Good morning. Hello. How are you?
Settling in to Alaska and a long thing about how Joan Robinson was robbed of the Nobel because of some completely true things about China
Good morning! Hello! How are you? And good afternoon if you are on the east coast. I got a lot of sleep. Slept from just after midnight to just after nine AM. I think I got my jetlag under control. That is good. Was really kicking my ass yesterday. I’m more or less settled in. Got the car and the car stereo all sorted. Got my groceries bought. Made my first breakfast in the hotel room. Have rough plans with my friends. Family’s got a plan together for dad’s service Thursday. Feeling more or less human today. Miss my baby. I felt like ass yesterday morning — not enough sleep, my neck still killing me from the flight. After seeing mom and val in the morning, they both had appointments and I had an opportunity to go back to my hotel and nap. I was too tired to actually nap at first, so I finally tried my new pain pill for my neck that my doctor gave me just before this trip: Tizanadine. The prescription says 3x a day but that seems madness. I took one, fell asleep, and woke up and 80% of my neck pain was gone. Made me feel a little loopy for the first hour or two after being awake, but here it is, something like 20 hours later, and my neck still feels better. I can’t tell you how exciting this is. I haven’t had a shred of hope on the neck pain in, like, six years. I’m not psyched it’s in pill form, this hope, and I worry about it being addictive, but as a very rare spot solution when things are bad, I will take it, thanks much.
Little things you forgot not being in Alaska for so long. Most of my visits these last few years have actually been in the winter. I don’t think I’ve been here in the summer since my sister’s wedding and that was… gosh, some years ago. I forgot about fire season. It’s not bad right now — Jack said he couldn’t smell it. I can’t either, now, but when I first got here on Sunday, I could smell the forest fires. That takes me back. It’s a smell I’ve always loved, with profound guilt. The little white cotton tails floating around through the air everywhere. Little fluffy clouds. The mosquitos. I forgot how much I love, profoundly love, birch trees.
Spent a lot of the day visiting my mom and sister, or my sister driving me around giving me a tour of the town. It’s so weird how your hometown is exactly the same as when you were a kid, but also completely different. Like the Upside Down or something. Some buildings, some businesses, are exactly the same, unchanged for thirty, forty years. Not even a new coat of paint. Other things are radically changed. Several of the “local institutions” have closed, during the pandemic or right before it. Sam’s Sourdough Cafe. The Marlin. The Loon burned down. But, then, other ones are on the up-and-up, under new management or just revitalized, like the Malemute. And some are exactly the same: Ivory Jack’s. Geraldo’s. Pike’s.
(Incidentally, without reading my GMHHAY yesterday, unbidden, my sister went on a long rant about how Pike’s hotel is a lie and it’s just a crummy motel masquerading behind a nice lobby and I AM VINDICATED).
Got to meet my nephew Lucas for the first time yesterday! Stupid pandemic. He was so light. Emma said it best on the phone last night: you never really get to experience your own baby when they’re light. You get used to one weight, they just get heavier, and they keep on doing it until you can’t carry them anymore. Maybe this is the secret reason people have a second kid, so they can enjoy how light they were. So of course this makes me useful to Val and Matt, because I want to carry baby Lucas all the time. He didn’t cry once in my presence, didn’t cry when I carried him. Didn’t cry at the family dinner. Good kid. It’s weird how Lucas and Jane both have pale blue eyes that Val and I do not have, nor has any Webb ever really had. They look very different otherwise, but they have very similar eyes.
We went and visited my dad’s resting place and I got six mosquito bites in just a couple minutes. I think dad would have appreciated that. It’s nice. He was cremated, it’s in a “memorial park.” There are traditional graves, but most of the resting places are in those wall things with little cabinets for urns. His wall thing has 16 or so cabinets on each side of the wall, for 32 spaces. Each space can fit two people (no polyamorous urn niches in Fairbanks I guess). My dad’s is about half full. I looked at the names and discovered that the aunt of one of my best friends was in there. This is weird because the friend is not an Alaskan. I met her a decade ago and she was like “oh you’re from Fairbanks, my aunt is the mayor” and sure enough, she was. I don’t think my dad ever knew her, but I’m happy about the connection.
This is the Fabric Cache, a building my grandfather bought from Ft. Wainwright and moved to this spot in the 70’s. My dad and uncle bought it from him in the 80’s and owned it through the mid-90’s. In 1993 or so, my friend Jason and I fixed it up and made it into our music studio. When Jason left town, I moved into it for my last few months in Fairbanks until my sister made me move back to Boston. I love the dip in the foundation at right. No one’s bothered to get it fixed. And they’re not wrong – the dip makes it look like it’s getting worse, but it’s not. It’s just been that dipped for, like, 40 years. Why fix it if it’s stable? It was a clock shop before the pandemic, last time I was in town. Not sure what it is now, but it doesn’t look abandoned! That is nice.
Today I’m gonna have lunch with my friend Jamie, grab drinks with my old friend Frank, and in between head up to my sister’s house and… I dunno, watch Matt and Jack do a bunch of carpentry and electrical things that I am incapable of doing. Maybe I will learn something.
So. Joan Robinson.
Joan Robinson was one of the world’s great economists. She was largely self-taught. Well, not really. But sort of. She had a degree from a minor institution in England. Her husband was a semi-great economist at Cambridge, a contemporary and friend of John Maynard Keynes, but Austin (that was his name) regarded himself mostly as an educator and administrator. He was brilliant, but his passion did not lie in blazing theoretical trails. But Austin got Joan to Cambridge, where she could sit in on the lectures.
Within the span of three years, Joan went from being his wife and a minor, part-time educator of undergrads, to being considered by Sraffra, Keynes, and Pigou one of the great theoretical economists of the day. She published a wildly successful theoretical work, The Economics of Imperfect Competition, which, you know, invented the term Monopsony and kicked off what we call Macroeconomics. No big deal.
There was, interestingly, a case of simultaneous invention with Imperfect Competition. Everyone — well, not everyone, but, like, the smartest economists and all the normal people; the middling economists missed this fact — knew that Marshall’s model was brilliant yet flawed because — surprise — competition is not perfect. A Harvard man named Edward Hastings Chamberlain (who does not seem to have a Biography, unfortunately) also touched upon the same stuff in his groundbreaking work The Theory of Monopolistic Competition the same year as Joan. It was actually a re-working of his doctoral thesis, which he had written prior to Joan’s Imperfect Competition. But unlike Chamberlain, Imperfect Competition was building off of a paper she had previously published. His thesis was first, but her previous paper was first published. So even though they published their magnum opuses (opii?) within weeks of each other — and they were reviewed jointly — Joan tends to get more credit. And the terms we use our hers.
Joan was super worried about this at the time. The previous publishing of her paper, and the machinations of her lover and promoter — a stunningly talented economist named Richard Kahn — helped insure that she would get the more credit. There was a debate at Harvard where Kahn decimated Chamberlain in front of a ton of people, including Joseph Schumpeter, and he won the day for Robinson (Schumpeter, from then on, became one of Robinson’s fiercest advocates in the US, constantly calling out American sexism in advancing her cause at universities and associations). In the biographies I read about Joan I see a lot of assigning credit to this debate and to her and Kahn’s plotting for the fact that we use her terminology and she generally “won.” I suspect, however, that these days the reason she “won” is more for her later career. Chamberlain’s career was by no means dim, but Joan’s was positively stellar.
I’ve known all of that (except the intensity of Joan and Kahn’s love affair) for years, because in my research into the beginning of an economic theory of advertising, many people point to the post-Marshallian works of Chamberlain and Robinson. And Chamberlain did some good work here, coming up with the concept of product differentiation. But it’s interesting, because while, yeah, they both tackled reality and non-perfect competition, and touched on marketing, Joan’s theoretical work, as it relates to advertising, is much more robust. I think it’s reasonable to tie the together in terms of non-perfect competition, but as a heads up, if you’re working on an economic theory of advertising, keep ‘em separated.
Moving on, Joan was one of only four economists thanked by Keynes in the preface to the General Theory, and really only one of two who offered constructive work on it. She then published, in rapid succession, a series of four or so works that made the General Theory make sense to the layperson. Unlike Keynes, she understood that the battle for monetary theory was going to take place in the hearts and minds of students. She wrote the first textbooks for Keynsian theory.
She then published a second work that people also consider her magnum opus, which, I mean, aside from Keynes himself, how many economists do you say that about? Anyway, The Accumulation of Capital is a work extending Keynesianism into the long run. Many major economists became convinced she should win the Nobel prize.
But she never did.
There are three major theories about why she didn’t.
First: Sexism. Checks out.
Secondly: Because she didn’t care about them, didn’t want it, “refuse to be a member of any club who would have me” sort of thing. Conceivable.
The third, and major theory, though, is Joan was denied the Nobel because of Joan’s later work on China and North Korea. This has always been sort of a blank spot on the map for me. When you read her Wikipedia page, it reads like she was, like, a rah rah proponent of the purges or something. Not just your garden variety Western leftist that glossed over too many of the wrongs of Russia and China.
So I took the time to read a comprehensive survey of her work in China and here’s what I’ve learned:
In her later life, Joan was a developmental economist. This means she was an economist who focused on the economics of developing nations. As a developmental economists he spent a LOT of time in China. China was fairly closed off to the west, so she would publish essays when she got home about what she learned.
Her basic theory with regard to China was twofold:
1) That for poor countries, socialism potentially provided a quicker and more equitable path to modernization than capitalism, which, surprise, had profound problems with income inequality.
2) China was a separate major force on the world stage, not just a vassal of Russia (this was before they split in the 50’s) and that… drumroll… China had the potential to be as profoundly important to the world stage in the latter half of the 20th century as America did in the 19th.
Even as late as the nineteen nineties, people were pooh poohing her for the complete absurdity of the second prediction.
She was maybe off by twenty years.
Now, to be fair, there were some black marks. She wrote a pamphlet saying how badly China treated its minorities but didn’t say it was bad perhaps firmly enough? She believed, for a while, the propagandistic statistics that Mao gave her. She became an unwitting defender of China’s atrocities, though she later learned her errors and recanted. She was oblivious to the nuances of the battles raging between Mao and the “rightist” forces in the Cultural Revolution. She denied the famine of the Great Leap Forward, because the government hid it from her. She later recanted all of this as she learned the truth. She was also really into North Korea, in its early days, as another possible example of socialism bringing a country to modernity. This, too, obviously, she recanted as she learned more.
But it wasn’t just North Korea and China. Another thing she did in her later life that should have contributed to the Nobel but barely gets mentioned is the great assistance she provided to India in helping them modernize, for example. She taught the Nobel prize-winning welfare economist Amartya Sen and another laureate - Joseph Stiglitz. She helped out Pakistan.
It’s also worth nothing she was publishing these works as travel pieces, essays in cultural magazines and pamphlets the the like. They were not, by and large, published in Economic Journals.
And for that, she was denied the Nobel. That crazy woman, thinking China was going to be a major force on the world’s economic stage. Hahaha.
I’m thinking that maaaaybe Joan in China might be due a revision.
I’m really sorry about the quality of these Spotify playlist graphics in these Alaska posts. The screen on this computer is just too small to do them right. Anyway, I’m gonna do a “most depressing” playlist today because it’s the one closest to being done. You know how it is. Ive been working on this one for ages, too. But It’s come together nicely in the last day or two. It’s interesting, making “most depressing” playlists when Love isn’t The Most Depressing thing anymore.
Okay let’s get this day show on the road. Wow it’s almost ten! That’s amazing. I can’t remember the last time I’ve had such a leisurely morning. Quite nice. I hope your day is going swimmingly. Talk tomorrow!
I've had tizanidine before! I get weird muscle spasms after general anesthesia and they gave it to me to prevent those. It worked well. Didn't seem to be habit forming at all, so I think you might be in the clear there. I know they prescribe it sometimes to people going through withdrawal too, to help with the muscle spasms associated with that.