show tells us about our diminished cultural expectations

Organized by Frédéric Migayrou and Francis Rambert, the show takes us back to a bolder and more innocent age. In the process, it re-establishes the 87-year-old Mr. Parent as a pivotal force in European architecture after decades of neglect by the design mainstream — a force whose influence can be clearly felt in the works of younger luminaries like Wolf Prix, Rem Koolhaas and Jean Nouvel.

Mr. Parent’s work, most of which was designed in the 1960s and 1970s, appears to point a finger at our own world. Its concrete forms, full of ramped spaces and oblique angles, come across as acts of defiance, against both the excesses of global consumer culture and the architects who are hired to dress it up. Its confidence would be impossible to summon today.

Mr. Parent began his career as France was just emerging from its postwar misery, and like others of his generation — Serge Gainsbourg and Boris Vian were contemporaries — he cultivated a theatrical persona and an open distaste for bourgeois uptightness. He was often seen zipping around Paris in an Army jeep or a Bentley convertible and once plastered the Boulevard Raspail with posters bearing slogans like “Put yourself at risk!” and “One day you will live in cities that resemble petrified oceans!” His dream, he said recently, was that architecture would one day share a place in the popular consciousness with soft drinks.

The Paris show begins by mapping out the twists and turns in Mr. Parent’s early creative struggle, including a series of remarkable collaborations with artists and sculptors. A photograph of a modern glass-and-steel house built in 1962 for the engineer and sculptor André Bloc focuses on a big exterior spiral staircase, emphasizing Mr. Parent’s early fascination with movement. (He said that he wanted the house, which sits at the edge of a steep hill, to rest on its site “as delicately as a mosquito landing on your arm.”)

In contrast, a small experimental theater designed later that year in collaboration with Bloc for a site in Dakar evokes the surreal, womblike forms of Frederick Kielser’s “Endless House.” Its smooth ovoid form, which enclosed a stage and seats that could in theory be reconfigured at will, resembles a polished stone.

In a later project, the unbuilt Lunatour designed in 1964 in collaboration with the sculptor Jean Tinguely, Mr. Parent creates a fantastical tower packed with carousels, ramps and escalators and emblazoned with gigantic advertising images. Conceived as a vertical city in miniature, the structure glorifies what Guy Debord called the “society of the spectacle” — the delirium at the core of popular consumer culture.

These early experiments crystallize in a series of mostly unbuilt civic projects designed between the mid-1960s and the early ’70s. These monumental buildings at first seem to have been inspired by the postwar Brutalism of architects like Le Corbusier and Peter and Alison Smithson. In fact, they are firmly planted in the technological assurance and psychic anxieties of the cold war period.

The Église Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay, completed in 1966 in the small city of Nevers, can be read as a brash critique of Le Corbusier’s 1954 Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut — one of the great monuments of postwar Modernism. Le Corbusier’s composition of concave and convex forms evokes primitive temples and mosques; Mr. Parent’s building — massive concrete walls with rounded corners and slot windows — is the expression of a culture living under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation and still haunted by the devastation of World War II.

Inside, two sloped seating areas converge under the light of a long, narrow window running the length of the roof, creating a space of disquieting solitude. The message is ambiguous. Is it a safe haven from the vulgarities of the new consumer society? Or the final resting place for a fixed moral order that is dying out?

Either way, this zone of intimate, even tender social encounters carefully sheltered from the outside world became a recurring motif in Mr. Parent’s work, and is the aspect of it that can make it so moving despite its aggressive qualities.

For a 1966 proposal for the unbuilt Palais des Expositions in Ardennes, Mr. Parent created a gigantic slab building that extends out over the Meuse River from the edge of a small plaza. When I first saw it, the project reminded me of an afternoon in the Santa Monica Mountains when I looked up from a backyard and caught a glimpse of a stealth bomber drifting ominously across a California sky. Yet it also evokes something mystical. The enormous roof, which slopes upward as it reaches out over the water, is an informal public amphitheater. Ramps and stairs spiral down into the cavernous main hall and out through the belly of the building to the water below, a sequence suggesting a shared descent into the sanctuary of a prehistoric cave.

Perhaps the most memorable project is Mr. Parent’s losing entry in the 1971 competition for the Centre Pompidou: an enormous pyramid-shaped hill covered in dense vegetation. Inside, visitors would have moved up and down on ramps spiraling among the museum’s galleries. It is as if Wright’s famous Guggenheim ramp had been buried inside a funerary mound, an image as cheeky as his earlier take on Le Corbusier’s chapel.

The show goes on to examine a number of nuclear plants Mr. Parent designed in the late 1970s, when France was developing its image as a technological leader. There are also a series of increasingly utopian drawings of ribbonlike cities that unfurl across barren landscapes and oblique towers that pierce through the earth’s surface.

Yet nothing matches the work he created in the five years from 1966 to 1971. And part of the pleasure of seeing it again today is realizing the degree to which these designs anticipate current trends in architectural thought. The ramped surfaces bring to mind the fluid spaces of the emerging information age; the Brutalist forms echo our recent fascination with large-scale urban infrastructure.

Those who follow contemporary architectural trends closely may even notice more direct influences, like the similarity between Mr. Parent’s proposal for an Education Ministry building at La Défense and Coop Himmelblau’s European Bank design, currently under construction in Frankfurt. (Both Wolf Prix, a founder of Coop Himmelblau, and Jean Nouvel, who worked in Mr. Parent’s office in the 1960s, consider Mr. Parent a mentor. Mr. Nouvel, who designed the installation for the show, even dedicated his proposal for a new Paris Philharmonic hall to him.)

Mr. Parent, for his part, sees all of these projects as elements in a more ambitious urban vision that he calls “the oblique city” — the final stage after the fall of the traditional horizontal village and the densely packed, vertical city of modernity. New York, to Mr. Parent and his longtime collaborator, the cultural theorist Paul Virilio, represented a conclusion: “The epitome and the end of verticality.” His inclined forms were meant as a way to resolve the schism between ancient and modern precedents, and to reconnect us with the natural undulations of the earth’s surface.

Some may find this idea terrifying. But I suspect the work will only get more seductive as time passes. As the deadening visual noise and consumer distractions of our cities continue to thicken, the quiet force of Mr. Parent’s designs begins to look like a heroic resistance. At their core, they embody a desire to preserve a small kernel of humanity amid all the waste.

February 25 - April 4, 2010

Rachel Uffner

By Bettina Boxall
LA Times March 9, 2010

Reporting from Orange Cove, Calif. - Harvey Bailey was 11 when Friant Dam started spitting the San Joaquin River into an irrigation canal the size of a freeway.

His father and other growers laid bets on when the river’s cool waters would reach their little farm town on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, promising an end to the region’s irrigation woes. Life magazine published a big photo spread on the canal’s opening.

“It was a huge event,” recalled Bailey, 72, president of the Orange Cove Irrigation District.

Now he hopes another dam will rise on the San Joaquin, at a narrow spot seven miles upriver from Friant, called Temperance Flat.

Backed by the Schwarzenegger administration and Central Valley farm interests, the $3.3-billion dam and reservoir at Temperance Flat would be the biggest water storage project in California in more than three decades.

But amid a deep recession and an endemic budget crisis in Sacramento, some are questioning whether it’s worth the investment and whether taxpayers should keep subsidizing water projects that primarily benefit California agribusiness.

“Let’s spend it where it would have the biggest effect: conservation and efficiency,” said Pacific Institute president Peter Gleick. “It’s a fallacy to believe all we have to do is build a couple of big dams and our problems will be over.”

Bailey and his brother Lee grow oranges, lemons and olives on 1,100 acres they own and 900 more they manage in the citrus belt that runs in a shiny green grid along the flanks of the Sierra Nevada.

Orange Cove gets its name from the hills that embrace it, sheltering groves from the cold.

“Family been here since ‘10,” Bailey said, meaning 1910.

Like most other Central Valley settlers, his grandparents pumped groundwater to irrigate fields or grew crops that could survive on the valley’s scant rainfall.

But aquifer levels nose-dived in the years before World War II. Citrus groves were abandoned. “You could see across 10 acres because there weren’t any leaves on the trees,” Bailey said.

The federal government came to the rescue with the Central Valley Project, the nation’s biggest irrigation operation, which erected Friant Dam in the pine-flecked Sierra foothills about 40 miles northwest of Orange Cove. It was completed in 1942.

Two monster canals guzzled water from Millerton Lake, the reservoir formed by the dam. The Madera ran north and the Friant-Kern snaked south, feeding the east side’s myriad irrigation ditches.

The river’s Chinook salmon soon vanished and some 60 miles of riverbed downstream from Friant turned to desert in all but the wettest years.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation knew when it planned the dam that it would rob the lower San Joaquin, which meanders north to meet the Sacramento River and forms a sprawling delta leading to San Francisco Bay.

Drying up the San Joaquin was a problem for the corporate descendants of the 19th century cattle empire amassed by two San Francisco butchers, Henry Miller and Charles Lux. They held rights to the lower river, which they used to green 250,000 acres on the valley’s baking west side, running from Mendota north to Patterson.

To keep them happy, the Bureau of Reclamation built the Delta Mendota Canal to ferry supplies 117 miles upstream from the delta to a spot near Mendota, where the water was dumped into the desiccated San Joaquin for use by the Miller-Lux successors, known as exchange contractors. Their rights predate the Central Valley Project, so they pay nothing for an annual allocation of water greater than the city of Los Angeles uses in a year.

Not only are their supplies free, the exchange contractors are at the head of the line. If there isn’t enough delta water to fill their allotments, the bureau has to give them river water from Millerton, raiding other irrigators’ supplies.

That has yet to happen. But as the delta’s environmental problems grow and its fish populations teeter on the edge of extinction, the state and federal water projects that draw from it have been hit with increasingly severe pumping restrictions.

Sometime soon, the exchange contractors may have to take supplies from Friant, stirring unrest on the San Joaquin that could threaten their deal. Build more storage, they reason, and peace will reign.

“When the dog isn’t hungry, he doesn’t go out hunting,” said Steve Chedester, executive director of the San Joaquin River Exchange Contractors Water Authority.

The push for another reservoir on the San Joaquin is not new. The concrete had barely set on Friant when grousing began: It was built in the wrong place. Millerton was too small to capture all the high flows of Sierra snowmelt.

“They made a boo-boo,” said Mario Santoyo, assistant general manager of the Friant Water Authority, which represents districts supplied by Millerton.

Santoyo, 53, is the son of Central Valley farmworkers. His father, who laid irrigation pipes in other men’s fields, was politically invisible.

Not Santoyo. A veteran water manager, he helped found the 4-year-old California Latino Water Coalition, which is allied with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and is a vocal proponent of building more dams and reservoirs.

Santoyo said he worries that Friant farmers are being squeezed both by the delta’s environmental restrictions and by a 2006 court settlement that requires them to release some of their water into the river to revive a once-bounteous Chinook salmon run.

“Things are only going to get worse,” Santoyo said.

In his campaign for Temperance, Santoyo may encounter opposition broader than the expected environmental groups: urban taxpayers and budget guardians.

In 1960, California voters approved a big bond to build the State Water Project, a network of dams and aqueducts that captures Northern California water and ships it through the delta to the south’s subdivisions and cities.

The primarily urban water agencies, and ultimately their rate-payers, are repaying most of the bond, with interest. They also shoulder almost all of the system’s annual operating costs.

Bailey and the other irrigators in the Central Valley Project have, in contrast, enjoyed the equivalent of a 60-year, interest-free loan. They have so far repaid about 19% of their $1.2-billion share of the federal project’s capital costs. And under reclamation law, the government charges them no interest.

Though as much as three-fourths of Temperance Flat’s releases could go to growers, they say they can’t afford to take on that proportion of the dam’s costs.

Standing in a newly planted citrus grove, Bailey does some budget calculations and shakes his head. “There’s no way you could pay $1,500 an acre for water,” he says flatly.

Temperance, which would boost the state’s annual water supply by a small fraction of California’s total demand, could win a big chunk of state taxpayer funding through the $11-billion water bond measure slated for the November ballot.

But the bond, which would set aside $3 billion for unspecified surface and groundwater storage, can pay no more than half of any project’s total cost. So dam backers would still have to turn elsewhere for money — most likely to the federal government or urban Southern California.

“If it’s just going to be on the backs of ag, it’s probably not going to be doable,” Santoyo said. “Municipalities are going to have to play a major role in this.”

Government planners have devised a scenario under which some water from Temperance could go to the State Water Project that helps supply the Southland.

But officials with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California aren’t making any commitments.

“We’re certainly not going to write a check without a benefit,” said Jeffrey Kightlinger, the district’s general manager. If agriculture needs financing partners, he said, “they are going to have to go out and get them and make it attractive.”

Closes March 13

Michael Kohn

By ALAN TONELSON and KEVIN L. KEARNS
NY Times Published: March 5, 2010

Washington

FOR a quarter-century, American economic policy has assumed that the keys to durable national prosperity are deregulation, free trade and a swift transition to a post-industrial, services-dominated future.

Such policies, advocates say, drive innovation, which leads to enormous labor productivity and wage gains — more than enough, supposedly, to make up for the labor disruptions that accompany free trade and de-industrialization.

In reality, though, wage gains for the average worker have lagged behind productivity since the early 1980s, a situation that free-traders usually attribute to workers failing to retrain themselves after seeing their jobs outsourced.

But what if wages lag because productivity itself is being grossly overstated, especially in the nation’s manufacturing sector? Then, suddenly, a cornerstone of American economic policy would begin to crumble.

Productivity measures how many worker hours are needed for a given unit of output during a given time period; when hours fall relative to output, labor productivity increases. In 2009, the data show, Americans needed 40 percent fewer hours to produce the same unit of output as in 1980.

But there’s a problem: labor productivity figures, which are calculated by the Labor Department, count only worker hours in America, even though American-owned factories and labs have been steadily transplanted overseas, and foreign workers have contributed significantly to the final products counted in productivity measures.

The result is an apparent drop in the number of worker hours required to produce goods — and thus increased productivity. But actually, the total number of worker hours does not necessarily change.

This oversight is no secret: as Labor Department officials acknowledged at a 2004 conference, their statistical methods deem any reduction in the work that goes into creating a specific unit of output, whatever the cause, to be a productivity gain.

This continuing mismeasurement leads economists and all those who rely on them to assume that recorded productivity gains always signify greater efficiency, rather than simple offshoring-generated cost cuts — leaving the rest of us scratching our heads over stagnating wages.

Of course, just because productivity is mismeasured doesn’t mean that genuine innovations can’t improve living standards. It does mean, however, that Americans are flying blind when it comes to their economy’s strengths and weaknesses, and consequently drawing the wrong policy lessons.

Above all, if offshoring has been driving much of our supposed productivity gains, then the case for complete free trade begins to erode. If often such policies simply increase corporate profits at the expense of American workers, with no gains in true productivity, then they don’t necessarily strengthen the national economy.

In this regard, the case for free trade as a stimulus for innovation weakens, too. Because productivity gains in part reflect job offshoring, not just the benefits of technology or better business practices, then the American economy has been much less innovative than widely assumed.

How can we actually increase innovation and real productivity? Manufacturing, long slighted by free-market extremists, needs to be promoted, not pushed offshore, since it has historically accounted for the bulk of research and development spending and employs the bulk of American science and technology workers — who in turn spur further innovation and real productivity.

Promoting manufacturing will require major changes in tax and trade policies that currently foster offshoring, including implementing provisions to punish currency manipulation by countries like China and help American producers harmed by discriminatory foreign value-added tax systems. It also means revitalizing government and corporate research and development, which has languished since its heyday in the 1960s.

Much of government policy and business strategy rides on false assumptions about innovation, and although the Obama administration acknowledges the problem, it has done nothing to correct it. With the economy still in need of government life support and the future of American manufacturing in doubt, relying on faulty productivity data is a formula for disaster.

Alan Tonelson, a fellow at the United States Business and Industry Council, is the author of “The Race to the Bottom.” Kevin L. Kearns is the president of the council, which is an association of small manufacturers.

Sterling Ruby: 2TRAPS
Through March 20, 2010

Pace Wildenstein

Through March 27, 2010

Pace Wildenstein

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NY Times Published: March 2, 2010

I was traveling via Los Angeles International Airport — LAX — last week. Walking through its faded, cramped domestic terminal, I got the feeling of a place that once thought of itself as modern but has had one too many face-lifts and simply can’t hide the wrinkles anymore. In some ways, LAX is us. We are the United States of Deferred Maintenance. China is the People’s Republic of Deferred Gratification. They save, invest and build. We spend, borrow and patch.

And this contrast is playing out in the worst way — just slowly enough so the crisis never seems acute enough to take urgent action. But, eventually, infrastructure, education and innovation policies matter. Businesses prefer to invest with the Jetsons more than the Flintstones, which brings me to the subject of this column.

I had a chance last week to listen to Paul Otellini, the chief executive of Intel, the microchip maker and one of America’s crown jewel companies. Otellini was in Washington to talk about competitiveness at Brookings and the Aspen Institute. At a time when so much of our public policy discussion is dominated by health care and bailouts, my public service for the week is to share Mr. Otellini’s views on start-ups.

While America still has the quality work force, political stability and natural resources a company like Intel needs, said Otellini, the U.S. is badly lagging in developing the next generation of scientific talent and incentives to induce big multinationals to create lots more jobs here.

“The things that are not conducive to investments here are [corporate] taxes and capital equipment credits,” he said. “A new semiconductor factory at world scale built from scratch is about $4.5 billion — in the United States. If I build that factory in almost any other country in the world, where they have significant incentive programs, I could save $1 billion,” because of all the tax breaks these governments throw in. Not surprisingly, the last factory Intel built from scratch was in China. “That comes online in October,” he said. “And it wasn’t because the labor costs are lower. Yeah, the construction costs were a little bit lower, but the cost of operating when you look at it after tax was substantially lower and you have local market access.”

These local incentives matter because smart, skilled labor is everywhere now. Intel can thrive today — not just survive, but thrive — and never hire another American. Asked if his company was being held back by weak science and math education in America’s K-12 schools, Otellini explained:

“As a citizen, I hate it. As a global employer, I have the luxury of hiring the best engineers anywhere on earth. If I can’t get them out of M.I.T., I’ll get them out of Tsing Hua” — Beijing’s M.I.T.

It gets worse. Otellini noted that a 2009 study done by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and cited recently in Democracy Journal “ranked the U.S. sixth among the top 40 industrialized nations in innovative competitiveness — not great, but not bad. Yet that same study also measured what they call ‘the rate of change in innovation capacity’ over the last decade — in effect, how much countries were doing to make themselves more innovative for the future. The study relied on 16 different metrics of human capital — I.T. infrastructure, economic performance and so on. On this scale, the U.S. ranked dead last out of the same 40 nations. … When you take a hard look at the things that make any country competitive. … we are slipping.”

If the government just boosted the research and development tax credit by 5 percent and lowered corporate taxes, argued Otellini, and we “started one or two more projects in companies around the country that made them more productive and more competitive, the government’s tax revenues are going to grow.” With the generous research and development tax credits and lower corporate taxes they receive, Intel’s chief competitors in South Korea basically have “zero cost of money,” said Otellini. Intel can compete against that with superior technology, but many other U.S. firms can’t.

Does the Obama team get it? Otellini compared the Obama administration to a “diode” — an electronic device that conducts electric current in only one direction. They are very good at listening to Silicon Valley, he said, but not so good at responding.

“I’d like to see competitiveness and education take a higher role than they are today,” he said. “Right now, they’re going to try to push this health care thing over the line, and, after that, deal with the next thing. God, I’d just like this [our competitiveness] to be the next thing. Something has to pay for” everything government is doing today.

We had to do the bailouts, the buy-ups and the jobs bills to stop the bleeding. But now we need to focus on the policies that spawn new firms and keep our best at the top. “Having run a company through a major transition, it’s a lot easier to change when you can than when you have to,” said Otellini. “The cost is less. You have more time. I am a little worried that by the time we wake up to the crisis we will be in the abyss.”

March 12 - May 15, 2010

Opening reception
March 12, 2010 6-8pm

Blum and Poe

by Richard Rodriguez
The Wilson Quarterly
Winter 2010 Issue

The funeral for Cesar Chavez took place in an open field near Delano, a small agricultural town at the southern end of California’s Central Valley. I remember an amiable Mexican disorder, a crowd listening and not listening to speeches and prayers delivered from a raised platform beneath a canvas tent. I do not remember a crowd numbering 30,000 or 50,000, as some estimates have ­it—­but then I do not remember. Perhaps a cool, perhaps a warm spring sun. Men in white shirts carried forward a pine box. The ease of their movement suggested the lightness of their ­burden.

When Cesar Chavez died in his sleep in 1993, not yet a very old man at 66, he died—as he had so often portrayed himself in life—as a loser. The United Farm Workers (UFW) union he had co­founded was in decline; the union had 5,000 members, equivalent to the population of one very small Central Valley town. The labor in California’s agricultural fields was largely taken up by Mexican migrant workers—the very workers Chavez had been unable to reconcile to his American union, whom he had branded “scabs” and wanted reported to immigration authorities.

I went to the funeral because I was writing a piece on Chavez for The Los Angeles Times. It now occurs to me that I was present at a number of events involving Cesar Chavez. I was a teenager at the edge of the crowd in 1966, when Chavez led UFW marchers to the steps of the capitol in Sacramento to generate support for a strike against grape growers. A few years later, I went to hear him speak at Stanford University. I can recall everything about the occasion except why I was there. I remember a golden light of late afternoon; I remember the Reverend Robert McAfee Brown introducing Cesar Chavez. Something about Chavez embarrassed me. It was as though someone from my family had turned up at Stanford to lecture undergraduates on the hardness of a Mexican’s life. I stood at the back of the room. I did not join in the standing ovation. I would not give him anything. And yet, of course, there was something compelling about his ­homeliness.

In her thoroughly researched and thoroughly unsentimental book The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement, journalist Miriam Pawel chronicles the lives of a collection of ­people—­farm workers, idealistic college students, young East Coast lawyers, a Presbyterian minister, and ­others—­who gave years of their lives at subsistence pay to work for the UFW. By the end of her book, every person Pawel profiles has left the ­union—­has been fired or has quit in disgust or frustration. Nevertheless, it is not beside the point to notice that Cesar Chavez inspired such a disparate, devoted ­company.

We easily forget that the era we call “the Sixties” was not only a time of vast civic disaffection; it was also a time of religious idealism. At the forefront of what amounted to the religious revival of America in those years were the black Protestant ministers of the civil rights movement, ministers who insisted upon a moral dimension to the rituals of everyday American ­life—­eating at a lunch counter, riding a bus, going to ­school.

Cesar Chavez similarly cast his campaign for better wages and living conditions for farm workers as a religious movement. He became for many Americans, especially Mexican Americans (my parents among them), a figure of spiritual authority. I remember a small brown man with an Indian aspect leading labor protests that were also medieval religious processions of women, children, nuns, college students, burnt old ­men—­under the banner of Our Lady of ­Guadalupe.

By the time he had become the most famous Mexican American anyone could name—his face on the cover of ­Time—­the majority of Mexican Americans lived in cities, far from the tragic fields of California’s Central Valley that John Steinbeck had made famous a generation before. Mexican Americans were more likely to work in construction or in ­service-­sector jobs than in the ­fields.

Cesar Chavez was born in Yuma, Arizona, in 1927. During the hardscrabble years of his youth, he dropped out of school to work in the fields of Arizona and California. As a young man he accumulated an autodidact’s library. He read books on economics, philosophy, history. (Years later, Chavez was apt to quote Winston Churchill at UFW staff meetings.) He studied the black civil rights movement, particularly the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. He studied most intently the lives and precepts of St. Francis of Assisi and Mohandas ­Gandhi.

It is heartening to learn about private acts of goodness in notorious lives. It is discouraging to learn of the moral failures of famously good people. The former console. But to learn that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was a womanizer is to be confronted with the knowledge that flesh is a complicated medium for grace. To learn that there were flaws in the character of Cesar Chavez is again to test the meaning of a good life. During his lifetime, Chavez was considered by many to be a saint. Pawel is writing outside the hagiography, but while reading her book, I found myself wondering about the nature of sanctity. Saints? Holiness? I apologize for introducing radiant ­nouns.

The first portrait in The Union of Their Dreams is of Eliseo Medina. At the advent of the UFW, Eliseo was a shy teenager, educated only through the eighth grade. Though he was not confident in English, Medina loved to read El Malcriado, the feisty bilingual weekly published by the UFW. He remembered that his life changed the Thursday night he went to hear Chavez in the social hall of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Delano. He was “disappointed by the leader’s unimpressive appearance.” But by the end of the evening, he had determined to join the ­union.

No Chavez speech I have read or heard approaches the rhetorical brilliance of the Protestant ministers of the black civil rights movement. Chavez was, however, brilliantly theatrical. He seemed to understand, the way Charlie Chaplin understood, how to make an embarrassment of ­himself—­his mulishness, his silence, his witness. His presence at the edge of a field was a blight of ­beatitude.

Chavez studied the power of abstinence. He internalized his resistance to injustice by refusing to eat. What else can a poor man do? Though Chavez had little success encouraging UFW volunteers to follow his example of fasting, he was able to convince millions of Americans (as many as 20 million, by some estimates) not to buy grapes or ­lettuce.

Farmers in the Central Valley were bewildered to find themselves roped into a religious parable. Indeed, Valley growers, many of them Catholics, were distressed when their children came home from parochial schools and reported that Chavez was used as a moral exemplum in religion ­class.

At a time in the history of American entrepreneurialism when Avis saw the advantage of advertising itself as “Number Two” and Volkswagen sold itself as the “bug,” Chavez made the smallness of his union, its haphazardness, a kind of boast. In 1968, during his most publicized fast to support the strike of grape pickers, Chavez issued this statement (he was too weak to read aloud): “Those who oppose our cause are rich and powerful and they have many allies in high places. We are poor. Our allies are few.”

Chavez ended his 1968 fast in a tableau that was rich with symbol and irony. Physically diminished (in photographs his body seems unable to sustain an erect, seated position), he was handed bread (sacramental ministration after his trial in the desert) by Chris Hartmire, the Presbyterian minister who gave so much of his life to serving Chavez and his union. The Protestant activist was feeding the Catholic ascetic. Alongside Chavez sat Robert F. Kennedy, then a U.S. senator from New York. The poor and the meek also have allies in high ­places.

Here began a conflict between deprivation and success that would bedevil Chavez through three decades. In a way, this was a struggle between the Mexican Cesar Chavez and the American Cesar Chavez. For it was Mexico that taught Chavez to value a life of suffering. It was America that taught him to fight the causes of ­suffering.

The speech Chavez had written during his hunger strike of 1968, wherein he compared the UFW to David fighting Goliath, announced the Mexican ­theme: “I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally ­non-­violent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be ­men.” (Nearly three decades later, in the program for Chavez’s funeral, the wording of his psalm was revised—“humanity” substituted for “manliness”: To be human is to suffer for others. God help me to be human.)

Nothing else Chavez would write during his life had such haunting power for me as this public prayer for a life of suffering; no utterance would sound so Mexican. Other cultures in the world assume the reality of suffering as something to be overcome. Mexico assumes the inevitability of suffering. That knowledge informs the folk music of Mexico, the bitter humor of its proverbs, the architecture of its stoicism. To be a man is to suffer for others. The code of machismo (which in American English translates too crudely to sexual bravado) in Mexico derives from a medieval chivalry whereby a man uses his strength to protect those less powerful. God help us to be men.

Mexicans believe that in 1531 the Virgin Mary appeared in brown skin, in royal Aztec raiment, to a converted Indian peasant named Juan Diego. The Virgin asked that a church be erected on the site of her four apparitions so that Mexican Indians could come to her and tell her of their suffering. Our Lady of Guadalupe was a part of every UFW ­demonstration.

Though he grew up during the American Depression, Chavez breathed American optimism and American activism. In the early 1950s, while still a farm worker, he met Fred Ross of the Community Service Organization, a group inspired by the principles of the radical organizer Saul Alinsky. Chavez later became an official in the CSO, and eventually its president. He persuaded notoriously apathetic Mexican Americans to register to vote by encouraging them to believe they could change their lives in ­America.

If you would understand the tension between Mexico and the United States that is playing out along our mutual border, you must understand the psychic tension between Mexican ­stoicism—­if that is a rich enough word for ­it—­and American optimism. On the one side, Mexican peasants are tantalized by the American possibility of change. On the other side, the tyranny of American optimism has driven Americans to neurosis and ­depression—­when the dream is elusive or less meaningful than the myth promised. This constitutes the great irony of the Mexican-American border: American sadness has transformed the drug lords of Mexico into billionaires, even as the peasants of Mexico scramble through the darkness to find the American ­dream.

By the late 1960s, as the first UFW contracts were being signed, Chavez began to brood. Had he spent his poor life only to create a middle class? Lionel Steinberg, the first grape grower to sign with the UFW, was drawn by Chavez’s charisma but chagrined at the union’s disordered operations. “Is it a social movement or a trade union?” Steinberg wondered. He urged Chavez to use experienced negotiators from the AFL-­CIO.

Chavez paid himself a subsistence annual wage of $5,000. “You can’t change anything if you want to hold onto a good job, a good way of life, and avoid suffering.” The ­world-­famous labor leader would regularly complain to his poorly ­paid staff about the phone bills they ran up and about what he saw as the misuse of a fleet of ­second-­hand UFW cars. He held the union hostage to the purity of his intent. Eliseo Medina, who had become one of the union’s most effective organizers, could barely support his young family and, without even the prospect of establishing a savings account, asked Chavez about setting up a trust fund for his infant son. Chavez promised to get back to him but never did. Shortly after, discouraged by the mismanagement of the union, Medina ­resigned.

In 1975, Chavez helped to pass legislation prohibiting the use of the short-handled ­hoe—­its ­two-­foot-­long haft forced farm workers to stoop all day. That achievement would outlast the decline of his union. By the early 1970s, California vegetable growers had begun signing sweetheart contracts with the rival Teamsters Union. The UFW became mired in scraps with unfriendly politicians in Sacramento. Chavez’s attention wandered. He imagined a “Poor Peoples Union” that would reach out to senior citizens and people on welfare. He contacted church officials within the Vatican about the possibility of establishing a religious society devoted to service to the poor. He grew interested in the Hutterite communities of North America and the Israeli kibbutzim as possible ­models.

Chavez visited Synanon, the drug rehabilitation commune headed by Charles Dederich, shortly before some of its members were implicated in a series of sexual scandals and criminal assaults. Chavez borrowed from Synanon a version of a disciplinary practice called “the Game,” whereby UFW staff members were obliged to stand in the middle of a circle of peers and submit to fierce criticism. Someone sympathetic to Chavez might argue that the Game was an inversion of an ancient monastic discipline meant to teach humility. Someone less sympathetic might conclude that Chavez was turning into a petty tyrant. I think both estimations are ­true.

From his reading, Chavez would have known that St. Francis of Assisi desired to imitate the life of Jesus. The followers of Francis desired to imitate the life of Francis. Within 10 years of undertaking his mendicant life, Francis had more than 1,000 followers. Francis realized he could not administer a growing religious order by personal example. He relinquished the administration of the Franciscans to men who had some talent for organization. Cesar Chavez never gave up his position as head of the ­UFW.

In 1977 Chavez traveled to Manila as a guest of President Ferdinand Marcos. He ended up praising the old dictator. There were darker problems within the UFW. It was rumored that some within the inner circle were responsible for a car crash that left Cleofas Guzman, an apostate union member, with permanent brain damage.

Chavez spent his last years protesting the use of pesticides in the fields. In April of 1993, he ­died.

In death, Cesar Chavez became a Mexican saint and an American ­hero. The year after his death, Chavez was awarded the National Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton. In 2002, the U.S. Postal Service unveiled a 37-cent stamp bearing the image of Cesar Chavez. Politicians throughout the West and the Southwest attached Chavez’s name to parks and schools and streets and civic buildings of every ­sort.

In 1997 American painter Robert Lentz, a Franciscan brother, painted an icon of “Cesar Chavez of California.” Chavez is depicted with a golden halo. He holds in his hand a scrolled broadsheet of the U.S. Constitution. He wears a pink sweatshirt bearing the UFW ­insignia.

That same year, executives at the advertising agency TBWA/Chiat/Day came up with a campaign for Apple computers that featured images of some famous ­dead—­John Lennon, Albert Einstein, Frank ­Sinatra—­alongside a ­grammar-­crunching motto: THINK ­DIFFERENT.

I remember sitting in bad traffic on the San Diego Freeway and looking up to see a photograph of Cesar Chavez on a billboard. His eyes were downcast. He balanced a rake and a shovel over his right shoulder. In the upper-­left-­hand corner was the corporate logo of a bitten ­apple.

via

The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis

March 4 through April 24, 2010

David Zwirner

Pawel in the Warsaw synagogue. A former truck driver and neo-Nazi skinhead, Pawel, 33, has since become an Orthodox Jew, covering his shaved head with a yarmulke and shedding his fascist ideology for the Torah.

By DAN BILEFSKY
NY Times Published: February 27, 2010

WARSAW — When Pawel looks into the mirror, he can still sometimes see a neo-Nazi skinhead staring back, the man he was before he covered his shaved head with a skullcap, traded his fascist ideology for the Torah and renounced violence and hatred in favor of God.

“I still struggle every day to discard my past ideas,” said Pawel, a 33-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jew and former truck driver, noting with little irony that he had to stop hating Jews in order to become one. “When I look at an old picture of myself as a skinhead, I feel ashamed. Every day I try and do teshuvah,” he said, using the Hebrew word for repentance. “Every minute of every day. There is a lot to make up for.”

Pawel, who also uses his Hebrew name Pinchas, asked that his last name not be used for fear that his old neo-Nazi friends could harm him or his family.

Twenty years after the fall of Communism, Pawel is perhaps the most unlikely example of the Jewish revival under way in Poland, of a moment in which Jewish leaders here say the country is finally showing solid signs of shedding the rabid anti-Semitism of the past.

Before 1939, Poland was home to more than three million Jews, more than 90 percent of whom were killed by the Nazis. Most who survived emigrated. Of the fewer than 50,000 who remained in Poland, many abandoned or hid their Judaism during decades of Communist oppression in which political pogroms against Jews persisted.

Today, though, Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, said he considered Poland the most pro-Israel country in the European Union. He said the attitude of Pope John Paul II, a Pole, who called Jews “our elder brothers,” had finally entered the public consciousness.

Ten years after the revelation that 1,600 Jews of the town of Jedwabne were burned alive by their Polish neighbors in July 1941, he said the national myth that all Poles were victims of World War II had finally been shattered.

“Before 1989 there was a feeling that it was not safe to say, ‘I am a Jew,’ ” Rabbi Schudrich said. “But two decades later, there is a growing feeling that Jews are a missing limb in Poland. The level of anti-Semitism remains unacceptable, but the image of the murderous Pole seared in the consciousness of many Jews after the war doesn’t correspond to the Poland of 2010.”

The small Jewish revival has been under way for several years around eastern Europe. Hundreds of Poles, a majority of them raised as Catholics, are either converting to Judaism or discovering Jewish roots submerged for decades in the aftermath of World War II.

In the past five years, Warsaw’s Jewish community had grown to 600 families from 250. The cafes and bars of the old Jewish quarter in Krakow brim with young Jewish converts listening to Israeli hip hop music.

Michal Pirog, a popular Polish dancer and television star, who recently proclaimed his Jewish roots on national television, said the revelation had won him more fans than enemies. “Poland is changing,” he said. “I am Jewish and I feel good,” he said.

Pawel’s metamorphosis from baptized Catholic skinhead to Jew began in a bleak neighborhood of concrete tower blocks in Warsaw in the 1980s, where Pawel said he and his friends reacted to the gnawing uniformity of socialism by embracing anti-Semitism. They shaved their heads, carried knives and greeted one another with the raised right arm gesture of the Nazi salute.

“Oy vey, I hate to admit it, but we would beat up local Jewish and Arab kids and homeless people,” Pawel said on a recent day from the Nozyk Synagogue here. “We sang about stupid stuff like Satan and killing people. We believed that Poland should only be for Poles.”

One day, he recalled, he and his friends skipped school and took a train to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, near Krakow. “We made jokes that we wished the exhibition had been bigger and that the Nazis had killed even more Jews,” he said.

Even as Pawel embraced the life of a neo-Nazi, he said that he had pangs that his identity was built on a lie. His churchgoing father seemed overly fond of quoting the Old Testament. His grandfather hinted about past family secrets.

“One time when I told my grandfather that Jews were bad, he exploded and screamed at me, ‘If I ever hear you say such a thing again under my roof, you will never come back!’ ”

Pawel joined the army and married a fellow skinhead at age 18. But his sense of self changed irrevocably at the age of 22, when his wife, Paulina, suspecting that she had Jewish roots, went to a genealogical institute and discovered Pawel’s maternal grandparents on a register of Warsaw Jews, along with her own grandparents.

When Pawel confronted his parents, he said, they broke down and told him the truth: his maternal grandmother was Jewish and had survived the war by being hidden in a monastery by a group of nuns. His paternal grandfather, also a Jew, had seven brother and sisters, most of whom had perished in the Holocaust.

“I went to my parents and said, ‘What the hell’? Imagine, I was a neo-Nazi and heard this news? I couldn’t look in the mirror for weeks,” he said. “My parents were the typical offspring of Jewish survivors of the war, who decided to conceal their Jewish identity to try and protect their family.”

Shaken by his own discovery, Pawel said he spent weeks of cloistered and tortured reflection but was finally overcome by a strong desire to become Jewish, even Orthodox. He acknowledged that he was drawn to extremes. He said his transformation was arduous, akin to being reborn. He even forced himself to reread “Mein Kampf” but could not get to the end because he felt physically repulsed.

“When I asked a rabbi, ‘Why do I feel this way?’ he replied, ‘The sleeping souls of your ancestors are calling out to you.’ ”

At age 24, he was circumcised. Two years later, he decided to become an ultra-Orthodox Jew. He and his wife are raising their two children in a Jewish home.

Pawel noted that he was still singled out by the same anti-Semites who once counted him among their ranks. “When younger people see me on the street with my top hat and side curls they sometimes laugh at me,” he said. “But it is the old ladies who are the meanest. Sometimes, they use the language I used when I was a skinhead and say, ‘Get out and go back to your country’ or ‘Jew go home!’ ”

And now he is studying to become a shochet, a person charged with killing animals according to Jewish dietary laws. “I am good with knives,” he explained.

Jennifer Bornstein, Sunset Blvd, west of Martel Ave, on the south side of the street, facing east.

The MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House is pleased to present its most ambitious project to date: How Many Billboards? Art in Stead. This large-scale urban exhibition debuts 21 newly commissioned works by leading contemporary artists, presented simultaneously on billboards in Los Angeles in February and March 2010.

map of project

By AL GORE
NY Times Published: February 27, 2010

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.

Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.

The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.

Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants — especially carbon dioxide — have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.

Though there have been impressive efforts by many business leaders, hundreds of millions of individuals and families throughout the world and many national, regional and local governments, our civilization is still failing miserably to slow the rate at which these emissions are increasing — much less reduce them.

And in spite of President Obama’s efforts at the Copenhagen climate summit meeting in December, global leaders failed to muster anything more than a decision to “take note” of an intention to act.

Because the world still relies on leadership from the United States, the failure by the Senate to pass legislation intended to cap American emissions before the Copenhagen meeting guaranteed that the outcome would fall far short of even the minimum needed to build momentum toward a meaningful solution.

The political paralysis that is now so painfully evident in Washington has thus far prevented action by the Senate — not only on climate and energy legislation, but also on health care reform, financial regulatory reform and a host of other pressing issues.

This comes with painful costs. China, now the world’s largest and fastest-growing source of global-warming pollution, had privately signaled early last year that if the United States passed meaningful legislation, it would join in serious efforts to produce an effective treaty. When the Senate failed to follow the lead of the House of Representatives, forcing the president to go to Copenhagen without a new law in hand, the Chinese balked. With the two largest polluters refusing to act, the world community was paralyzed.

Some analysts attribute the failure to an inherent flaw in the design of the chosen solution — arguing that a cap-and-trade approach is too unwieldy and difficult to put in place. Moreover, these critics add, the financial crisis that began in 2008 shook the world’s confidence in the use of any market-based solution.

But there are two big problems with this critique: First, there is no readily apparent alternative that would be any easier politically. It is difficult to imagine a globally harmonized carbon tax or a coordinated multilateral regulatory effort. The flexibility of a global market-based policy — supplemented by regulation and revenue-neutral tax policies — is the option that has by far the best chance of success. The fact that it is extremely difficult does not mean that we should simply give up.

Second, we should have no illusions about the difficulty and the time needed to convince the rest of the world to adopt a completely new approach. The lags in the global climate system, including the buildup of heat in the oceans from which it is slowly reintroduced into the atmosphere, means that we can create conditions that make large and destructive consequences inevitable long before their awful manifestations become apparent: the displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases.

It’s important to point out that the United States is not alone in its inaction. Global political paralysis has thus far stymied work not only on climate, but on trade and other pressing issues that require coordinated international action.

The reasons for this are primarily economic. The globalization of the economy, coupled with the outsourcing of jobs from industrial countries, has simultaneously heightened fears of further job losses in the industrial world and encouraged rising expectations in emerging economies. The result? Heightened opposition, in both the industrial and developing worlds, to any constraints on the use of carbon-based fuels, which remain our principal source of energy.

The decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s led to a period of philosophical dominance for market economics worldwide and the illusion of a unipolar world. It also led, in the United States, to a hubristic “bubble” of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere. Over time, markets would most efficiently solve most problems, they argued. Laws and regulations interfering with the operations of the market carried a faint odor of the discredited statist adversary we had just defeated.

This period of market triumphalism coincided with confirmation by scientists that earlier fears about global warming had been grossly understated. But by then, the political context in which this debate took form was tilted heavily toward the views of market fundamentalists, who fought to weaken existing constraints and scoffed at the possibility that global constraints would be needed to halt the dangerous dumping of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere.

Over the years, as the science has become clearer and clearer, some industries and companies whose business plans are dependent on unrestrained pollution of the atmospheric commons have become ever more entrenched. They are ferociously fighting against the mildest regulation — just as tobacco companies blocked constraints on the marketing of cigarettes for four decades after science confirmed the link of cigarettes to diseases of the lung and the heart.

Simultaneously, changes in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis — inconvenient as ever — must still be faced.

The pathway to success is still open, though it tracks the outer boundary of what we are capable of doing. It begins with a choice by the United States to pass a law establishing a cost for global warming pollution. The House of Representatives has already passed legislation, with some Republican support, to take the first halting steps for pricing greenhouse gas emissions.

Later this week, Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman are expected to present for consideration similar cap-and-trade legislation.

I hope that it will place a true cap on carbon emissions and stimulate the rapid development of low-carbon sources of energy.

We have overcome existential threats before. Winston Churchill is widely quoted as having said, “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes, you must do what is required.” Now is that time. Public officials must rise to this challenge by doing what is required; and the public must demand that they do so — or must replace them.

Al Gore, the vice president from 1993 to 2001, is the founder of the Alliance for Climate Protection and the author of “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.” As a businessman, he is an investor in alternative energy companies.

By SINDYA N. BHANOO
NY Times Published: February 22, 2010

Just why the brain erases certain memories has long been a topic of interest to scientists.

Now, new research suggests that short-term memory is erased by the brain on purpose, so that new, more relevant memories can be recorded.

At least in fruit flies.

Researchers from China and the United States have found that flies have a protein called Rac that does the job of eroding a memory when needed. The researchers experimented with Rac levels in fruit flies and subjected the flies to two circumstances: a foul smelling odor and a foul smelling odor that also came with an electric shock.

Under normal circumstances, after being exposed to both situations, flies picked the lesser of the two evils — the foul odor without the shock.

The scientists then changed the shock to be tied with the first odor instead of the second.

The flies noted this new information, and erased their original memory. The shock, in their minds, was now correctly tied to the first odor. When exposed to both odors, they again correctly picked the odor without the shock.

But when the experiment was repeated after the memory-eroding protein was blocked, there was utter confusion.

The flies had not erased their first memory, and had made a second memory. Unable to pick which odor to fly toward, they zigzagged back and forth.

Humans also have the protein Rac, and Yi Zhong, the paper’s lead author, believes that further study may reveal how human memories are made.

There is also hope that once they are better understood, Rac levels can be controlled to help people with abnormal memory, said Dr. Zhong of Tsinghua University in China and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

The findings were in last week’s edition of the journal Cell.

“The white room that Loos designed for Lina, his blonde, blue-eyed, nineteen-year-old wife, was the most intimate place in the house. The white walls, the white draperies and the white angora sheepskins created a sensual and delicate fluidity; every object in the room was white. Even the closets were concealed behind pale linen drapes. this was an architecture of silence, of a sentimental and erotic approach. Its contrast with the more public living spaces attests to a method of composition that was strictly governed by the psychological status of each room.” – Panayotis Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos, Princeton Architectural Press, 2002, p. 36.

Ornament and Crime

Blinky Palermo’s “To the People of New York City (Part IX),” from the Dia’s permanent collection.

By CAROL VOGEL
NY Times Published: February 25, 2010

There are artists whose work is much loved in Europe but barely noticed in this country. Martin Kippenberger, the German painter who died in 1997, fell into this category until last year, when the Museum of Modern Art presented a major retrospective. Suddenly his canvases started turning up at auctions in New York, where they brought prices that were higher than anticipated. Now another European name — the German abstract painter Blinky Palermo — is getting his posthumous American moment.

Two institutions with bases in the Hudson Valley — the Dia Art Foundation and the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture at Bard College — will present a joint retrospective, the first in the United States, of works by Palermo, who died in 1977. Organized by Lynne Cooke, Dia’s curator at large, it will include about 60 pieces, many of which have never been shown here.

The show will go on a yearlong tour starting in October at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, moving to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington next February and winding up in 2011 at Dia:Beacon (the foundation’s seven-year-old museum on the Hudson River) and Bard in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

“It’s about time that someone decided to do an exhibition of Palermo’s work in this country,” said Philippe Vergne, Dia’s director. “There’s a myth that surrounds him because his life was too short and his work is too rare. There are so many connections between Palermo and American abstraction.”

Palermo, who died when he was just 34, studied with Joseph Beuys in the late 1960s in Düsseldorf. Palermo, whose original name was Peter Schwarze, lived in the United States from 1973 to 1976; once back in Europe, he produced a monumental painting on 15 parts — bands of red, yellow and black, the colors of the German flag — that he titled “To the People of New York City.” It is his best-known work and his last. It is also in Dia’s permanent collection.

Dia has always been a Palermo supporter. Its founder, Heiner Friedrich, represented Palermo, a friend, through his Munich gallery in the mid-1960s. Bard has a Palermo connection too. Marieluise Hessel, the German-born philanthropist whose collection of contemporary art is housed in a museum named for her at Bard, was an early supporter of Palermo’s work.

The partnership is a first for Dia and Bard. Since the Dia:Beacon galleries have natural light, which can be harmful to pieces like Palermo’s cloth pictures — colored materials sewn together along horizontal or vertical seams and attached to stretchers — Bard will show those along with a comprehensive survey of his career.

Tom Eccles, executive director of the center at Bard, said, “We have taken down all the walls in our gallery so it looks almost like an aircraft hangar,” making it a perfect space for many of Palermo’s odd-shaped works.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: February 25, 2010

If we’re lucky, Thursday’s summit will turn out to have been the last act in the great health reform debate, the prologue to passage of an imperfect but nonetheless history-making bill. If so, the debate will have ended as it began: with Democrats offering moderate plans that draw heavily on past Republican ideas, and Republicans responding with slander and misdirection.

Nobody really expected anything different. But what was nonetheless revealing about the meeting was the fact that Republicans — who had weeks to prepare for this particular event, and have been campaigning against reform for a year — didn’t bother making a case that could withstand even minimal fact-checking.

It was obvious how things would go as soon as the first Republican speaker, Senator Lamar Alexander, delivered his remarks. He was presumably chosen because he’s folksy and likable and could make his party’s position sound reasonable. But right off the bat he delivered a whopper, asserting that under the Democratic plan, “for millions of Americans, premiums will go up.”

Wow. I guess you could say that he wasn’t technically lying, since the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Senate Democrats’ plan does say that average payments for insurance would go up. But it also makes it clear that this would happen only because people would buy more and better coverage. The “price of a given amount of insurance coverage” would fall, not rise — and the actual cost to many Americans would fall sharply thanks to federal aid.

His fib on premiums was quickly followed by a fib on process. Democrats, having already passed a health bill with 60 votes in the Senate, now plan to use a simple majority vote to modify some of the numbers, a process known as reconciliation. Mr. Alexander declared that reconciliation has “never been used for something like this.” Well, I don’t know what “like this” means, but reconciliation has, in fact, been used for previous health reforms — and was used to push through both of the Bush tax cuts at a budget cost of $1.8 trillion, twice the bill for health reform.

What really struck me about the meeting, however, was the inability of Republicans to explain how they propose dealing with the issue that, rightly, is at the emotional center of much health care debate: the plight of Americans who suffer from pre-existing medical conditions. In other advanced countries, everyone gets essential care whatever their medical history. But in America, a bout of cancer, an inherited genetic disorder, or even, in some states, having been a victim of domestic violence can make you uninsurable, and thus make adequate health care unaffordable.

One of the great virtues of the Democratic plan is that it would finally put an end to this unacceptable case of American exceptionalism. But what’s the Republican answer? Mr. Alexander was strangely inarticulate on the matter, saying only that “House Republicans have some ideas about how my friend in Tullahoma can continue to afford insurance for his wife who has had breast cancer.” He offered no clue about what those ideas might be.

In reality, House Republicans don’t have anything to offer to Americans with troubled medical histories. On the contrary, their big idea — allowing unrestricted competition across state lines — would lead to a race to the bottom. The states with the weakest regulations — for example, those that allow insurance companies to deny coverage to victims of domestic violence — would set the standards for the nation as a whole. The result would be to afflict the afflicted, to make the lives of Americans with pre-existing conditions even harder.

Don’t take my word for it. Look at the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the House G.O.P. plan. That analysis is discreetly worded, with the budget office declaring somewhat obscurely that while the number of uninsured Americans wouldn’t change much, “the pool of people without health insurance would end up being less healthy, on average, than under current law.” But here’s the translation: While some people would gain insurance, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most. Under the Republican plan, the American health care system would become even more brutal than it is now.

So what did we learn from the summit? What I took away was the arrogance that the success of things like the death-panel smear has obviously engendered in Republican politicians. At this point they obviously believe that they can blandly make utterly misleading assertions, saying things that can be easily refuted, and pay no price. And they may well be right.

But Democrats can have the last laugh. All they have to do — and they have the power to do it — is finish the job, and enact health reform.

untitled
2010
steel, brass, paint
234×180 x 160cm

Modern Art at Independent
548 West 22nd Street, New York
4 – 7 March, 2010

Modern Art

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: February 24, 2010

Autism was first identified in 1943 in an obscure medical journal. Since then it has become a frighteningly common affliction, with the Centers for Disease Control reporting recently that autism disorders now affect almost 1 percent of children.

Over recent decades, other development disorders also appear to have proliferated, along with certain cancers in children and adults. Why? No one knows for certain. And despite their financial and human cost, they presumably won’t be discussed much at Thursday’s White House summit on health care.

Yet they constitute a huge national health burden, and suspicions are growing that one culprit may be chemicals in the environment. An article in a forthcoming issue of a peer-reviewed medical journal, Current Opinion in Pediatrics, just posted online, makes this explicit.

The article cites “historically important, proof-of-concept studies that specifically link autism to environmental exposures experienced prenatally.” It adds that the “likelihood is high” that many chemicals “have potential to cause injury to the developing brain and to produce neurodevelopmental disorders.”

The author is not a granola-munching crank but Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, professor of pediatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and chairman of the school’s department of preventive medicine. While his article is full of cautionary language, Dr. Landrigan told me that he is increasingly confident that autism and other ailments are, in part, the result of the impact of environmental chemicals on the brain as it is being formed.

“The crux of this is brain development,” he said. “If babies are exposed in the womb or shortly after birth to chemicals that interfere with brain development, the consequences last a lifetime.”

Concern about toxins in the environment used to be a fringe view. But alarm has moved into the medical mainstream. Toxicologists, endocrinologists and oncologists seem to be the most concerned.

One uncertainty is to what extent the reported increases in autism simply reflect a more common diagnosis of what might previously have been called mental retardation. There are genetic components to autism (identical twins are more likely to share autism than fraternal twins), but genetics explains only about one-quarter of autism cases.

Suspicions of toxins arise partly because studies have found that disproportionate shares of children develop autism after they are exposed in the womb to medications such as thalidomide (a sedative), misoprostol (ulcer medicine) and valproic acid (anticonvulsant). Of children born to women who took valproic acid early in pregnancy, 11 percent were autistic. In each case, fetuses seem most vulnerable to these drugs in the first trimester of pregnancy, sometimes just a few weeks after conception.

So as we try to improve our health care, it’s also prudent to curb the risks from the chemicals that envelop us. Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey is drafting much-needed legislation that would strengthen the Toxic Substances Control Act. It is moving ahead despite his own recent cancer diagnosis, and it can be considered as an element of health reform. Senator Lautenberg says that under existing law, of 80,000 chemicals registered in the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency has required safety testing of only 200. “Our children have become test subjects,” he noted.

One peer-reviewed study published this year in Environmental Health Perspectives gave a hint of the risks. Researchers measured the levels of suspect chemicals called phthalates in the urine of pregnant women. Among women with higher levels of certain phthalates (those commonly found in fragrances, shampoos, cosmetics and nail polishes), their children years later were more likely to display disruptive behavior.

Frankly, these are difficult issues for journalists to write about. Evidence is technical, fragmentary and conflicting, and there’s a danger of sensationalizing risks. Publicity about fears that vaccinations cause autism — a theory that has now been discredited — perhaps had the catastrophic consequence of lowering vaccination rates in America.

On the other hand, in the case of great health dangers of modern times — mercury, lead, tobacco, asbestos — journalists were too slow to blow the whistle. In public health, we in the press have more often been lap dogs than watchdogs.

At a time when many Americans still use plastic containers to microwave food, in ways that make toxicologists blanch, we need accelerated research, regulation and consumer protection.

“There are diseases that are increasing in the population that we have no known cause for,” said Alan M. Goldberg, a professor of toxicology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. “Breast cancer, prostate cancer, autism are three examples. The potential is for these diseases to be on the rise because of chemicals in the environment.”

The precautionary principle suggests that we should be wary of personal products like fragrances unless they are marked phthalate-free. And it makes sense — particularly for children and pregnant women — to avoid most plastics marked at the bottom as 3, 6 and 7 because they are the ones associated with potentially harmful toxins.

Fig. 3
2010
jelutong
17.8×17.8×21.6 cm
7×7 x 8.5 ins

Modern Art at Independent
548 West 22nd Street, New York
4 – 7 March, 2010

Modern Art

Paul Krugman and his wife, Robin Wells, at home with their cats, Doris Lessing and Albert Einstein. Photograph by Tina Barney.

by Larissa MacFarquhar
The New Yorker March 1, 2010

When it is cold at home, or he has a couple of weeks with nothing to do but write his Times column, or when something unexpectedly stressful happens, like winning the Nobel Prize, the Princeton economist Paul Krugman and his wife, Robin Wells, go to St. Croix. Here it is warm, and the days are longer, and the phone doesn’t ring much. Here they live in a one-bedroom condo they bought a few years ago, nothing fancy but right on the beach. The condo’s walls are yellow and blue, the furniture is made of wicker, there are pillows and seashells. There are tall, sprawling bougainvillea bushes along the side of the road.

“We first fell in love with St. John,” Krugman says. “It was New York lawyers who’d decided to give up on the whole thing and live on a houseboat and wear their gray ponytails.”

“But St. John went too upscale,” Wells says.

“Our complex is more Midwesterners. Retired car dealers and so on.”

The east end of St. Croix is something of a tourist spot, but the west end, where they decided to settle, is where the Crucians live, and it has a Jimmy Buffett feel to it that they like. In Frederiksted, the west end’s tiny town, there are a couple of coffee shops, a KFC, a Wendy’s, a few churches, a post office, and a promenade by the sea with concrete picnic tables. Not many people about. Farther out along the coast, there are beach bars with plastic chairs and Christmas lights, men with beards and very tanned middle-aged women sitting and smoking in the afternoon.

“The west end is where the whites who’ve gone native live,” Wells says. “They have a couple of beach bars with not very good blues and jazz bands. They were playing Neil Young as we went by the other night, and Paul said, ‘Boy, that was an awful rendition.’ ”

“It was Buffalo Springfield.”

“Yes, Springfield, O.K. I said, ‘Aging boomers, they love any rendition, no matter how bad.’ ”

Here Krugman wears the same shirt for days, a short-sleeved plaid cotton shirt, and bathing trunks. He sits in the room where they eat their breakfast, which has a long window open to the sea. He types at a tiny table that folds out of a closet, which requires him to sit more or less inside the closet, but this is helpful, because the light can be so bright in the room that it becomes blinding. If he turns his head, he can see the sky.

First thing when he wakes up, he checks out a few Web sites, and if he’s not writing his column that day he and Wells will go for a walk on the beach, or they will stroll into Frederiksted and have breakfast at Polly’s, a little coffee shop that serves iced lattes and pretty good egg burritos. If he is writing his column, he will start it on the morning of the day it’s due, and, if the spirit is with him, he will be done soon after lunch. When he has a draft, he gives it to Wells to edit. Early on, she edited a lot—she had, they felt, a better sense than he did of how to communicate economics to the layperson. (She is also an economist—they met when she was a postdoc at M.I.T. and he was teaching there.) But he’s much better at that now, and these days she focusses on making him less dry, less abstract, angrier. Recently, he gave her a draft of an article he’d done for Rolling Stone. He had written, “As Obama tries to deal with the crisis, he will get no help from Republican leaders,” and after this she inserted the sentence “Worse yet, he’ll get obstruction and lies.” Where he had written that the stimulus bill would at best “mitigate the slump, not cure it,” she crossed out that phrase and substituted “somewhat soften the economic hardship that we face for the next few years.” Here and there, she suggested things for him to add. “This would be a good place to flesh out the vehement objections from the G.O.P. and bankers to nationalization,” she wrote on page 9. “Show us all their huffing and puffing before you dismiss it as nonsense in the following graf.”

On the rare occasion when they disagree about something, she will be the one urging him to be more outraged or recalcitrant. She pushed him to denounce the filibuster. She wanted him to be more stubborn in holding out for the public option in the health-care bill. He spent a few sleepless nights wrestling with his conscience about that but ultimately decided that a flawed bill was so much better than no bill at all that he had to support it. “You can get beaten down,” he says. “When Robin and I started writing about health care, single payer was clearly the way to go. And then bit by bit you start saying, ‘O.K., you take what you can get.’ There’s a trap I’ve seen some people fall into—you let your vision of what should be get completely taken over by what appears possible right now—and that’s something I’m trying to avoid.”

In the late afternoon, they lie on beach loungers underneath a clump of sea-grape trees, facing the ocean. Krugman sips a piña colada through a straw and reads the galleys of a book about the financial crisis. They were thinking of having dinner at a place in town, but then they discovered that there was to be an Elvis impersonator singing there, so they decided to go to the Sunset Grill, where the stereo is playing Wings. It’s getting buggy on the beach, and Wells hands Krugman a can of Off. The tide is coming in. Krugman puts his book down, eases himself out of his lounger, and, still wearing his hat and sunglasses, wades cautiously into the sea.

In his columns, Krugman is belligerently, obsessively political, but this aspect of his personality is actually a recent development. His parents were New Deal liberals, but they weren’t especially interested in politics. In his academic work, Krugman focussed mostly on subjects with little political salience. During the eighties, he thought that supply-side economics was stupid, but he didn’t think that much about it. Unlike Wells, who was so upset when Reagan was elected that she moved to England, Krugman found Reagan comical rather than evil. “I had very little sense of what was at stake in the tax issues,” he says. “I was into career-building at that point and not that concerned.” He worked for Reagan on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers for a year, but even that didn’t get him thinking about politics. “I feel now like I was sleepwalking through the twenty years before 2000,” he says. “I knew that there was a right-left division, I had a pretty good sense that people like Dick Armey were not good to have rational discussion with, but I didn’t really have a sense of how deep the divide went.”

For the first twenty years of Krugman’s adult life, his world was divided not into left and right but into smart and stupid. “The great lesson was the low level of discussion,” he says of his time in Washington. “The then Secretary of the Treasury”—Donald Regan—“was not that bright, and you could have angry exchanges where neither side understood the policy.” Krugman was buoyed and protected in his youth by an intellectual snobbery so robust that distractions or snobberies of other sorts didn’t stand a chance. “When I was twenty-eight, I wouldn’t have had the time of day for some senator or other,” he says.

Krugman’s tribe was academic economists, and insofar as he paid any attention to people outside that tribe, his enemy was stupid pseudo-economists who didn’t understand what they were talking about but who, with attention-grabbing titles and simplistic ideas, persuaded lots of powerful people to listen to them. He called these types “policy entrepreneurs”—a term that, by differentiating them from the academic economists he respected, was meant to be horribly biting. He was driven mad by Lester Thurow and Robert Reich in particular, both of whom had written books touting a theory that he believed to be nonsense: that America was competing in a global marketplace with other countries in much the same way that corporations competed with one another. In fact, Krugman argued, in a series of contemptuous articles in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere, countries were not at all like corporations. While another country’s success might injure our pride, it would not likely injure our wallets. Quite the opposite: it would be more likely to provide us with a bigger market for our products and send our consumers cheaper, better-made goods to buy. A trade surplus might be a sign of weakness, a trade deficit a sign of strength. And, anyway, a nation’s standard of living was determined almost entirely by its productivity—trade was just not that important.

When Krugman first began writing articles for popular publications, in the mid-nineties, Bill Clinton was in office, and Krugman thought of the left and the right as more or less equal in power. Thus, there was no pressing need for him to take sides—he would shoot down idiocy wherever it presented itself, which was, in his opinion, all over the place. He thought of himself as a liberal, but he was a liberal economist, which wasn’t quite the same thing as a regular liberal. Until the late nineties, when he became absorbed by what was going wrong with Japan, he believed that monetary policy, rather than government spending, was all that was needed to avoid recessions: he agreed with Milton Friedman that if only the Fed had done its job better the Great Depression would never have happened. He thought that people who wanted to boycott Nike and other companies that ran sweatshops abroad were sentimental and stupid. Yes, of course, those foreign workers weren’t earning American wages and didn’t have American protections, but working in a sweatshop was still much better than their alternatives—that’s why they chose to work there. Moreover, sweatshops really weren’t the threat to American workers that the left claimed they were. “A back-of-the-envelope calculation . . . suggests that capital flows to the Third World since 1990 . . . have reduced real wages in the advanced world by about 0.15%,” he wrote in 1994. That was not nothing, but it certainly wasn’t anything to get paranoid about. The world needed more sweatshops, not fewer. Free trade was good for everyone. He felt that there was a market hatred on the left that was as dogmatic and irrational as government hatred on the right.

In writing his first popular book, “The Age of Diminished Expectations,” he became preoccupied by the way that inequality had vastly increased in the Reagan years. (Interestingly for an economist, Krugman believes that the political often determines the economic, rather than the other way around; he believes that the increase in inequality in the U.S. since the sixties is a product less of economic factors—the development of technology, say, leading to the greater importance of skills and education—than of political decisions about taxation and unions.) After the book was published, in 1990, various people denied that inequality had increased, and this really annoyed him. He began to get into fights. He was taken aback by the 1994 midterm elections, and during the impeachment hearings he began to think that the Republicans were getting pretty radical, but he still wasn’t angry about it. “Some of my friends tell me that I should spend more time attacking right-wingers,” he wrote in 1998. “The problem is finding things to say. Supply-siders never tire of proclaiming that taxes are the root of all evil, but reasonable people do get tired of explaining, over and over again, that they aren’t.”

Certainly until the Enron scandal, Krugman had no sense that there was any kind of problem in American corporate governance. (He consulted briefly for Enron before he went to the Times.) Occasionally, he received letters from people claiming that corporations were cooking the books, but he thought this sounded so implausible that he dismissed them. “I believed that the market was enforcing,” he says. “I believed in the S.E.C. I just never really thought about it. It seemed like a pretty sunny world in 1999, and, for all of my cynicism, I shared a lot of that. The extent of corporate fraud, the financial malfeasance, the sheer viciousness of the political scene—those are all things that, ten years ago, I didn’t see.”

When the Times approached him about writing a column, he was torn. “His friends said, ‘This is a waste of your time,’ ” Wells says. “We economists thought that we were doing substantive work and the rest of the world was dross.” Krugman cared about his academic reputation more than anything else. If he started writing for a newspaper, would his colleagues think he’d become a pseudo-economist, a former economist, a vapid policy entrepreneur like Lester Thurow? Lester Thurow had become known in certain circles as Less Than Thorough. It was hard to imagine what mean nickname could be made out of Paul Krugman, but what if someone came up with one? Could he take it?

It was the 2000 election campaign that finally radicalized him. He’d begun writing his column the year before, and although his mandate at the outset was economic and business matters, he began paying more attention to the world in general. During the campaign, he perceived the Bush people telling outright lies, and this shocked him. Reagan’s people had at least tried to justify their policies with economic models and rationalizations. Krugman hadn’t believed the models would work, but at least they were there.

After the election, he began to attack Bush’s policies in his column, and, as his outrage escalated, his attacks grew more venomous. Krugman felt that liberals were unwilling to confront or even to acknowledge the anger on the right with some of their own, so he was going to have to do it. “He saw that it had been very, very painful during the nineties to get American fiscal policy in order, and he saw all of that being thrown away callously and with very little thought,” Brad DeLong, a professor of economics at Berkeley, says. “And it turned out to be true that Alan Greenspan was going to meetings at the White House saying we’re going to regret this. Paul was simply six years behind those of us who had worked in the Clinton Administration, who found the collapse of reality-based Republicanism coming much earlier.” Krugman attacked Bush for trying to bankrupt Social Security, for promoting an economically and environmentally disastrous energy policy, for increasing inequality by cutting taxes for the rich and corporations, for using the war on terrorism to conceal his fiscal misdeeds, and for insider trading before he became President. He wrote a brave column on September 16, 2001, arguing that the catastrophe of September 11th was partly self-inflicted, because the government had abandoned airport security—which should be a public service—to be paid for by the airlines, who naturally did it on the cheap.

In return, he received great piles of hate mail. “He’d get threats,” Wells says. “The Times was constantly barraged with complaints. One time on book tour, he was filmed by this crazy right-winger with a video camera. They were getting hold of his student evaluations to find out if he was indoctrinating Princeton’s youth. At one point, I wanted them to put a panic button in Paul’s office. Our garage doors were egged.” Even some people who agreed with him felt that he was too relentlessly partisan for a columnist in a mainstream paper. But on the left he was revered. “The book tour for ‘The Great Unravelling’ was like revival meetings, because so few people were speaking out then,” Krugman says. “There was a great event—it was in Berkeley, which devalues it a bit—but there was this event with a joint appearance by Al Franken, Kevin Phillips, and me, with three thousand people in the audience, and when we walked onstage we got a standing ovation. That would have been 2004.” “I remember one woman saying, ‘I thought I was going crazy until I read you,’ ” Wells says. “He gave a talk for a small bookstore in Marin County, and the town was so small they didn’t have a place big enough to hold it, so they held it in a local church, and they had to open the windows, because people were outside listening.” All of this—the hate and the love—was exciting, and made Krugman realize that what he was doing was important, even though it was only journalism. Wells tried to prevent it from going to his head. “I said to him, ‘You know, life after Bush is going to be different; you won’t be everybody’s darling, because it will be a more sane time.’ ”

In fact, the change came faster than either of them had anticipated, because during the primary campaign Krugman was very critical of Barack Obama. He was critical chiefly because, of the three main candidates, Obama seemed to him the most conservative (his health plan, for instance, didn’t mandate universal coverage), but it wasn’t just his policies that Krugman objected to. He couldn’t stand all the feel-good stuff about hope and dialogue and reconciliation. He hated that Obama was out there saying nice things about Reagan when what Democrats needed to do most was debunk the persistent myth that Reaganomics had been good for America. He thought Obama was completely wrong to believe that the country’s problems were due largely to partisan nastiness, and ridiculously naïve to imagine that he could bring together Republicans and insurance companies to reform health care. “Anyone who thinks that the next president can achieve real change without bitter confrontation is living in a fantasy world,” he wrote in 2007. Krugman supported John Edwards, for his emphasis on poverty, for his ambitious health-care plan, and for his rough talk about attacking the interests of the wealthy. After Edwards dropped out, he supported Hillary Clinton. She wasn’t as left as Edwards was, but at least she was a fighter, and she obviously had no illusions about bipartisan harmony.

But most people didn’t see Obama the way Krugman did; they thought he was the savior of the left, and the passions of the campaign were such that when Krugman wrote columns deriding Obama he was lacerated—scathing comments on the progressive blogs, more hate mail, and not the fun kind. “I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here,” Krugman wrote. “The Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.” “OK, you did it,” one commenter wrote in response. “You lost me. I’ve defended you on local blogs but you’ve sunk into low territory.” “You’re devolving into a caricature with your gross misrepresentations and strident, ignorant defense of the Clinton campaign,” another wrote. “Paul, you’re killing a little bit of your readers’ souls,” a third wrote, “or at least those of us who used to love your column.” “The primary was terrible, it was awful,” Krugman says.

“Paul was getting attacked by people we thought of as on our side,” Wells says. “I thought to myself, Well, I knew things were going to change, but this is quick and hard enough to give you whiplash. One of our friends said, ‘You’d better be careful, because Obama supporters might put rattlesnakes in your mailbox.’ People said, ‘Oh, Paul’s son works in Hillary’s campaign.’ ” (Krugman has no children.) “People were so upset and angry after Bush, they had taken leave of their senses. They wanted to give themselves over, and they resented people like Paul who said, ‘No, don’t give yourselves over, think about what’s going on.’ They wanted to feel that they were being redeemed, and this is what Obama was offering, but he doesn’t have the right or the ability to redeem people; that’s not appropriate.”

Once Obama won the primary, Krugman supported him. Obviously, any Democrat was better than John McCain.

“I was nervous until they finally called it on Election Night,” Krugman says. “We had an Election Night party at our house, thirty or forty people.”

“The econ department, the finance department, the Woodrow Wilson school,” Wells says. “They were all very nervous, so they were grateful we were having the party, because they didn’t want to be alone. We had two or three TVs set up and we had a little portable outside fire pit and we let people throw in an effigy or whatever they wanted to get rid of for the past eight years.”

“One of our Italian colleagues threw in an effigy of Berlusconi.”

“I put out some coloring paper and markers so that people could write stuff on it and throw it into the fire. People really felt like there was stuff they wanted to shed! I had little hats and party whistles.”

In the first few months of the new Administration, Krugman tried to be sympathetic. It was not in his nature to be hopeful or understanding of human frailty, but he tried to be both. Finally, he had a chance to sway people in power. All over Washington, people read his columns and brought up his arguments in meetings. He met the President. He spoke on the phone to Lawrence Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, every month or so. Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, read his blog every morning. Senators phoned him, to thank him for a column, or to discuss a policy.

People in the Administration were sometimes frustrated by his criticisms. “Paul’s great strength is his pellucid clarity,” Summers says delicately. “The other side of it is that there’s a degree of complexity in the world that a President has to deal with that he sometimes misses in his search for clarity.” But Krugman could also be useful: if he supported something that the left was dubious about—the Senate health-care bill, for instance—he could bring a lot of people around. On the other hand, when, as was more often the case, it was conservatives who were holding out, he had no influence at all. “I was actually in the room when many of the final negotiations”—over the stimulus package—“were done, and there was no way that a larger package would have gotten sixty votes,” an Administration official says. “Regardless of whether he is academically correct, it just wasn’t in the cards.”

“Now that we have people whose goals I share in power, I’ve seen what it actually takes to make policy change happen,” Krugman says. “It’s pretty revelatory. It’s one thing to do opinion pieces about the way things ought to be; it’s another thing to think about, O.K., given the makeup of the U.S. Senate, given the difficulties of getting people on board and of communicating stuff to the public, what can you actually do?”

But by the anniversary of Obama’s Inauguration Krugman felt unhappily vindicated. Obama’s hands-off, conciliatory style drove him crazy, especially when it became clear that his attempts to win over the Republicans had failed. Why wasn’t he more aggressive, more of a leader on health care, rather than leaving the details to endless committees? Krugman wondered. How could he be so passive about it? Why didn’t he fight? “I have to say,” he wrote on his blog a year after the Inauguration, “I’m pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama.”

These days when Krugman criticizes Obama, commenters on his blog tend to agree with him. He has regained his credibility with the left. There are even some songs about him on YouTube. “Hey, Paul Krugman,” a young guy with closed eyes and an ironically furrowed brow sings, “why aren’t you in the Administration? Is it some kind of politicking that I don’t understand? I mean, Timothy Geithner is like some little weasel. . . . Hey, Paul Krugman, where the hell are you, man?”

Last August, Krugman decided that before he and Wells departed for a bicycle tour of Scotland he would take a couple of days to speak at the sixty-seventh world science-fiction convention, to be held in Montreal. (Krugman has been a science-fiction fan since he was a boy.) At the convention, there was a lot of extremely long hair, a lot of blue hair, and a lot of capes. There was a woman dressed as a cat, there was a woman with a green brain attached to her head with wire, there was a person in a green face mask, there was a young woman spinning wool. There was a Jedi and a Storm Trooper. Those participants who were not dressed as cats were wearing T-shirts with something written on them: “I don’t understand—and I’m a rocket scientist,” “I see dead pixels,” “Math is delicious.” Krugman has always had a nerdy obsession with puns. (He is very proud of a line in one of his textbooks: “Efforts to negotiate a resolution to Europe’s banana split had proved fruitless.”) He also likes costumes. Once, he and Wells gave a Halloween party where the theme was economics topics—two guests came as Asian tigers, several came as hedge funds, one woman came as capital, dressed as a column. Sitting up onstage at the science-fiction convention, Krugman looked happy to be there. It seemed that these were, in some worrying sense, his people.

“Hi, everyone!” he called out.

“Hi!” everyone called back.

Krugman explained that he’d become an economist because of science fiction. When he was a boy, he’d read Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy and become obsessed with the central character, Hari Seldon. Seldon was a “psychohistorian”—a scientist with such a precise understanding of the mechanics of society that he could predict the course of events thousands of years into the future and save mankind from centuries of barbarism. He couldn’t predict individual behavior—that was too hard—but it didn’t matter, because history was determined not by individuals but by laws and hidden forces. “If you read other genres of fiction, you can learn about the way people are and the way society is,” Krugman said to the audience, “but you don’t get very much thinking about why are things the way they are, or what might make them different. What would happen if ?”

With Hari Seldon in mind, Krugman went to Yale, in 1970, intending to study history, but he felt that history was too much about what and not enough about why, so he ended up in economics. Economics, he found, examined the same infinitely complicated social reality that history did but, instead of elucidating its complexity, looked for patterns and rules that made the complexity seem simple. Why did some societies have serfs or slaves and others not? You could talk about culture and national character and climate and changing mores and heroes and revolts and the history of agriculture and the Romans and the Christians and the Middle Ages and all the rest of it; or, like Krugman’s economics teacher Evsey Domar, you could argue that if peasants are barely surviving there’s no point in enslaving them, because they have nothing to give you, but if good new land becomes available it makes sense to enslave them, because you can skim off the difference between their output and what it takes to keep them alive. Suddenly, a simple story made sense of a huge and baffling swath of reality, and Krugman found that enormously satisfying.

This was, he discovered later, a development that Keynes had helped to bring about. In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, economics had been more like history: institutional economics was dominant, and, in opposition to neoclassical economics, emphasized the complicated interactions between political, social, and economic institutions and the complicated motives that drove human economic behavior. Then came the Depression, and the one question that people wanted economists to answer was “What should we do?” “The institutionalists said, ‘Well, it’s very deep, it’s complex, I mean, you just talk about what happened in 1890,’ ” Krugman says. “Keynesian economics, which was coming out of the model-based tradition, even if it was pretty loose-jointed by modern standards, basically said, ‘Push this button.’ ” Push this button—print more money, spend more money—and the button-pushing worked. Push-button economics was not only satisfying to someone of Krugman’s intellectual temperament; it was also, he realized later, politically important. Thinking about economic situations as infinitely complex, with any number of causes going back into the distant past, tended to induce a kind of fatalism: if the origins of a crisis were deeply entangled in a country’s culture, then maybe the crisis was inevitable, perhaps insoluble—even deserved.

“What does it mean to do economics?” Krugman asked on the stage in Montreal. “Economics is really about two stories. One is the story of the old economist and younger economist walking down the street, and the younger economist says, ‘Look, there’s a hundred-dollar bill,’ and the older one says, ‘Nonsense, if it was there somebody would have picked it up already.’ So sometimes you do find hundred-dollar bills lying on the street, but not often—generally people respond to opportunities. The other is the Yogi Berra line ‘Nobody goes to Coney Island anymore; it’s too crowded.’ That’s the idea that things tend to settle into some kind of equilibrium where what people expect is in line with what they actually encounter.”

After Yale, Krugman went to graduate school at M.I.T. “M.I.T. in the mid-seventies was a sort of Athens of economics—everybody was there,” he says. “And it was a golden age for clever little models.” Krugman took a class with Rudiger Dornbusch and became interested in international macroeconomics. Bretton Woods—the international system of monetary control established by the Allies during the Second World War—had just collapsed a few years earlier, floating exchange rates had turned out to be much more volatile than anybody expected, and figuring out why turned out to be a fantastically interesting puzzle.

Krugman wrote his thesis on exchange rates, but another class, on international trade, inspired him. “There was this kind of platonic beauty to the whole thing,” he says. “I remember going through the two-by-two-by-two model—two goods, two countries, two factors of production. The way all these pieces fitted together into a Swiss-watch-like mechanism was beautiful. I loved it.” The traditional theory of international trade, first formulated by the British economist David Ricardo, two hundred years ago, explained trade by comparative advantage: a country exported the goods that it could produce most cheaply, owing to whatever advantages it possessed—cheap labor, climate, technological expertise, and so on. It followed from this theory that countries that were the most dissimilar should do the most trade—countries in the Third World dispatching labor-intensive goods to the First World, the First World selling technology- or capital-intensive goods in return. In the years following the Second World War, however, economists had noticed that much international trade didn’t follow this pattern at all. There was a large amount of trade between countries whose economies were extremely similar, and these countries traded goods that were virtually identical: Germany sold BMWs to Sweden and Sweden sold Volvos to Germany. People had speculated about why this should be so, but nobody had come up with a model that explained it in a rigorous manner.

Krugman realized that trade took place not only because countries were different but also because there were advantages to specialization. If one country was the first to begin manufacturing airplanes, say, it might accumulate an advantage in economies of scale so large that it would be difficult for another country to break into the industry later on, even though there might not be anything about the first country that made it particularly well suited to airplane-making. But why would countries trade goods that were almost the same? Because consumers like to have a choice, and, as Avinash Dixit and Joseph Stiglitz had pointed out a few years earlier, the same logic of increasing returns to scale that Krugman had identified as an essential dynamic in trade could apply to a single brand as well as to a whole industry. Krugman presented his theory to the world in the form of a paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research in July, 1979. “The hour and a half in which I presented that paper was the best ninety minutes of my life,” he wrote later. “There’s a corny scene in the movie ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter,’ in which the young Loretta Lynn performs for the first time in a noisy bar, and little by little everyone gets quiet and starts to listen to her singing. Well, that’s what it felt like: I had, all at once, made it.”

One implication of Krugman’s theory was that, contrary to economic orthodoxy, industrial policy might have its benefits. If the location of a new industry was essentially arbitrary, then a government, by subsidizing and protecting its emergence, could enable it to gain such a lasting advantage that other countries would find it difficult to catch up. But Krugman tried to discourage industrial strategists who cited him. For, while in principle industrial policy could be helpful, in practice, he believed, it was so difficult to determine which industry should receive government help, at the expense of all the others—so difficult to predict an industry’s future, and so difficult to determine merit when powerful interests would be trying to influence that determination—that in the end industrial policy would be likely to benefit mostly the owners of a few businesses and hurt everybody else. (Industrial strategists were not convinced. “You have the cases of Japan, Korea, Brazil, China, and, to some extent, France, and the counterfactual—let’s imagine that they didn’t have an industrial policy, would they have produced the same amount of growth?—is unimaginable,” Robert Kuttner, the co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, says. “But to be a conventional academic economist you almost have to swear an oath that governments can’t outguess markets in the allocation of capital.”)

Later on, Krugman became interested in economic geography, in the related question of why there were regional specialties—why, in the United States, for instance, were cars produced in Detroit, carpets in Dalton, Georgia, jewelry in Providence, and chips in Silicon Valley? Again, the answer turned out to be history and accident. Once an industry started up in one place, for whatever reason (the carpet industry in Dalton appears to have its origin in a local teen-ager who in 1895 made a tufted bedspread as a wedding present), local workers became trained in its methods, skilled workers from elsewhere moved there, and related businesses sprang up close by. Then, as more skilled labor became available, the industry could grow and benefit from economies of scale. Soon, as long as it didn’t cost too much to transport the industry’s products, the advantages of the place would be such that it would be impractical for someone to open up a similar business anywhere else. Many economists found the idea that economic geography could be so arbitrary “deeply disturbing and troubling,” Krugman wrote, but he found it exciting.

Again, as in his trade theory, it was not so much his idea that was significant as the translation of the idea into mathematical language. “I explained this basic idea”—of economic geography—“to a non-economist friend,” Krugman wrote, “who replied in some dismay, ‘Isn’t that pretty obvious?’ And of course it is.” Yet, because it had not been well modelled, the idea had been disregarded by economists for years. Krugman began to realize that in the previous few decades economic knowledge that had not been translated into models had been effectively lost, because economists didn’t know what to do with it. His friend Craig Murphy, a political scientist at Wellesley, had a collection of antique maps of Africa, and he told Krugman that a similar thing had happened in cartography. Sixteenth-century maps of Africa were misleading in all kinds of ways, but they contained quite a bit of information about the continent’s interior—the River Niger, Timbuktu. Two centuries later, mapmaking had become much more accurate, but the interior of Africa had become a blank. As standards for what counted as a mappable fact rose, knowledge that didn’t meet those standards—secondhand travellers’ reports, guesses hazarded without compasses or sextants—was discarded and lost. Eventually, the higher standards paid off—by the nineteenth century the maps were filled in again—but for a while the sharpening of technique caused loss as well as gain.

Translating unmappable facts into economic discourse, it turned out, was what Krugman was better at than anyone else: he could take an intriguing notion that had come up in real-world discussions, pare away the details (knowing just what to take out and what was essential), and refine what was left into a clean, clever, “cute” (as he liked to put it), and simple model. “It’s poetry,” Kenneth Rogoff, an economist at Harvard, says. “I mean, you go back to his first book and there was this beautiful chart about what the Volcker contraction did to output that swept aside so much—he just drew this little graph which really cleared the air. I’ve heard economists use the word ‘poet’ in describing him for decades.”

Krugman’s theories of trade and economic geography are still taught everywhere. “I think there’s a pretty good case to be made that the stuff that I stressed in the models is a less important story than the things that I left out because I couldn’t model them, like spillovers of information and social networks,” he says. But failure to represent reality accurately is rarely a fatal flaw in an economics model—what’s valued is the model’s usefulness as an analytic tool. The most successful paper Krugman ever wrote was about target zones, and it was completely wrong. In the years before Europe adopted the euro, it was thought that establishing something between floating exchange rates and fixed ones—a “target zone” within which a currency would be allowed to float—might reap some of the advantages of each. He estimates that by the time the paper was officially published, in 1991, some hundred and fifty derivative papers had already appeared. “Empirically, it doesn’t work at all,” Krugman says. “People loved it as an academic thing, but it had some very strong predictions about interest rates inside target zones. Those predictions all turned out to be wrong. But nobody attacked me for that. I was showing that if target zones worked the way that people say they’re supposed to work, then this is how it would play out.”

When they’re not in St. Croix, Krugman and Wells live in a large house on a quiet country road in Princeton with their two cats, Doris Lessing and Albert Einstein. They built the house a few years ago, in a kind of Japanese modern style, with pale wood and horizontal lines and few walls. Next to the living-room area, there is a large empty space where Wells teaches yoga. On Saturday mornings, she teaches a class for, Krugman says, alter kakers (old farts), which he attends; he avoids the classes for somewhat younger and mostly female people that she teaches during the week. In the front of the house is an orderly garden, and in the back the land slopes downhill toward a stream and woods.

“We have a resident fox, and from my office while working I can look out and see the fox trotting across behind the house,” Krugman says.

“We have—what do we call him? Wally? What did we name the blue heron?”

Krugman’s office is a smallish room on the top floor which is usually extremely messy. On the wall over his desk, he has hung a few framed photographs: F.D.R. when young; his parents when young; himself at the White House at a table with Obama, Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Jeffrey Sachs, and Joseph Stiglitz; two photographs of himself with congressmen whose identities he has forgotten; Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s campaign manager, speaking on the phone with a copy of “The Great Unravelling” visible behind his left ear.

Krugman and Wells moved to Princeton from M.I.T. a few years ago, mostly to be closer to their parents. Krugman’s parents were born into families from Belarus and grew up in Brooklyn, pretty poor. Krugman’s father worked at Equitable Life Insurance on Long Island. “I still get a frisson in Penn Station when I hear them announcing the Babylon-line trains,” Krugman says. “It’s like ad jingles from your childhood, you remember it always.” Krugman’s parents now live in a retirement community in New Jersey, Exit 8A.

“Obviously, they’re kvelling, as they would say,” Krugman says. “Somebody from the retirement community actually accosted my father in the supermarket, bitterly saying, ‘Why has your son turned out the way he has and my son turned out the way he has?’ ”

“Your mother used to complain that every time she’d go to the doctor the doctor wanted to talk about you instead of her,” Wells says.

“I think I have actually been getting faster doctor appointments because of this. On the other hand, it’s not always working. My E.N.T. person is actually—I’m gathering, just from stray remarks—pretty conservative.”

Wells’s mother lives even closer than Krugman’s parents, five minutes away. Wells grew up in Dallas. She is African-American, and her older sister went to a segregated school; Wells, who was born in 1959, did not, but her school was bad enough so that college at the University of Chicago was a shock. Thinking about their parents’ old age and their own, Krugman and Wells have also bought an apartment in New York.

“We figured eventually we’ll retire there,” Wells says. “My hairdresser said she’s lost three clients in the past couple of years; they get older and sell everything and move into the city. Maybe that’s what I’ll have to do when my mother finally can’t drive.”

“Oh, gosh.”

“My mother is very independent.”

“Very independent.”

Their apartment in New York is in the same neighborhood as both Jeffrey Sachs’s and Joseph Stiglitz’s, but since they bought it, a few years ago, they haven’t seen either of them. Krugman doesn’t get out much, socially. But he travels constantly, speaking at conferences, speaking for pay, promoting his books. “I’m not a very easygoing person one on one, but put me in front of five hundred people and I get very relaxed and conversational,” he says. Years ago, when he was just an economist, he did a lot of speaking at corporate events. “I wasn’t enjoying those so much,” he says. “One of them was held at a golf course, and I gave the luncheon talk and I was thinking to myself, I could just as well have been a magician. And then, at dinner, they did have a magician!” These days, the Times forbids him to do gigs like that, to avoid conflicts of interest, but his book publisher sends him all over the place. “I don’t sell as many books as Tom Friedman does,” Krugman says. “That’s O.K. Tom gives you this, you know, ‘I was talking to somebody in Bangalore and this is what I saw.’ That’s a skill I don’t have.” Perhaps this is fortunate, because he finds book tours exhausting.

“Twenty-five cities in forty days,” he says. “The mechanics of washing up in hotel sinks because you’re not in any hotel long enough to use their laundry.”

It’s not so much the washing as the drying that presents a problem. Years of experiments have failed to yield a satisfactory solution. Krugman has discovered that it is slow and quite risky to use a hair dryer with any item that involves elastic. Long ago, in Tel Aviv, his roommates found him attempting to dry his underwear in a frying pan.

“The trick with underwear is to wring it out and then press down—”

“I learned this from yoga workshops,” Wells says. “You get out as much excess water as you can, then you lay a dry towel flat on the floor, you lay the article of clothing on the towel, and roll it up like this—”

“And then it’s only slightly damp in the morning when you have to put it on.”

“No, it’s usually dry. We also do that on bike trips.”

“Because you can’t take forty pairs of underwear.”

“Not in carry-on.”

Krugman is not a keen traveller. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many of his contemporaries set off for Eastern Europe—every economist wanted his own personal country to transition. Jeffrey Sachs, in particular, was all over the place, but Krugman was never tempted. “I know what Jeff does and I couldn’t do it,” he says. “Taking transport planes, living on yak meat for days—no. But I do write faster than anybody. You’ve got to figure out what you should be doing.”

“Paul is very good at protecting his sense of who and what he is,” Wells says. “I think that’s why he married me. He has a sense of what he’s good at and he sticks with that.” For this reason, even in the unlikely event that he were to be offered Larry Summers’s job, Krugman says he would turn it down. “I mean, I’d have to think really, really hard, because you don’t turn something like that down lightly, but I think I’m actually more effective doing what I’m doing,” he says. “You have to be an inside fighter, all of the negotiations, making sure you’re keeping the ear of the guy in charge. I don’t think I’m very good at that. Larry maybe has his shirttails hanging out, but he gets stuff done in an orderly fashion. I can organize my thoughts, but I can’t organize my office and I certainly can’t organize other people.”

Unlike most well-known academics, Krugman has never had many graduate students. He is unsure why this is so. Is it that his style of thinking, intuitive rather than methodological, is too difficult to imitate? he wonders. Is he too distracted? Too busy? Too short? Whatever the reason, it has become clear that his legacy will not be perpetuated in the usual way by a diaspora of little Krugmans, so, if his name is to survive, it is up to him. His papers and books, of course, are the main thing, but in recent years Krugman has also spent a great deal of time distilling his views into an undergraduate textbook. When he first signed the contract to write it, in 1994, he did it mostly for the money. Then he did no work on it for years. Finally, his publisher told him that he had to get moving, that he should work with a co-author who was better organized and more highly motivated than he was, and suggested his wife. It took them five years of intense work to write the first edition.

“It’s excruciatingly hard,” Wells says.

“You have to put yourself back in the mind of an eighteen-year-old,” Krugman says. “And it has to be impeccable. If you’re writing an academic paper, if you have some stuff that’s blurrily written, that won’t do too much harm. If you write a newspaper article and a third of the readers don’t get it, that’s a success. But a textbook has to be perfect.”

Even though they were doing it mostly for the money, they knew that, for the students who read it, their textbook might be the only time in their lives that they were exposed to proper economic thinking, which of course would have an influence on their political thinking.

“The books we’re competing with tend to be much more rah-rah about the market,” Wells says. “That’s partly because that reflects the views of the author, but also because it’s easy to do it that way—you just find where the lines cross and everybody’s happy. It’s more difficult to talk about how markets fail.”

“The trend when we were putting the latest edition together was to have less and less about the business cycle, and we said, ‘No, this is wrong, the business-cycle sections are still important,’ ” Krugman says. “That turns out to have been a really good bet.”

“We were the only textbook that incorporated the financial crisis, as we were chronically late. We were supposed to have the manuscript delivered in August or September, and by October we were still working, and we just said, ‘We can’t send it out like this, too much is going on.’ We were really in nail-biting territory, because you have to get it to the printers by a certain date or you miss the academic year.”

“We were right in the middle of that when the Nobel Prize committee called, and Robin’s reaction was ‘We don’t have time for this!’ The stress of the week or so after the announcement was crazy, so we actually went off to St. Croix. We were working frantically.”

“Even in Sweden, I was working on pages.”

When they wrote the first edition, they divided the labor according to their specialties, Krugman writing all the macro chapters, Wells writing some of the micro material.

“I’m more micro,” Wells says. “Micro people tend to be wannabe mathematicians, whereas macroeconomists tend to be more policy and real-world oriented. You have to be tolerant of a lot more ambiguity in macro than in micro.”

“In micro, the rules of the game are clear,” Krugman says. “Of course, you can do stuff that involves people not being fully rational, but the bulk of it is the full neoclassical thing, rational individuals interacting with markets that are either perfectly competitive or imperfectly competitive in well-defined ways, whereas macro tends to be a lot of ad-hoc stuff. You say, ‘I have to make this assumption about what’s going on, which I can’t fully justify in terms of the micro foundations, but I’ll make it anyway, because it seems to fit what happens.’ ”

To some extent, this difference also maps onto the divide between the “freshwater” and “saltwater” schools of thought in macroeconomics. Freshwater economists—who live near lakes, particularly at the University of Chicago, but also in Rochester and Minneapolis—are more likely to insist that macroeconomics be based on microeconomic foundations, which is to say that one should study large phenomena like recessions and inflation as functions of the behavior of many perfectly rational individuals. A freshwater economist might argue, for instance, that debt-financed government spending to stimulate the economy won’t have a significant effect, because people will realize that they will have to pay off that debt with higher taxes in the future, and so will save more in anticipation, leaving net spending essentially unchanged. Saltwater economists—who are to be found in coastal areas, especially at M.I.T., Harvard, and Berkeley—are more likely to allow that, at this stage of our understanding, it is excusable to study some macro phenomena without giving a complete account of their causal logic. Saltwater types are also more likely to include irrationality or other market imperfections in their models: they believe, for instance, that since it is clearly the case that prices do not fall immediately following a decline in demand but tend to be “sticky,” you should incorporate this fact, even if you haven’t yet got an account of why it should be so. It isn’t that freshwater types believe that actual people are perfectly rational—they just believe that making that assumption enables a more rigorous economics than is possible without it. After all, while there is only one way to be perfectly rational, there are an infinite number of ways to be irrational, and how do you choose? It all begins to look awfully arbitrary.

Last fall, Krugman wrote an article for the Times Magazine, “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?,” about the profession’s failure to anticipate the financial crisis, and what that revealed about its failings in general. He accused his colleagues of mistaking beauty for truth. They were so enamored of the elegance of their models and the consistency of their logic, he wrote, that they had come to believe that assumptions that were originally adopted merely as tools (perfectly rational individuals, efficient markets) by Milton Friedman’s generation were so sacrosanct that economics wasn’t economics without them. Freshwater types, in particular, had forgotten the Depression, forgotten what Keynes had said about the resemblance of financial markets to casinos. So attached were they to the idea that markets always got things right that some actually suggested that unemployment must be a consequence of workers’ choosing not to work. Saltwater economists were less blinkered in their view of markets and the rationality of investors, Krugman wrote (Larry Summers, a saltwater type, once began a paper on finance by declaring “THERE ARE IDIOTS. Look around”), and had retained a Keynesian view of recessions as crises of insufficient demand. But even saltwater models had no room for such wild imperfections as bubbles and banking-system collapse. “Economists will have to learn to live with messiness,” Krugman concluded.

Reactions to his article were quick and outraged. “Who are these economists who got it so wrong?” a Washington University economist, David Levine, wrote. “Speak for yourself kemo sabe. . . . It makes me feel physically ill that a distinguished economist could be so ignorant of his own profession.” “How sad,” John Cochrane, of the University of Chicago, wrote. “Don’t argue with them, swift-boat them. Find some embarrassing quote from an old interview. Well, good luck, Paul. Let’s just not pretend that this has anything to do with economics.” Levine and Cochrane maintained that the fact that freshwater economists had failed to predict the financial crisis was not an embarrassment to their theories but a confirmation of them: “The central empirical prediction of the efficient markets hypothesis is precisely that nobody can tell where markets are going—neither benevolent government bureaucrats, nor crafty hedge-fund managers, nor ivory-tower academics,” Cochrane wrote. If professional economists failed to predict or understand the crisis, how could it make sense for Krugman to argue that bureaucrats would do a good job of curing it?

Krugman was bemused by the reactions. True, he had accused Chicago economists of espousing ridiculous ideas in part because of financial incentives—sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution, job opportunities on Wall Street. But when those economists responded with anger he was surprised. “There was no personal invective in what I wrote,” he says. “I never insulted anybody’s personality. It was always at the level of ideas.” Krugman has a peculiar blind spot when it comes to scorn. Even as he delights in the scorn of others (a recent blog post was titled “Today in Exquisite Insults”), he imagines himself to be a rather dry, abstract writer who takes little interest in individuals. There is, it’s true, an understanding in some parts of academia that calling a colleague’s ideas stupid is not supposed to be taken personally, but Krugman goes well beyond this.

Insults may have done some damage to his career over the years. Shortly after Clinton was elected President, Krugman attended an economic summit in Little Rock and then went on “Larry King Live” and called it “useless.” This, along with his relentless criticisms of Robert Reich, may have been what kept him from the chairmanship of Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. Although Krugman doesn’t always appreciate the effects of his mockery, he does realize that he is not a sugar-tongued, diplomatic sort of guy, and he has incorporated this fact into his self-image. “Paul is really averse to being drawn into a social network, to being groomed,” Wells says. “He doesn’t go to Washington because he doesn’t want to fall into that. As a spouse, you have your little list of things that you jokingly won’t forgive your spouse for. Right after he started writing for the Times and attacking George Bush, we got an invitation to have dinner with Paul Newman and his wife, but he wouldn’t go. And now he’s dead.”

“It was inconvenient,” Krugman says. “I just don’t get any joy out of thinking, Oh, here I am with the movers and shakers. It would have required really discombobulating my schedule just to be able to say I’d had dinner with Paul Newman, and it’s not worth it.”

“Dimon was really stupid this morning,” Krugman said. He was thinking about writing his column the next day about the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. He had read an account of the congressional hearings in the newspaper which quoted Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, and Lloyd Blankfein, the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs, saying things so clueless, so insensitive, and so comprehensively boneheaded that even he, not inclined to think well of them, could hardly believe it, and so he had spent that morning vainly hunting for the transcript to see if there was something mitigating about the context that the article had missed. Dimon had commented that financial crises were just things that happened every few years; Blankfein had compared the crisis to an act of God, like a hurricane. Krugman was curious to know whether these giants of Wall Street understood what they’d done wrong. There was a callousness coming through, he felt. Still, in the end, the spectacle wasn’t that satisfying, because this wasn’t the Pecora Commission, of the thirties, which led to the passing of the Glass-Steagall Act. It was probably just a bit of Kabuki that would end in not much.

Why was it so politically difficult to reregulate the banks? he wondered. Why couldn’t the Administration harness the populist outrage? What good had Wall Street ever done for America? “There must be something useful in there, but it is really hard to see what,” he says. “That’s everybody’s challenge: come up with a clearly beneficial example of financial innovation without mentioning A.T.M.s, and no one can do it. If there are arbitrage opportunities and you’re able to spot them a few seconds before anybody else, you can make a lot of money, but there’s no actual social gain from doing that. We’ve tried talking to our friends in finance, and they say, ‘Liquidity, liquidity, liquidity.’ Well, there is some social loss if people are hanging on to a lot of idle cash, so the financial system, by providing liquid assets that provide a pretty good yield, is supposed to deal with that. But it turns out that, just when you need it most, that liquidity froze.”

Krugman and Wells pulled out of the stock market ten years ago and never went back.

“It just takes a lot of work to think about it,” Krugman says, “and at no point—except maybe early 2009, if I’d been really feeling daring, stocks really did look cheap—”

“We bought a couple of things,” Wells says. “We bought muni bonds and some Ford Motor bonds. The thing is, if you look at it on a historical basis, even back in the two-thousands, stocks are not cheap.”

“They were a good deal when the average price-earnings ratio for stocks was thirteen or fourteen, but now, except at the very bottoms of recent swings, it’s been over twenty, which means that historical rules probably don’t apply anymore. Stocks used to be undervalued.”

“I made some money and lost some in the Internet bubble,” Wells says. “You told me to sell and I didn’t sell, and I should have sold, and I never want to go through that feeling again.”

“Let’s put it this way. I can have fairly high confidence—it’s a personality thing—that a market is overvalued. Somehow I never have the same confidence in saying that it’s undervalued.”

The crisis should have been a lesson to people not to rush into investments that they didn’t understand, but Krugman suspects that it wasn’t. “It hasn’t been the searing experience,” he says. “A lot of people got burned, but I’m not sure that they’ll remember. You really have to have a Depression mentality to say, ‘I’d rather have cash or Treasury bills that yield almost nothing, rather than this product that my banker assures me is perfectly safe and yields two per cent.’ So, unless there’s a lot more regulation, we could do this again.” Krugman had been getting more and more pessimistic about the possibilities for recovery. Already, incredibly, people seemed to be forgetting that America’s economy had nearly collapsed, and the usual critics of deficit spending and those who did not share his sanguine attitude toward inflation were speaking up again. He’d been reading a book that amassed data from eight hundred years of economic history, and the lesson he took from it was that, in a financial crisis, being an advanced country was no protection. He’d thought that it was only in the Third World that crises dragged on and on, but it turned out that Finland and Sweden had suffered slumps as long as Indonesia’s.

“Did Blankfein say anything?” Wells asked.

“He was really guarded.”

“He probably figured the pitchforks were waiting for him.”

“I was reading his prepared testimony just now and it is mind-numbingly dull. I couldn’t find a thing to quote in it.”

“Well, that’s the point.”

“That’s the point, I know.”

Krugman doesn’t know how long he’ll be writing his column. Maybe he’ll get tired of it, maybe the Times will kick him out, who knows. But, after the column, then what? He’s checked off pretty much all the career boxes, he reckons. There are some big questions in development that he’d like to think seriously about. “How is it that most of the world remains so poor?” he says. “That was the old mystery. The new mystery is ‘Why is it that every once in a while it’s as if somebody turned on a switch and some previously hapless country suddenly goes soaring?’ ”

But it’s been a long time—years now—since he did any serious research. Could he, still? “I’d like to get back to it,” he says. “I’m craving the chance to do some deep thinking, and I haven’t been doing a lot of that. I guess doing the really creative academic work does require a state of mind that’s hard to maintain throughout your whole life. Even Paul Samuelson—the bulk of the stuff you read from him is before he was fifty. There was an intensity of focus that I had when I was twenty-six that I won’t be able to recapture at fifty-six. You develop your habits of mind, and to a point that’s a good thing, because you learn ways to work, but it does mean that you’re less likely to come up with something really innovative. Even if I weren’t doing all this other stuff, I don’t think I’d be producing a lot of breakthrough papers. There’s crude stuff: if I do have some brilliant academic insight, what are they going to do, give me a Nobel Prize? . . . When I was younger, when I figured something out there was this sense of the heavens parting and the choirs singing that I don’t get now. And that’s life.”

For someone else, this loss might be a devastation, but even though for thirty years thinking deeply about economics was all Krugman really cared about, he has let it pass out of his life without regret. “I think he’s happy,” his friend Craig Murphy says. “A much happier person now than when we first met him. He feels like he’s done good things, and they’re greater than what he expected when he was young. If there is sadness in him at all, I think it is a tiny core of profound sadness of the kind that the Buddha understood—that we probably can’t use human rationality to make the world all better, and it would be really nice if we were able to.” ♦

February 6 - April 17, 2010

Mathew Marks

via

Seven Faces
February 27 – April 3, 2010
Opening reception: Saturday, February 27, 2010, 6 – 8 pm

blum and poe

also be sure to see matt connors show across the street. same opening night and time.
cherry and martin

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: February 21, 2010

O.K., the beast is starving. Now what? That’s the question confronting Republicans. But they’re refusing to answer, or even to engage in any serious discussion about what to do.

For readers who don’t know what I’m talking about: ever since Reagan, the G.O.P. has been run by people who want a much smaller government. In the famous words of the activist Grover Norquist, conservatives want to get the government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

But there has always been a political problem with this agenda. Voters may say that they oppose big government, but the programs that actually dominate federal spending — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — are very popular. So how can the public be persuaded to accept large spending cuts?

The conservative answer, which evolved in the late 1970s, would be dubbed “starving the beast” during the Reagan years. The idea — propounded by many members of the conservative intelligentsia, from Alan Greenspan to Irving Kristol — was basically that sympathetic politicians should engage in a game of bait and switch. Rather than proposing unpopular spending cuts, Republicans would push through popular tax cuts, with the deliberate intention of worsening the government’s fiscal position. Spending cuts could then be sold as a necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate an unsustainable budget deficit.

And the deficit came. True, more than half of this year’s budget deficit is the result of the Great Recession, which has both depressed revenues and required a temporary surge in spending to contain the damage. But even when the crisis is over, the budget will remain deeply in the red, largely as a result of Bush-era tax cuts (and Bush-era unfunded wars). And the combination of an aging population and rising medical costs will, unless something is done, lead to explosive debt growth after 2020.

So the beast is starving, as planned. It should be time, then, for conservatives to explain which parts of the beast they want to cut. And President Obama has, in effect, invited them to do just that, by calling for a bipartisan deficit commission.

Many progressives were deeply worried by this proposal, fearing that it would turn into a kind of Trojan horse — in particular, that the commission would end up reviving the long-standing Republican goal of gutting Social Security. But they needn’t have worried: Senate Republicans overwhelmingly voted against legislation that would have created a commission with some actual power, and it is unlikely that anything meaningful will come from the much weaker commission Mr. Obama established by executive order.

Why are Republicans reluctant to sit down and talk? Because they would then be forced to put up or shut up. Since they’re adamantly opposed to reducing the deficit with tax increases, they would have to explain what spending they want to cut. And guess what? After three decades of preparing the ground for this moment, they’re still not willing to do that.

In fact, conservatives have backed away from spending cuts they themselves proposed in the past. In the 1990s, for example, Republicans in Congress tried to force through sharp cuts in Medicare. But now they have made opposition to any effort to spend Medicare funds more wisely the core of their campaign against health care reform (death panels!). And presidential hopefuls say things like this, from Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota: “I don’t think anybody’s gonna go back now and say, Let’s abolish, or reduce, Medicare and Medicaid.”

What about Social Security? Five years ago the Bush administration proposed limiting future payments to upper- and middle-income workers, in effect means-testing retirement benefits. But in December, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page denounced any such means-testing, because “middle- and upper-middle-class (i.e., G.O.P.) voters would get less than they were promised in return for a lifetime of payroll taxes.” (Hmm. Since when do conservatives openly admit that the G.O.P. is the party of the affluent?)

At this point, then, Republicans insist that the deficit must be eliminated, but they’re not willing either to raise taxes or to support cuts in any major government programs. And they’re not willing to participate in serious bipartisan discussions, either, because that might force them to explain their plan — and there isn’t any plan, except to regain power.

But there is a kind of logic to the current Republican position: in effect, the party is doubling down on starve-the-beast. Depriving the government of revenue, it turns out, wasn’t enough to push politicians into dismantling the welfare state. So now the de facto strategy is to oppose any responsible action until we are in the midst of a fiscal catastrophe. You read it here first.