John Costello

[This is an essay in the old sense of the word. I'm not here to pick fights or bludgeon anyone with my point of view on SF¹. I want to explore, to wander a little. I've used footnotes not as a scholarly buttress but in an attempt to keep this exploration from becoming a hopeless tangle.]

I’m English. I've lived in the US a long time (in fact last year I got my US citizenship) but I’m still English. You can tell: all I have to do is speak. There's no hiding that accent. In England, I belong. I visit often; I feel at home; I just don't live there anymore.

A few years ago, when William Gibson was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, he said: I am a native of science fiction but no longer a resident.² I understood exactly what he meant.

My most recent novel, Hild, has no fantastical elements whatsoever. It's not set in a secondary world, there are no dragons, no wizards casting spells, no special swords or magic rings. Yet the book has been nominated for three SF awards³. Why?

Perhaps it's because I'm a native of SF and it shows: Hild might be a literary novel but it speaks with a fantasy accent and uses the grammar of science fiction. It relies on world-building, the grand "What if...?" learnt reading and writing SF. More than that, it relies on readers being willing to take that leap of faith into the unknown—the ability to take odd spellings, strange names, unfamiliar concepts in stride, to risk just going with the flow and trust it'll make sense eventually—that is one of the mainstays of our genre.

Perhaps it's because of the setting. Hild begins fourteen hundred years ago, in the north of Britain. A time that used to be called the Dark Ages, lit in our imagination by flickering flame, with menhirs looming from the mist and men on horseback waving swords. It was a time when kings were petty warlords, might was right, and some thought there was a god on every hill.⁴ The tropes of this milieu are often appropriated by fantasy writers, so much so that it's become a cliché. But here's the thing: the setting of Hild is real. Hild was a real person. Everything in that book could actually have happened.⁵

Perhaps, then, it's because I deliberately worked to give the book the feel of myth and epic. It might be a novel of character—Hild is in every single scene; there's no "Meanwhile, several hundred leagues away in the head of a character you've forgotten about"—but it's painted on a heroic canvas. There's gold and glory, plots and politics, sweeping change and a focus on systems (economic, climatic, and behavioural). There's also very human joy and misery, fear and hope, lust and boredom, and a few simple contentments.

I admit, I wanted Hild to be the Platonic ideal of a novel: to feel like myth, yet to make sense not only on an epic but a personal scale; for its magic to be the wild magic of the landscape and that of the human heart.

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Margaret Atwood (in)famously defined speculative fiction as being about what could happen. If we focus only on that and ignore her other idiotic pronouncements⁶ , then Hild is separated from the genre only by a matter of tense; if I've done my research properly, it's what could have happened.

In this sense, then, I'm comfortable defining Hild as speculative fiction. It relies on a tradition practised by fantasy and science fiction writers and readers. It could not exist without the particular reading stance honed by and required by genre, the willingness to reach understanding as one proceeds. But I was surprised when it (along with Karen Joy Fowlers's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves) was nominated for a Nebula.

Clearly some voting members believed a fantasy accent or science fiction grammar enough for a book to belong to the genre. But maybe it's not the books that are considered to belong but the authors.

I can't speak for Karen but, yes, I am part of the SF community and have been for decades. And it is a community (or, rather, many interlocking communities). I went to the Nebula Awards Weekend in San Jose not because I thought I'd win—I knew I wouldn't7—but to hang out in the bar. To spend time with my people. Because the readers and writers of SF are my people. I feel at home here; I belong.

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In May, before I went to the Nebulas, I read a review of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry, edited by TC Tolbert and Tim Trace Peterson.⁸ Frances Power, the reviewer, suggests (I'm paraphrasing) that speculative writing helps us to live because the definitions by which we live are products of culture. They are imaginary; we made them up.

She's referring to the work of Judith Butler on the gender binary but I think her opinion applies equally to the artificial division between SF and so-called mainstream fiction: both are cultural constructs, invented categories; we can uninvent them.

The tricky part, of course, is who are We—whose definitions are we using?

The world is changing. It no longer belongs to angry white boys sitting around in their white-wall buzz cuts eating white bread and watching Leave It To Beaver. (I'm not sure it ever did, but they certainly thought so.) The world is changing and the SF community is changing with it. I understand that this upsets some people; change is hard. But change also lies at the heart of the genre. It's who we are, what we do. We ask "What if...?" and follow the answer relentlessly.

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The big "What if..." in Hild is: What if women had always been real human beings, human in, of, and by themselves rather than in relation to men? What if, despite the stories we've been told—and ask yourself who told those stories—women have always found a way around their constraints, just as we do today? What would history have really looked like? I wrote this book to find out.

What we read, what we experience in the privacy of our heads, changes us one at a time. For me the best books put us right there, right then with a character, make her experiences our own, his lessons our lessons, their lives ours lives. We become them, just for a little while, and come back increased.

In this way, books can change the world: they change us, one at a time. With Hild I've come back to the question that lay at the heart of Ammonite: What if all people are just people? What if that has been, is, and will be true in every time and place?

And so, for me—though of course every writer is different—the past is where I turn the key that unlocks the answers. If someone like Hild, someone with her agency, her will, her determination was possible fourteen hundred years ago, then she is possible now. If she's possible now then the odds are good that we're making very sure she will be possible in the future. And suddenly the world looks different: if the lights go out, women don't have to be chattels.⁹

This is why I made the world of seventh-century Britain as real as I could, why I decided against an alternate history or secondary world fantasy, though that would have been far easier: I wanted to change this one.

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At SF gatherings built around books and stories—functionally I see no difference between conferences, conventions, and award weekends—the sense of community is palpable. It can be hard to tell the difference between writers and fans. First and foremost, SF writers are fans; we are readers. In this genre there's an assumption of equality between those two sides¹⁰ that I had no idea was not true for others. The gathering is structured for mutual support of readers and writers. We exchange reading recommendations, information on publishing, direct experience of life, the universe, and everything. The weekends (they are usually weekends) are administered and run by the community itself.

In my experience, then, the SF community is something special. Yes, there's always been in-fighting, some of it vicious. We have always fought, as all communities do, over who owns the clubhouse: who makes sets the standards and makes the rules? Who is Us and who is Other?¹¹

Our community is in the process of experimenting, of unmaking and remaking. Expect the pendulum, the definition of what is and what is not genre, to swing wildly meanwhile. I have no doubt that many find this unsettling, but meanwhile there are some astonishing moments.

It was amazing to sit at the Nebula Awards and watch women win, cheer women of colour as they climbed the stage, listen to a woman who loves women tell her Toastmaster jokes. It was fabulous to see men applaud heartily and laugh at the jokes about gender. To me and many people in that room, it felt like a vast hand pushing aside old boundaries, making room for even more experimentation.

And isn't that the point of SF, to experiment, to ask "What if...?"

Perhaps my insistence on realism is what disqualifies Hild as SF. I'm okay with that. For now. But it'll be interesting to see if this holds true in the future, to see who We become, who owns SF.

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¹ I'm going to use SF as an umbrella term to cover fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction, horror, etc. It's just easier.
² I'm paraphrasing. This was relayed to me secondhand at a dinner party by someone who attended the ceremony. That was six years ago. But I think the essentials are accurate.
³ Shortlisted for the Nebula and John W Campbell Memorial Awards and named a Tiptree Honor book.
⁴ Not everyone, of course. Perhaps not even most. Then, as now, culture was not monolithic; there were many layers, levels of status, belief systems. Then, as now, individuals in the same family could have radically different worldviews. (Just like the SF community. Or communities. I'll come back to this.)
⁵ Though I did, apparently, make one idiotic error regarding hay: they kept it loose and didn't bale it. (Mea culpa.) What people of early seventh-century Britain did or did not do with hay, though, is not (in my opinion) enough to classify a novel as fantasy.
⁶ See, for example, the Guardian.
⁷ Though I admit I was disappointed when I didn't win. Yes, intellectually I knew I wouldn't. Yes, I've won it before. No, Hild's not fantasy. Yes, it was an honour and delight to be shortlisted. But it turns out hope springs eternal and I want all the prizes!
⁸ May 2014 issue of Poetry magazine, beginning p 105.
⁹ Or the world all white, or straight.
¹⁰ Samuel R. Delany has talked about the egalitarian foundations of the genre as we know it today. I can't find the reference but he mentions Wagner and his demand that audiences listen to his music as though it were more important than they were. And how SF's refusal to privilege creator over audience antipates postmodernism. Or something like that...
¹¹ Men and Women. White people and People of colour. Straights and Queers (whether we're talking sexual orientation or gender identification). Able and Differently Abled (whether we're talking physically or neurologically). The list is almost endless—and not particular to SF. Religion and class and political ideology are the stuff of war and revolution.

[Many thanks to Gary Wolfe, Jonathan Strahan, and Kelley Eskridge for the conversations that helped shape some of these ideas. See, for example, this Coode Street podcast.]

[Image: Photo by Heiko Prumers, courtesy of LiveScience].

The remains of artificial structures that pre-date the Amazon rainforest have been found beneath the trees in Bolivia and Brazil. The forest actually grew up and around their ruins, we read, gradually consuming these structures altogether as the rainforest we see there today slowly spread over hundreds of years and conquered the landscape.

"A series of square, straight and ringlike ditches scattered throughout the Bolivian and Brazilian Amazon were there before the rainforest existed," LiveScience reported earlier this month.

Based on the research of a postdoctoral graduate student named John Francis Carson, the report suggests that "the diggers of these ditches created them before the forest moved in around them. They continued to live in the area as it became forested, probably keeping clear regions around their structures."

[Image: Photo by Heiko Prumers, courtesy of LiveScience].

One of the most intriguing suggestions of the study is that the rainforest we see there today is actually, at its origins, what Carson calls "a coproduction between humans and nature."

"It's very likely, in fact," he explains, "that people had some kind of effect on the composition of the forest... People might favor edible species, growing in orchards and things like that, [or] altered the soils, changing the soil chemistry and composition, which can have a longer-lasting legacy effect."

In other words, the deliberate, long-term selection and cultivation of plant species preferred by humans would have led to a distinct type of forest growing in the region, not just a "wild" expanse of whatever plants could naturally survive.

The ancient forest was pruned, tended, and gardened, Carson's research suggests, and therefore has a kind of unnatural origin, not unlike an abandoned garden gone to seed.

[Image: Photo by Heiko Prumers, courtesy of LiveScience].

In fact, this brings to mind the fascinating work of UC Berkeley anthropologist Christine Hastorff, who has pointed out that many of the heavily vegetated Central American landscapes we inaccurately and over-simplistically describe as "rainforest" are actually "feral gardens": plots of artificially cultivated plants, vines, and trees, similar to orchards, that only later took on the appearance of wilderness after their gardeners were exterminated by Europeans.

Hastorff—like Carson—suggests that traces of this human-induced artificiality at the scale of an entire ecosystem can still be detected in the landscape, following detailed investigations into what combinations of plants grow in what areas, and then comparing these to what we would expect to see growing without human interference. These landscapes are not really wild forests at all, then, Hastorff explains, but "Maya village community garden plants that have gone feral. That isn’t the forest that was there before humans landed in the Americas."

In any case, Carson's work on the "mysterious earthen rings" found beneath the tree cover of the Brazilian and Bolivian Amazon is certainly fascinating for its glimpse of human settlement patterns—that is, architecture—hidden beneath an incredible landscape. However, its even more intriguing take away is that this very landscape was—at least in part—cultivated and influenced by the people who built the "earthen rings" we see in these photographs. Developing the implications of this "has only just started," he tells LiveScience.

The Silva Field Guide to Birds of a Parallel Future, featuring several videos of how futuristic birds might move. For instance, here's a deconstructed bird in the shape of a Borg cube:

Tags: Rick Silva   video

A couple in a kayak gets too close to a whale and then the whale raises them right out of the water. And not just for a moment either.

Tags: video

In 2011, Magnum photographer Martin Parr visited the Teddy Grays candy factory near Birmingham, England that makes old-fashioned candy with Wonka-esque names -- Mint Humbugs, Nutty Brittles, Spearminties. The result is this ultra-charming 20 minute film profile of the company and its candy-making process.

Charmingness evidence, exhibit A: When asked if the company would ever modernize, company director Teddy Gray responds, "Imagine coming to work in the morning and looking at all them faxes, oh no." Even his modernization references need modernizing.

Charmingness evidence, exhibit B: The lingerie calendar behind Gray as he talks on the phone, and the beefcake calendar behind his daughter in the very next scene.

Charmingness evidence, exhibit C through exhibit ZZZ: Every other scene in the film.

I know 20 minutes for a web video sounds daunting, but it's worth the while. At the very least, skip to 14:00 and watch how they make "lettered rock", hard candy sticks with words written on the inside of the candy. As shown in the video, the individual letters start out 3-4 inches high, are arranged into words when rolled up into a massive tube of candy a foot in diameter, and end up a fraction of an inch tall when pulled out into small sticks, like so:

And you thought laying out type for the web was difficult. (thx, nick)

Tags: food   Martin Parr   Teddy Grays   video

The Paradox of Sign Language Morphology:

An interesting article about morphology in sign languages, by Aronoff, Meir, and Sandler. The whole thing is available here and is quite long, but here’s an excerpt from the beginning that introduces the concept of simultaneous versus sequential morphology and what that means for sign languages: in a nutshell, sign languages have striking similarities to both highly inflected languages, like Navajo, and highly uninflected languages, like Tok Pisin, which you’d think wouldn’t be possible. 

In the early days of linguistic research on sign languages, in the 1970s and 1980s, researchers noticed that sign languages have complex morphology. Further research showed that this morphological structure is simultaneous, in the sense that the different morphemes of a word are simultaneously superimposed on each other rather than being strung together, as those of spoken languages usually are. As sign-language research expanded to include more linguistic structures as well as more sign languages, several generalizations emerged. First, all sign languages studied were found to have this particular kind of morphology. Second, the grammatical categories encoded by many of these morphological structures, as well as the form that they take, were found to be quite similar across different sign languages. That is, sign languages show strong crosslinguistic similarities in their morphological structures.

Researchers also noticed early on that sign languages share many properties with young creole languages (Fischer 1978, Meier 1984); yet they differ markedly from young creoles in one crucial respect, the same one that ties sign languages together as a group: their complex simultaneous morphology. What has gone largely unnoticed so far is that sign languages are not confined to simultaneous morphological structures. At least some sign languages also have sequential affixation. These linear structures differ significantly from the simultaneous type, not only in the way the morphemes are affixed to each other, but in other ways as well:

• the occurrence, grammatical function, and form of the sequential morphological constructions are language-specific;
• the sequential morphological constructions are variable among signers;
• the sequential morphological constructions are often of limited productivity.

This morphological state of affairs presents us with two puzzles; we call them the young language puzzle and the typology puzzle.

The young language puzzle

Sign languages exhibit certain key properties characteristic of young creole languages, which we enumerate below (§2.2).1 These commonalities have been attributed to similarities in the age and conditions of acquisition of sign languages and young creoles. But sign languages differ radically from young spoken creole languages in one respect. The latter normally have little inflection, very little derivation (McWhorter 1998), and what little morphology they have consists largely of affixation, with no simultaneous morphology. Furthermore, the affixation found in creole languages varies from one to another. Even Bickerton’s bioprogram hypothesis (1981), which claims that creole languages are similar to one another because they spring from universal grammar, does not argue for such close similarities in the morphologies of all spoken creole languages. Sign languages, in contrast, have rich morphological structure, both inflectional and derivational. If sign languages share some of the linguistic patterning of young creoles, why do the two types differ so in their morphological systems?

The morphological-typology puzzle

Sign languages exhibit two radically different morphological types in their grammars. On the one hand, they have complex morphological structures—verb agreement, classifier constructions, and verbal aspects, to name a few. Depending on the particular analysis, a single verb may include five or more morphemes. For example, the American Sign Language verb LOOK-AT may be inflected for subject and object agreement as well as for temporal aspect, and it could be accompanied by a grammatical nonmanual (e.g. facial) marker that functions as an adverbial. Such a verb, meaning, for example, ‘he looked at it with relaxation and enjoyment for a long time’, consists of five morphemes. This type of morphology is reminiscent of very heavily inflecting languages. All of these complex morphological structures—verb agreement, classifier constructions, and verbal aspects—have been found in all well-studied sign languages. On the other hand, some sign languages, including the two that form the subject matter of this article, American Sign Language (ASL) and Israeli Sign Language (ISL), also have simple affixal morphology. In both of these languages, the affixed elements are related to free content words, from which they appear to have evolved. They are, moreover, confined to derivational processes and they are not sign-language universal. A particular affix may occur in one sign language but not in another. These morphological phenomena are very similar to those found in young creoles: they are the product of change, grammaticizations, and they are infrequent within the language.

Sign-language morphology thus seems to comprise two radically different types. One is rich, complex, and simultaneous, and the other is sparse, relatively simple, and sequential. Sign languages seem to present the impossible combination of Navajo-like and Tok-Pisin-like languages, a typological puzzle. Only sign languages seem to have this dichotomy in their morphology and the dichotomy appears time and again when a previously undescribed sign language is studied in detail. We know of no spoken language with this property.

We have found an explanation for this difference between languages in the two modalities in a pair of observations about sign languages. First, because they are transmitted by the hands, face, and body and perceived by the eyes, sign languages have the capacity to represent certain spatio-temporal concepts in a more direct manner than spoken languages do. This property allows sign languages to have morphological structures that are not entirely arbitrary and that might be similar across sign languages. In this sense, sign languages differ from spoken languages. The second observation points in the opposite direction, towards expected similarities between signed languages and spoken creoles. As natural human languages produced by the same brain under similar sociocultural-ecological conditions, sign languages have many structural properties in common with young spoken languages.

Full paper here. 

Young Knight in a Landscape (1510).

A painting by Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1460–1525/26) replete with natural detail. Many of these details, the animal ones in particular, are no doubt symbolic, although what they symbolise can change over time, and may also refer to the personal mythology of the family for whom the painting was created. Dogs often represent fidelity but the dog crouching on the path behind the knight wears an expression that may be taken for a snarl. The hawk knocking another bird from the sky is more obviously a symbol of belligerence which suits the action of drawing a sword.

The note for this painting says it was attributed to Albrecht Dürer until 1919, something I find surprising. The vegetation is certainly painted with a Dürer-like precision but Dürer was equally precise with his figures, and would have paid more attention to the modelling of the hands. One detail I don’t recall seeing before is the codpiece pocket. The Scottish sporran often has a pocket in the back, there being no pockets in kilts or, for that matter, in suits of armour.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Eustace details

She was great. (In this clip, wait'll she warms up! She begins a tad pro-forma, as if she doesn't like filling in for Merman nor the giant image orthicon cameras pointed at her -- that discomfiture is fun to observe, too -- but soon she shakes it off, and by the encore it's as if she's spotted a friend in the audience and is showing off.)

Now maybe I'll download her children's album.

UPDATE. Guess we should have this, especially if you've never seen it:



Not many people in history could be called definitive interpreters of Sondheim and Noel Coward.

Since 1979, Jadav Payeng has planted every single tree in a forest that covers some 1360 acres of an island in the Jorhat district of India. The forest helps prevent the erosion of the island and is now home to elephants, rhinos, tigers, and other animals. Forest Man is a short documentary film on how this forest came to be.

(via @AdmiralTwombly)

Tags: Jadav Payeng   video

Earlier we have looked at the possibility of using foodpairs as a yardstick by which bodies of recipes can be compared for their (dis)similarity. The aim is to so look at cuisines in order to see how Asian cuisines differ from Western ones, how Asian cuisines differ internally and how the cuisines of the new world in turn relate to the ones from the old world.

This is interesting to pursue for the way it might corroborate larger historic explanations of how cuisines have developed. China developed in isolation much longer than any other civilization in the old world, is its cooking also more singular? India has been invaded several times and its food is very much a product of its own cultures clashing with its Muslim conquerors, does that make it stand out from the other Asian cuisines? Read Rachel Laudan's book Cuisine and Empire for the bigger historic picture.

In practice when using the word cuisine we are actually comparing English language books written for an audience of English speaking home cooks; an important difference. 

The number of foodpairs a recipe generates increases exponentially with the number of ingredients. A typical cookbook (and the ones we use here are all modest one) yields anywhere between 700 and 2500 pairs, the number of connections when comparing three books is large and a really meaningful way to visualize a foodpair comparison we have not yet found. Instead we have turned to using the Jaccard Index, a simple formula for comparing similarity in datasets.  If two book are absolutely similar (a book compared with itself) the index is 1, if the books are completely dissimilar the index is 0. So how higher the number how greater the similarity. Let's look at how Jamie Oliver's Naked Chef compares to 12 cookbooks representing many styles and cuisines.


It is much easier to compare cookbooks on the presence of ingredients alone, there is much less data. When doing this for the same books as above the graph below is created. Or check here for a interactive one.The numbers are different, the Jaccard-index gets much higher (54% ingredient similarity between the top-scoring duo Ramsay and Oliver), but the overall shape of these two graphs is recognizably similar, especially when you factor in the difference in scale. This is good news because proper food pair data (recipe for recipe) is hard to create while creating ingredient lists for books is exactly what foodmap does.

According to data collected by a European satellite array, the Earth's magnetic field is shifting and weakening at a greater pace than previously thought. One of the reasons for the shift might be that the magnetic North and South poles are swapping positions.

Scientists already know that magnetic north shifts. Once every few hundred thousand years the magnetic poles flip so that a compass would point south instead of north. While changes in magnetic field strength are part of this normal flipping cycle, data from Swarm have shown the field is starting to weaken faster than in the past. Previously, researchers estimated the field was weakening about 5 percent per century, but the new data revealed the field is actually weakening at 5 percent per decade, or 10 times faster than thought. As such, rather than the full flip occurring in about 2,000 years, as was predicted, the new data suggest it could happen sooner.

You can read up on geomagnetic reversals on Wikipedia. A short sampling:

These periods [of polarity] are called chrons. The time spans of chrons are randomly distributed with most being between 0.1 and 1 million years with an average of 450,000 years. Most reversals are estimated to take between 1,000 and 10,000 years. The latest one, the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal, occurred 780,000 years ago. A brief complete reversal, known as the Laschamp event, occurred only 41,000 years ago during the last glacial period. That reversal lasted only about 440 years with the actual change of polarity lasting around 250 years. During this change the strength of the magnetic field dropped to 5% of its present strength.

Tags: Earth   physics   science

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Alan Noble is not being disingenuous in his recent Atlantic essay, “Is Evangelical Morality Still Acceptable in America?”

That stipulation is a bit of a stretch, since Noble generally seems like a fairly bright man, and thus the self-serving obtuseness he affects here seems to be a pose. But let’s pretend the pretense is genuine and treat his faux-naive argument as genuine naiveté. Let us answer his question as though he didn’t already know.

Noble presents “evangelical morality” as under siege. He isn’t responsible for the subtitle of his essay, but the copy editor who supplied that did a good job summarizing Noble’s question: “People who disagree with same-sex marriage and birth-control use have been met with accusations of bigotry. Are some Christians being unfairly shamed out of the public square?”

Here is his conclusion:

If the evangelical worldview is deemed invalid in the public sphere, then the public sphere loses the value of being public. American discourse will be marked by paranoid conformity, rather than principled and earnest disagreement. And our ability to prophetically speak to one another and to our nation’s troubles will be restrained.

The right framework here is one of pluralism: the ability of many different kinds of people to live out their faith in public with and among those who deeply disagree with them.

Pluralism, bravo. Excellent. Robust, “principled and earnest disagreement” in the “public sphere” and the public square. Yes. Good. Three cheers for pluralism and wave the Patheos flag.

Noble, rightly, believes that everyone should have the right to participate in such disagreements and in such public arguments. Where he goes wrong — and rather weirdly wrong at that — is in his insistence that the right to participate in such public discourse carries with it the right to be rewarded for winning such arguments even when you’re losing them. The freedom to disagree, for Noble, means the freedom to have a losing argument afforded the same dignity, merit and respect as the arguments it is losing to.

Ultimately, then, Noble’s argument is profoundly disrespectful of evangelical Christianity. He insists that “the evangelical worldview” must be treated like a small child in a T-ball game in which no one keeps score, no one makes an out, and everybody gets to run the bases even after three strikes. He wants evangelicals to have the freedom to disagree, but he will not allow them the mature freedom to lose an argument.

Nor will he allow anyone else the freedom to notice that “evangelical morality” is losing the argument.

Consider two such arguments that “evangelical morality” is currently losing — and losing quite badly: 1) The advocacy of “purity culture,” and 2) The denial of civil marriage for same-sex couples.

Noble desperately want to avoid the substance of these losing arguments, and to ignore the consequences of them. That’s not a luxury that everyone has. Both of these arguments have been pressed, forcefully and incisively, by the very people who bear those consequences. For them, these disagreements are not abstractions to be pondered in an essay for the Atlantic. They are, rather, sources of real, tangible and measurable harm — harm inflicted on them. Noble’s abstract appeal to a perpetually unsettled disagreement would mean, for them, perpetual harm — without respite, without hope, without end.

And so Noble does his best to distract us from these real people — to keep the focus elsewhere, on some abstract, ethereal dispute between advocates of “tradition” and the cruel juggernaut of “progressives.” Doing that requires Noble to maintain that disingenuous pose in which he pretends not to understand any motive for these so-called “progressives” other than their blind devotion to a creed of progress. He can’t allow himself to admit or to acknowledge any substantial motive for this challenge to “tradition,” because to do so would require him to acknowledge the real harm that is being done to real people by the traditions he wants to defend.

But again, let’s play along with Noble’s pretense, and respond as though he really doesn’t understand why “evangelical morality” has lost the argument. So, then.

Dear Alan Noble:

Evangelical morality is not losing the argument because it is insufficiently “progressive.” Evangelical morality is losing the argument because it is insufficiently moral.

Evangelical morality has, rather, demonstrated itself to be immoral — to be a source of harm to real people. Those people — rightly, justly, and understandably — are demanding that this harm stop. “Evangelical morality” insists that this harm continue, but has thus far been unable to offer any reason why it should. Defenders of evangelical morality are free to keep trying to come up with some plausible justification for such harm being done to others, but they are not free to mandate that everyone else ignore the failure of their attempts to do so thus far.

Because of those two things — the real harm being done to real people and the utter failure to provide any credible basis for inflicting such harm — this “evangelical morality” is, in fact, increasingly being “shamed out of the public square.” This is not happening because the public square is dominated by progressive chauvinists. This is happening because such immoral “evangelical morality” is, in fact, shameful.

Martha Harbison has a painfully funny piece in Audubon about the history and significance of that magazine’s decision to mandate title case for bird names (e.g., “Bald Eagle” rather than “bald eagle”). Here’s a sample:

A group of magazine editors, scientists, and communications professionals, convened by Audubon’s VP of Content, Mark Jannot, was asked to hash out, once and for all, whether Audubon would use title case (that is, capitalizing the first letter of each word) for common bird names. You can read Jannot’s account of ruffled feathers and rooster-like posturing here. (Spoiler: Audubon is switching to title case across all of its channels, including stories published in Audubon magazine.) The entire dustup was an eye-opener for me, a lifelong birder but a relatively recent hire at Audubon. Before that meeting, I thought magazine copy editors were the most rule-crazy, uptight cranks going when it came to orthography. Little did I know that ornithologists share that trait. Listening to each camp snipe at the other, over rules that nobody else in the world cares about, made me question my allegiance to either side.

As someone with more than a decade’s experience working in magazine editing, grokking the impulses of copy editors is easy: Any given rule is either in the style manual (one of a half-dozen stylebooks—but, in any given copy editor’s case, only a particular one of the those) or it’s not (and therefore it’s not a rule). To understand the ornithologist’s fervor for majuscules required some research, so I dug up a copy of the very first Check-List of North American Birds, published by the American Ornithologists’ Union in 1886. I read the entire Code of Nomenclature [...]

I personally agree with Anselm Atkins, “a longtime birder, ex-Trappist monk, and former academic,” who complained about title case, saying: “let us surrender to the dictionary. Until we do, we ornithologists, with our Important Capitals, continue to look Curiously Provincial.” But I’m not a birder, so I just watch with bemusement from the sidelines. (Via MetaFilter, where birders are defending their Important Capitals.)

The illustrations below were designed by the German artist and naturalist, Maria Sibylla Merian. The plates were originally prepared for a mid-1670s book on the metamorphosis of caterpillars into butterflies. However, the scientific community of the time largely ignored Merian's work because it wasn't published in Latin, the formal language of science.

Some forty years later, Merian finally reworked and expanded this earlier book on European insects. Sadly, she died shortly before the completed book - in Latin, finally - was readied for publication in 1717 as 'Erucarum Ortus..'. The full title of the book is said to translate as: 'The Miraculous Transformation and Unusual Flower-Food of Caterpillars'.

Merian's portrayal of plants and insects in a semi-naturalistic way was something of a step forward in the world of scientific illustration. Many of her contemporaries 'arranged' the illustrated scenes to show man's domination over nature, or took liberties with embellishment to impress and dazzle the audience.

"For her period, her work is scientifically accurate and she is considered by modern scholars to be one of the founders of entomology, the study of insects." [source]

'Erucarum Ortus' features some 150 plates of butterflies, caterpillars, moths and other insects together with their associated plants. The book is divided into three sections and about half of the first section of illustrations - in this particular copy - has been enhanced with hand-colouring. The balance of engravings below were sampled from throughout the book. The opium poppy plate was cropped back to the engraving plate margin; all others were chopped off at the page edge. I haven't checked whether all the hand written species names on the book pages are correct or not.

"Although the 'Erucarum Ortus' appeared one year after her death, Merian was very much involved in its publication. From at least 1705 she had intended to issue her work on European insects in Latin and Dutch, completing it with a third part. Ill health at the end of her life delayed publication of the third part until just after her death, but the complete Latin edition followed only one year later." [source]

'Among the most important works in her oeuvre is her work on the feeding and growth of European caterpillars ... because these volumes contain both illustrations and texts, they provide a wealth of insights into Merian's interests with respect to art and nature, the intentions she sought in her work and the public for whom that work was intended. A unique primary source of information about a baroque painter, [..] ['Erucarum Ortus, Alimentum et Paradoxa Metamorphosis'] is also an invaluable historical source as a document of the popularisation of natural history in the early Enlightenment period.' (Heidrun Ludwig, 'The Rapuenbuch. A popular natural history', in Maria Sibylla Merian 1647-1717 Artist and Naturalist 1998, p.53) [source].

"Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) was one of the greatest artist-naturalists of her time. From childhood she had been fascinated by the life cycles of butterflies, and she made a close study of their transformations. She became a flower-painter and teacher in Nuremberg, Frankfurt and Amsterdam." [source]

"In 1711 Maria suffered a stroke and although greatly disabled, continued her work for a further six years. she died in Amsterdam on 13th January, 1717. The register of deaths lists her as a pauper, but in spite of this she had her own grave. In the same year her daughter published for the first time all three parts of her mothers life's work under the title 'Erucarum Ortus Alimentum et Paradoxa Metamorphosis' [..]

There are a number of versions of how the entire works of this extraordinary woman ended up in Russia. the most reliable record is that the works were purchased by Tsar Peter the Great, personally, during a visit to western Europe, only days before Merian's death in 1717. Upon the Tsar's death in 1725, the works were presented to the Academy of Sciences [in Germany] where they reside today." [source]

• 'Erucarum Ortus, Alimentum et Paradoxa Metamorphosis' 1717 by Maria Sibylla Merian is available online from Staatsbibliothek Bamberg - note the thumbnail view tab.
• Alternatively, 'Erucarum Ortus' is online at Göttinger Digitalisierungszentrum (GDZ) - the written sections are handily linked under species names, but I don't think the illustrations are as good.
• Previously: Surinam Insect Metamorphosis & Surinam Metamorphosis.
• Works by or about Maria Sibylla Merian at Amazon.
• Wikipedia article.
• This post first appeared on the BibliOdyssey website.

Three years ago MetaDesign Berlin asked us to design a custom Serif and Sans typeface for the German federal government. They had been assigned to redevelop the government’s corporate design with the typefaces as part of the update. The project was to cover all communication issued by the government and their ministries, online or offline, national or international. It was a demanding and interesting task. Though we were accustomed to working on projects like these for corporations, we were now asked to design “for the people”.

A custom type design job begins with the definition of aesthetic and technical goals, dictated to a large extent by the target group. A typeface for an art school can be more liberally designed than the typeface for a company of financial advisers or a newspaper font, though all three have easily definable target groups. Assumptions about a client’s target group are based on lifestyle, age group, likes and dislikes, etc. and shape the development of an aesthetic design.

The new typefaces for the German federal government

The technical savvy of the target group — how current their technology is, what devices, browsers, etc. they use — is also crucial. It informs us on the font technology required: font formats, hinting, and so on. The more homogenous the target group, the more straightforward the definitions are upon which we base our design.

Custom typefaces for the Glasgow School of Art, the northern Italian region of Südtirol, the Dutch weekly newspaper Staatscourant SC, and the Berlin Lottery (an assignment from Connex Advertising, Berlin). Custom type designs with set target groups and applications.

For this project we were faced with the challenge of mapping a goal for a target group that encompassed the general public — all citizens and persons coming into contact with information issued by the German government and its agencies, ranging from the age of 9 to 99, from all educational and cultural backgrounds — which was basically everyone. The written word, whether just a footnote or the headline on a billboard, had to be accessible and user-friendly to this widely diverse group.

Besides the public audience, the other target group for the typeface was the government itself: employees and officials using the fonts, creating information and communicating with them in an office environment. Though smaller than the first target group, it was crucial that their needs be met as well.

Our foremost goal in considering this broad audience was outstanding legibility — creating glyph shapes that made for pleasant reading. Not only because the user group was so diverse but also because the official text issued by the government could at times be complex and detailed.

The second aim was a consequence of the first: the typeface should have no extroverted details. By ornamenting information we would run the risk of distracting the reader. We chose therefore not to give the typeface too much personality, and aimed to design an unbiased yet friendly “transmitter”. This impulse was the opposite as that for a corporate typeface design, where we would enhance the profile with strong recognizable details. We were not competing with another brand in the free market, the typeface did not have to look “cooler” than the one before, it just needed to work “better” by serving a public function.

Translating our next two goals into definable shapes was more straightforward. We wanted to balance femininity and masculinity as well as infuse it with determination and sure-footedness. Both aspects have visual correlations and reflect the values implicit in “democracy”. One recognizes the equality of both sexes, while the other acknowledges the authority of government, tempered by democratic and humanitarian ideals. We strove to make an inclusive typeface, not an exclusive one.

Both writing and construction were part of the design concept for the two families.

The typefaces the government previously used were a combination of Neue Praxis and Neue Demos by Gerard Unger. These typefaces, originally designed in the 1970s, were built up of fairly coarse pixels and made to function within a specific technical environment where letters were formed by a cathode ray tube. This meant that the design had to match the technology and not the other way around.

Previously in use for the corporate design of the government: Neue Demos by Gerard Unger. BundesSerif has more definite and dynamic features.

The technical requirements for the BundesSans and BundesSerif were more demanding, requiring cross media, cross platform and cross browser usage. Again, with their heterogenous target group, our aim was to foster the government’s obligation to make information accessible to everyone. As not everyone has the latest computer or software, we had to create backwards-compatible typefaces. That meant the fonts would require hinting on various levels for good display on screens, especially under difficult conditions with font smoothing switched off.

The fonts rendered in Firefox Windows (left) and Mac OS. The ClearType and grayscale hinting for the web and office fonts was made by Monika Bartels from fontwerk.de

We approached the actual design of the typefaces on the macro and the micro levels. The macro meant defining the general profile or cornerstone of our design. Only after that did we start sketching and drawing letters on the micro level.

The foundation of our design began with general proportions, vertically (especially the ratio uppercase, ascender and x-height) and horizontally. We knew the typefaces should not demand too much space but also should not appear too compact or cramped. Then we looked at the possible shape of the letters for Sans and Serif, and at the level of individuality — recognizability — of the characteristic shapes.

Our first macro approach to vertical and horizontal proportions.

Balancing the proportions within the letters, design options (top and middle, blue is our choice) and some problem letters and combinations we needed to aware of.

On the micro level, we methodically considered how pointy/round the curves should be, compared dynamic (humanist) with more solid (constructed) shapes, and tested symmetrical/asymmetrical serifs. At that point in the process we gave great thought to each detail, questioned and discussed — sometimes fiercely — all the features that led us in the end to conclusions and possible design options. These were discussed with MetaDesign who assisted in streamlining our decisions to correspond with their modernized corporate design. Only after that did we present the development to the clients.

The glyphs’ individuality increases recognizability.

It is not easy to present individual letters to a client, laymen of type, and ask them to make decisions on details. Commonly, the client finds certain features strange because they have never been exposed to them close up. Characteristics of Times New Roman and Arial might be not questioned because they are never examined in detail, but when viewing a new alphabet through a magnifying glass, questions on forms and proportions suddenly arise — “why isn’t the letter ‘t’ as tall as the ‘h’ or ‘b’?” For this reason we always use meaningful words in our presentations — in this case, Bildung, Berlin, Demokratie — rather than individual letters.

Presentation of the typeface to the client.

After finalizing the last design decisions, we presented the complete glyph set of each weight/style on A2 boards (tabloid format x 2) to the client and after a few more detail tweaks, received the final “go ahead” signature on each — a green light for the last step of the production process. The result was two families for DTP, web and office use with each available weight in Roman and Italic, containing about 580 glyphs covering the European languages that use Latin script.

We have learned from this assignment that the usual corporate type design reasoning only applies to a certain extent. It is not a quest for the most groundbreaking “winning” solution or a visualisation of a company profile, because it is outside ‘commercialistic’ thinking where the sole objective is to increase and maximise financial gain. Our objective here was to create an understated design with a sense of integration, not exclusivity — universality instead of selectivity.

The project ran smoothly and our progress was viewed with great interest by the Bundespresseamt (German government press office) who mediated the assignment. Though their communication specialists were familiar with the processes of corporate design, the development of a typeface was something new to them. They came to see great advantages in a new, custom typeface over having their previous typeface overhauled. The latter would have meant an upgrade from Type1 to OpenType and web fonts, resulting in considerable license fees. The custom font allowed them to freely use and distribute it within the governmental bodies and ministries.

BundesSerif and BundesSans received awards from the International Forum Design and the German Designers Club.

Requested by the client: the design of an uppercase ß, the German double s (a ligature of ſs, a long s followed by a regular one) which typically becomes SS in uppercase writing. The letter has been included in the Unicode standard in 2008 as U+1E9E.

Prof. Jürgen Huber and Martin Wenzel are two experienced and enthusiastic type designers forming the custom type design partnership, supertype.de.
Jürgen studied Communication Design at the Folkwang University in Essen with Prof. Volker Küster before he worked for MetaDesign until 2004. Since 2012 he runs http://typedepartment.de together with Malte Herok. He currently teaches typography at the University of Applied Sciences HTW, Berlin.
Martin studied at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, while embarking on his own type design projects, eventually launching his foundry http://martinplusfonts.com in 2011. Martin also teaches typography part-time at the University of Applied Sciences HTW in Berlin.

Sponsored by Hoefler & Co.
and


BundesSans and BundesSerif — truly democratic typefaces

Come see me today, at GaymerX!

Don't use "orphanage" in a headline. It reminds people of why they hate you. (See also "widows.")  Geraghty goes on:

We may help out these kids because we’re kind-hearted souls...

Sorry, had something caught in my windpipe.

...some will say it’s the Christian thing to do.

Sorry, same thing. Okay:

...But we’re not obligated to do this. This isn’t our responsibility and this isn’t our fault. The parents of those kids are the ones who should be taking care of them – feeding them, clothing them, sheltering them and educating them. And I don’t think it’s cold-hearted to ask whether our immediate effort to take care of these kids – because they so desperately need care – is setting us up to be their long-term caretaker.

Geraghty supported the idea that we should devote $2 trillion and thousands of lives to invading and occupying Iraq to bring them freedom. But that was different, of course: We got to kill a bunch of them, which made it butch. Also we didn't have to hang around with them. Huddled masses yearning to breathe free are the worst!

Sometimes I wonder what these people think America is all about, but it's becoming clearer every day that their vision resembles an endless loop of Three Stooges shorts with Sousa marches playing in the background.

This week I have a somewhat topical essay over at Medium.com. Warning: political.

This is the fifth (and final) part of a series. See parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

For those who have read along thus, far, I am grateful. We’ve traveled a long road, but in the end we haven’t traveled very far.

We have understood, first, the conceit of traditional welfare economics: that with just a sprinkle of one, widely popular bit of ethical philosophy — liberalism! — we could let positive economics (an empirical science, at least in aspiration) serve as the basis for normative views about how society should be arranged. But we ran into a problem. “Scientificoliberal” economics can decide between alternatives when everybody would agree that one possibility would be preferable to (or at least not inferior to) another. But it lacks any obvious way of making interpersonal comparisons, so it cannot choose among possibilities that would leave some parties “better off” (in a circumstance they would prefer), but others worse off. Since it is rare that nontrivial economic and social choices are universally preferable, this inability to trade-off costs and benefits between people seems to render any usefully prescriptive economics impossible.

We next saw a valiant attempt by Nicholas Kaldor, John Hicks, and Harold Hotelling to rescue “scientificoliberal” economics with a compensation principle. We can rank alternatives by whether they could make everybody better off, if they were combined with a compensating redistribution (regardless of whether the compensating redistribution actually occurs). At a philosophical level, the validity of the Kaldor-Hicks-Hotelling proposal requires us to sneak a new assumption into “scientificoliberal” economics — that distributive arrangements adjudicated by the political system are optimal, so that any distributive deviation from actual compensation represents a welfare improvement relative to the “potential” improvement which might have occurred via compensation. This assumption is far less plausible than the liberal assumption that what a person would prefer is a marker of what would improve her welfare. But we have seen that, even if we accept the new assumption, the Kaldor-Hicks-Hotelling “potential Pareto” principal cannot coherently order alternatives. It can literally tell us that we should do one thing, and we’d all be better off, and then we should undo that very thing, because we would all be better off.

In the third installment, we saw that these disarming “reversals” were not some bizarre corner case, but are invoked by the most basic economic decisions. To what goods should the resources of an economy be devoted? What fraction should go to luxuries, and what fraction to necessities? Should goods be organized as “public goods” or “club goods” (e.g. shared swimming pools), or as private goods (unshared, personal swimming pools)? These alternatives are unrankable according to the Kaldor-Hicks-Hotelling criterion. The resource allocation decision that will “maximize the size of the pie” depends entirely on what distribution the pie will eventually have. It is impossible to separate the role of the economist as an objective efficiency maximizer from the role of the politician as an arbiter of interpersonal values. The efficiency decision is inextricably bound up with the distributional decision.

Most recently, we’ve seen that the “welfare theorems” — often cited as the deep science behind claims that markets are welfare optimizing — don’t help us out of our conundrum. The welfare theorems tell us that, under certain ideal circumstances, markets will find a Pareto optimal outcome, some circumstance under which no one can be made better off without making someone worse off. But they cannot help us with the question of which Pareto optimal outcome should be found, and no plausible notions of welfare are indifferent between all Pareto optimal outcomes. The welfare theorems let us reduce the problem of choosing a desirable Pareto optimal outcome to the problem of choosing a money distribution — once we have the money distribution, markets will lead us to make optimal production and allocation decisions consistent with that distribution. But we find ourselves with no means of selecting the appropriate money distribution (and no scientific case at all that markets themselves optimize the distribution). We are back exactly where we began, wondering how to decide who gets what.

In private correspondence, Peter Dorman suggests

Perhaps the deepest sin is not the urge to have a normative theory as such, but the commitment to having a single theory that does both positive and normative lifting. Economists want to be able to say that this model, which I can calibrate to explain or predict observed behavior, demonstrates what policies should be enacted. If these functions were allowed to be pursued separately, each in its own best way, I think we would have a much better economics.

We’ve seen that positive economics (even with that added sprinkle of liberalism) cannot serve as the basis for a normative economics. But if we toss positive economics out entirely, it’s not clear how economists might have anything at all to say about normative questions. Should we just leave those to the “prophet and the social reformer”, as Hicks disdainfully put it, or is there some other way of leveraging economists’ (putative) expertise in positive questions into some useful perspective on the normative? I think that there is.

They key, I think, is to relax the methodological presumption of one way causality from positive observations and normative conclusions. The tradition of “scientific” welfare economics is based on aggregating presumptively stable individual preferences into a social welfare ordering whose maximization could be described as an optimization of welfare. Scitovsky and then Arrow showed that this cannot be done without introducing some quite destructive paradoxes, or letting the preferences of a dictator dominate. It is, however, more than possible — trivial, even — to define social welfare functions that map socioeconomic observables into coherent orderings. We simply have to give up the conceit that our social welfare function arises automatically or mechanically from individual preferences characterized by ordinal utility functions. At a social level, via politics, we have to define social welfare. There is nothing “economic science” can offer to absolve us of that task.

But then what’s left for economic science to offer? Quite a bit, I think, if it would let itself out of the methodological hole its dug itself into. As Dorman points out, economists so entranced themselves with the notion that their positive economics carries with it a normative theory like the free prize in a box of Cracker Jacks that they have neglected the task of creating a useful toolset for normative economics as a fully formed field of its own.

A “scientific” normative economics would steal the Kaldor-Hicks-Hotelling trick of defining a division of labor between political institutions and value-neutral economics. But politicians would not uselessly (as a technical matter) and implausibly (let’s face it) be tasked with “optimal” distributional decisions. Political institutions are not well-suited to making ad hoc determinations of who gets what. We need something systematic for that. What political institutions are well suited to doing, or at least better suited than plausible contenders, is to make broad-brush determinations of social value, to describe the shape of the society that we wish to inhabit. How much do we, as a society, value equality against the mix of good (incentives to produce and innovate) and bad (incentives to cheating and corruption, intense competitive stress) that come with outcome dispersion? How much do we value public goods whose relationship to individual well-being is indirect against the direct costs to individuals required to pay for those goods?

A rich normative economics would stand in dialogue with the political system, taking vague ideas about social value and giving them form as social welfare functions, exploring the ramifications of different value systems reified as mathematics, letting political factions contest and revise welfare functions as those ramifications stray from, or reveal inconsistencies within, the values they intend to express. A rich normative economics would be anthropological in part. It would try to characterize, as social welfare functions, the “revealed preferences” of other polities and of our own polity. Whatever it is we say about ourselves, or they say about themselves, what does it seems like polities are actually optimizing? As we analyze others, we will develop a repertoire of formally described social types, which may help us understand the behavior of other societies and will surely add to the menu we have to choose from in framing our own social choices. As we analyze ourselves, we will expose fault lines between our “ideals” (preferences we claim to hold that may not be reflected in our behavior) and how we actually are. We can then make decisions about whether and how to remedy those.

The role of the economist would be that of an explorer and engineer, not an arbiter of social values. Assuming (perhaps heroically) a good grasp of the positive economics surrounding a set of proposals, an economist can determine — for a given social welfare function — which proposal maximizes well being, taking into account effects on production, distribution, and any other inputs affected by the proposal and included in the function. Under which of several competing social welfare functions policies should be evaluated would become a hotly contested political question, outside the economist’s remit (at least in her role as scientist rather than citizen). Policies would be explored under multiple social welfare functions, each reflecting the interests and values of different groups of partisans, and political institutions would have to adjudicate conflicting results there. But different social welfare functions can be mapped pretty clearly to conflicting human values. We will learn something about ourselves, perhaps have to fess up something about ourselves, by virtue of the social welfare functions whose champions we adopt. And perhaps seeing so clearly the values implied by different choices will help political systems make choices that better reflect our stated values, our ideals.

Coherent social welfare functions would necessarily incorporate cardinal, not ordinal, individual welfare functions. Those cardinal functions could not be fully determined by the results of strictly ordinal positive economics, though they might be defined consistently with those results. Their forms and cardinalities would structure how we make tradeoffs between individuals along dimensions of consumption and risk.

What if they get those tradeoffs “wrong”? What if, for example, we weight individual utilities equally, but one of us is the famous “utility monster“, whose subjective experience of joy and grief is so great and wide that, in God’s accounting, the rest of our trivial pleasures and pains would hardly register? How dare we arrogate to ourselves the power to measure and weigh one individual’s happiness against some other?

In any context outside of economics it would be unsurprising that the word “normative” conjures other words, words like “obligation” or “social expectation”. Contra the simplistic assumption of exogenous and stable preferences, the societies we inhabit quite obviously shape and condition both the preferences that we subjectively experience and the preferences it is legitimate to express in our behavior. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether “utility monsters” exist, and it doesn’t matter that the intensities of our subjective experiences are unobservable and incommensurable. Social theories do not merely describe human beings. Tacitly or explicitly, as they become widely held, they organize our perceptions and shape our behavior. They become descriptively accurate when we are able, and can be made willing, to perform them. And only then.

So the positive and the normative must always be in dialogue. A normative social theory, whether expressed as a social welfare function or written in a holy scripture, lives always in tension with the chaotic, path-dependent predilections of the humans whose behavior it is intended to order. On the one hand, we are not constrained (qua traditional welfare economics) by the positive. Our normative theories can change how people behave, along with the summaries of behavior that economists refer to as “preferences”. But if we try to impose a normative theory too out of line with the historically shaped preferences and incentives of those it would govern, our norms will fail to take. Our project of structuring a “good” society (under the values we choose, however arbitrarily) will fail. The humans may try to perform our theory or they may explicitly rebel, but they won’t manage it. Performativity gives us some latitude, but positive facts about human behavior — susceptibility to incentives, requirements that behavior be socially reinforced, etc. — impose constraints. Over a short time horizon, we may be unable to optimize a social welfare function that reflects our ideals, because we are incapable or unwilling to behave in the ways that would require. Intertemporal utility functions are a big deal in positive economics. The analog in normative economics should be dynamic social welfare functions, that converge over time to the values we wish would govern us, while making near-term concessions to the status quo and our willingness and capacity to perform our ideals. (The rate and manner of convergence would themselves be functions of contestable values constrained by practicalities.)

This performativity stuff sounds very postmodern and abstract, but it shouldn’t. It impinges on lots of live controversies. For example, a few years ago there was the kerfuffle surrounding whether the rich and poor consume such different baskets of goods that we should impute different inflation rates to them. Researchers Christian Broda and John Romalis argued that the inflation rate of the rich was higher than that of the poor, and so growth in real income inequality was overstated. I thought that dumb, since the rich always have the option of substituting the cheaper goods bought buy the poor into their consumption basket. Scott Winship pointed out the to-him dispositive fact that, empirically, they seem not to substitute. In fact, if you read the paper, the researchers estimate different utility functions for different income groups, treating rich and poor as though they were effectively distinct species. If we construct a social welfare function in which individual welfares were represented by the distinct utility functions estimated by Broda and Romalis, if in the traditional manner we let their (arguable) characterization of the positive determine the normative, we might find their argument unassailable. The goods the poor buy might simply not enter into the utility functions of the rich, so the option to substitute would be worthless. If we took this social welfare function seriously, we might be compelled, for example, to have the poor make transfers to the rich if the price of caviar rises too steeply. Alternatively, if we let the normative impose an obligation to perform, and if we want our social welfare function to reflect the value that “all men are created equal”, we might reject the notion of embedding different individual welfare functions for rich and poor into our social welfare function and insist on a common (nonhomothetic) function, in which case the option to substitute hot dogs for caviar would necessarily reflect a valuable benefit to the wealthy. But, we’d have to be careful. If our imposed ideal of a universal individual welfare function is not a theory our rich could actually perform — if it turns out that the rich would in fact die before substituting hot dogs for caviar — then our idealism might prove counterproductive with respect to other ideals, like the one that people shouldn’t starve. Positive economics serves as a poor basis for normative economics. But neither can positive questions be entirely ignored. [Please see update.]

I’ve given an example where a normative egalitarianism might override claims derived from positive investigations. That’s comfortable for me, and perhaps many of my readers. But there are, less comfortably, situations where it might be best for egalitarian ideals to be tempered by facts on the ground. Or not. There are no clean or true answers to these questions. What a normative economics can and should do is pose them clearly, reify different sets of values and compromises into social welfare functions, and let the polity decide. (Of course as individuals and citizens, we are free to advocate as well as merely explore. But not under the banner of a “value neutral science”.)

This series on welfare economics was provoked by a discussion of the supply and demand diagrams that lie at the heart of every Introductory Economics course, diagrams in which areas of “surplus” are interpreted as welfare-relevant quantities. I want to end there too. Throughout this series, using settled economics, we developed the tools by which to understand that those diagrams are, um, problematic. Surplus is incommensurable between people and so is meaningless when derived from market, rather than individual, supply and demand curves. Potential compensation of “losers” by “winners” is not a reasonable criterion by which to judge market allocations superior to other allocations: It does not form an ordering of outcomes. Claims that ill-formed surplus somehow represents a resource whose maximization enables redistribution ex post are backwards: Under the welfare theorems, redistribution must take place prior to market allocation to avoid Pareto inferior outcomes. As I said last time, the Introductory Economics treatment is a plain parade of fallacies.

You might, think, then, that I’d advocate abandoning those diagrams entirely. I don’t. All I want is a set of caveats added. The diagrams are redeemable if we assume that all individuals have similar wealth, that they share the similar indirect utility with respect to wealth while their detailed consumption preferences might differ, and the value of the goods being transacted is small relative to the size of market participants’ overall budget. Under these assumptions (and only under these assumptions), if we interpret indirect utilities as summable welfare functions, consumer and producer surplus become (approximately) commensurable across individuals, and the usual Econ 101 catechism holds. Students should learn that the economics they are taught is a special case — the economics of a middle class society. They should understand that an equitable distribution is prerequisite to the version of capitalism they are learning, that the conclusions and intuitions they develop become dangerously unreliable as the dispersion of wealth and income increases.

Why not just throw the whole thing away? Writing on economics education, Brad DeLong recently, wonderfully, wrote, “modern neoclassical economics is in fine shape as long as it is understood as the ideological and substantive legitimating doctrine of the political theory of possessive individualism.” An ideological and substantive legitimating doctrine is precisely what the standard Introductory Economics course is. The reason “Econ 101″ is such a mainstay of political discussions, and such a lightning rod for controversy, is because it offers a compelling, intuitive, and apparently logical worldview that stays with students, sometimes altering viewpoints and behavior for a lifetime. For a normative theory to be effective, people must be able to internalize it and live it. Simplicity and coherence are critical, not for parsimony, but for performativity. “Econ 101″ is a proven winner at that. If students understand that they are learning the “physics” of an egalitarian market economy, the theory is intellectually defensible and, from my value-specific perspective, normatively useful. If it is taught without that caveat (and others, see DeLong’s piece), the theory is not defensible intellectually or morally.

It would be nice if students were also taught they were learning a performative normative theory, a thing that is true in part because they make it true by virtue of how they behave after having been taught it. But perhaps that would be too much to ask.

---

Update: Scott Winship writes to let me know that some doubt has been cast on the Broda/Romalis differential inflation research; it may be mistaken on its own terms. But the controversy is still a nice example of the different conclusions one draws when normative inferences are based solely on positive claims drawn from past behavior versus when normative ideas are imposed and expected to condition behavior.

I’m currently reading and enjoying the book Latin Alive: The Survival of Latin in English and the Romance Languages by Joseph B. Solodow. For example, here’s the premise from Chapter 9 (When Words Collide: Conflict and Resolution in the Lexicon): 

In outline, every story of words in conflict is the same. At a given time in the history of the language it happens that more than one word is available to express a certain notion – both ignem and focum, for instance, or both aurem and auriculam. It does not matter whether the two terms are exact synonyms (they never really are) or just loosely associated with each other, nor whether one or the other is well established in the language or but newly coined.

Regardless of history or semantics, the two words have at a certain point come to be regarded as equivalent. The decisive moment in the story of words in conflict is the elimination of one in favor of the other. One word is victorious and continues in the language, while the other drops out of use. Or sometimes they continue to co-exist, although usually with different meanings.

For example, some words changed to as to be more regular in the daughter languages: 

The stories of the Italian and Spanish words for “sister” and “brother.” The Latin terms were sororem and fratrem, both third declension nouns, which passed smoothly into French as soeur and frère. Now, both Italian and Spanish tended to preserve a pattern from Latin whereby nouns ending in -a were feminine and those in -o were masculine. (The weakening and dropping of final vowels in French erased this handy pattern of gender distinctiveness.) Examples are Italian zia, zio, Spanish tía, tío “aunt” and “uncle,” and Italian nonna, nonno, Spanish abuela, abuelo “grandmother” and “grandfather.”

Conformity to the pattern was desirable with another clearly gendered pair, “sister” and “brother,” and the two languages did achieve this, although by different means. Italian resorted to diminutives, not of the same word, but clearly marked for gender nonetheless: sorella “sister” and fratello “brother.” Italian was urged along this path by the fact that frate had early come to be used for “brother” in the religious sense: thus, fratello not only ended in -o, but also maintained a useful distinction.

The Spanish words for “sister” and “brother” originated in phrases – sororem germanam, fratrem germanum– in which the adjective germanum “genuine” indicated sharing the same mother and father: “full sister, full brother.” The phrases got shortened to just the adjectives, with the result that the Modern Spanish words are hermana and hermano, a contrasting pair of terms neatly marked for gender.

Others, on the other hand, changed to become less regular, by substitution of longer synonyms for monosyllables that were no longer distinctive enough:  

The very common (and irregular) Latin verb for “to go” was ire, many of the forms of which were monosyllables and hence vulnerable. That it was precisely monosyllabism, and nothing else, which speakers and writers found objectionable emerges unmistakably from a set of observations made and reported by Einar Lofstedt, the great Swedish scholar of Late and Vulgar Latin ¨
(1880–1955). He contrasts the use of ire with that of the verb vadere, also meaning “to go,” all of whose forms are at least two syllables long.

Vadere, though found widely, was not nearly so often used by writers of Classical Latin. In regard to the Vulgate (the Latin translation of the Bible made by Jerome in
the late fourth century and expressed in every-day language), Lofstedt points out that the text never once has it “he, she goes,” or is “you (singular) go,” or
i “go! (imperative singular),” but instead has vadit (21 times), vadis (10), and vade (181). In contrast, it has ite “go! (imperative plural)” 68 times and the corresponding vadite not once. The conclusion is inescapable: Jerome never used the verb ire in his translation when it would have been a one-syllable form, putting vadere always in its place, but he did use ire otherwise. (Vadere is the source of invade, literally “to go into, against.”) […]

During the centuries since then, ire has nearly disappeared from the Romance languages (but it does still serve to form some future tenses: French j’irai, Spanish iré “I will go”). Its place has been taken variously by vadere (Italian vado, French je vais, Spanish voy “I go”), by the somewhat mysterious andare (Italian andiamo “let us go”), and by the puzzling alare (French allons “let us go”; English alley comes from French allée “path,” originally “a going”).

The earlier chapters were more review for me, since I’ve studied Latin, but if you haven’t I think that they would be a good introduction to the topic or even to descriptive grammar in general, since English has inherited much from the Latin grammatical tradition. It may be because I’ve studied all these languages to varying degrees, but I’m really enjoying this, and I think anyone with an interest in etymology or exposure to one or more Romance languages would as well. A fair bit is available at the Google Books preview, or wherever you normally get books. 

Victor Mair has an extremely interesting post up at the Log:

[...]I’ve long been intrigued by the fact that the number of basic morphemes in Sinitic is roughly comparable to the number of roots in Proto-Indo-European (PIE). I wondered whether this was purely a coincidence or a reflection of some fundamental feature of language and the human brain. So I started to look at other language families to see whether they too had a similar amount of root morphemes.

As I gathered and examined data, they seemed to confirm my initial impression that the essential etyma of many languages amount to approximately 1,000-2,000, with most falling at around 1,200-1,500. Wanting to secure more precise and reliable evidence, I asked colleagues who are specialists in various fields to share their expertise.

He quotes John Huehnergard on Semitic, Philip Jones on Sumerian, Michael Witzel on Nostratic and PIE, Allan Bomhard on Nostratic, John Colarusso on Caucasian languages, and Don Ringe, J. P. Mallory, and Douglas Adams on PIE, all very interesting, and himself discusses Sinitic, concluding:

[...]I think that the fact that the quantity of basic building blocks of various languages is roughly comparable is not merely coincidental, but may have something to do with the cognitive makeup of the brain. That is to say, at the bottom limit, for a language to become an organic, functioning entity, it needs to have a sufficient amount of constituent, core etyma from which a working vocabulary may be derived. At the other end of the scale, there seems to be an upper limit to the number of primary conceptual categories that the mind is capable of processing.

It seems that, in general, there are roughly 1,200-1,500 root concepts from which all others are generated. This appears to hold for many language families. Inventories of core etyma with a magnitude that are much over 2,000 or much under 1,000 are probably the result of differing definitions of what constitutes a basic root and how the computations are carried out.

Fascinating stuff, and I look forward to the ensuing discussion!

Palm trees and a photographer cast shadows on the ocean’s surface near Tahiti Island, Polynesia, May 1996.Photograph by Jodi Cobb, National Geographic Creative

These glass and wood tables made by Greg Klassen to resemble rivers and lakes are completely ridiculous and impractical but I love them.

Alas, they don't come cheap. (via colossal)

Tags: Greg Klassen

Watch actress Siobhan Thompson do 17 different British and Irish accents:

Much better done and more entertaining than this tour of British accents I featured back in April. (via @Atul_Gawande)

Tags: language   video

An open-and-shut case from FiveThirtyEight: Lionel Messi is far and away the best player in football. Ronaldo is the only player who is close and he's not even all that close.

By now I've studied nearly every aspect of Messi's game, down to a touch-by-touch level: his shooting and scoring production; where he shoots from; how often he sets up his own shots; what kind of kicks he uses to make those shots; his ability to take on defenders; how accurate his passes are; the kind of passes he makes; how often he creates scoring chances; how often those chances lead to goals; even how his defensive playmaking compares to other high-volume shooters.

And that's just the stuff that made it into this article. I arrived at a conclusion that I wasn't really expecting or prepared for: Lionel Messi is impossible.

It's not possible to shoot more efficiently from outside the penalty area than many players shoot inside it. It's not possible to lead the world in weak-kick goals and long-range goals. It's not possible to score on unassisted plays as well as the best players in the world score on assisted ones. It's not possible to lead the world's forwards both in taking on defenders and in dishing the ball to others. And it's certainly not possible to do most of these things by insanely wide margins.

But Messi does all of this and more.

The piece is chock-full of evidential graphs of how much of an outlier Messi is among his talented peers:

One of my favorite things that I've written about sports is how Lionel Messi rarely dives, which allows him to keep the advantage he has over the defense.

Tags: Lionel Messi   soccer   sports

Sand Dunes near Boulogne-sur-Mer, France (c. 1870) by Joséphine Bowes.

Dunes. Having visited the sand dunes that run along the French and Belgian coast it’s notable how much dune art has taken them as a subject. Belgian Symbolist Léon Spilliaert returned to them frequently, and managed to invest the littoral with a greater sense of mystery than many of his contemporaries.

Dune Landscape (1911) by Piet Mondrian.

Girls on a Dune (1913) by Léon Spilliaert.

Dunes, Oceano (1936) by Edward Weston.

Dune (1961) by Alexander MacKenzie.

Pale Dunes (1970) by Ronnie Landfield.

[Image: The "Blythe Intaglios," via Google Maps].

After reading an article about the "Blythe geoglyphs"—huge, 1,000-year old images carved into the California desert north of Blythe, near the border with Arizona—I got to looking around on Google Maps more or less at random and found what looked like a ghost town in the middle of nowhere, close to an old mine.

Turns out, it was the abandoned industrial settlement of Midland, California—and it's been empty for nearly half a century, deliberately burned to the ground in 1966 when the nearby mine was closed.

[Image: Midland, California, via Google Maps].

What's so interesting about this place—aside from the exposed concrete foundation pads now reused as platforms for RVs, or the empty streets forming an altogether different kind of geoglyph, or even the obvious ease with which one can get there, simply following the aptly named Midland Road northeast from Blythe—is the fact that the town was built for workers at the gypsum mine, and that the gypsum extracted from the ground in Midland was then used as artificial snow in many Hollywood productions.

[Image: Midland, California, via Google Maps].

As the L.A. Times reported back in 1970—warning its readers, "Don't Go To Midland—It's Gone"—the town served as the mineral origin for Hollywood's simulated weather effects.

"Midland was started in 1925 as a tent city," the paper explained, "with miners in the middle of the Mojave Desert digging gypsum out of the Little Marias to meet the demands of movie studios. All the winter scenes during the golden age of Hollywood were filmed with 'snowflakes' from Midland."

[Image: The abandoned streets of Midland, former origin of Hollywood's artificial snow; photo via CLUI].

Like some strange, artificial winter being mined from the earth and scattered all over the dreams of cinemagoers around the world, Midland's mineral snow had all the right qualities without any of the perishability or cold.

See, for example, this patent for artificial snow, filed in 1927 and approved in 1930, in which it is explained how gypsum can be dissolved by a specific acid mix to produce light, fluffy flakes perfect for the purposes of winter simulation. Easy to produce, with no risk of melting.

[Image: Midland, California, via Google Maps].

I've long been fascinated by the artificial snow industry—the notion of an industrially controlled climate-on-demand, spraying out snowflakes as if from a 3D printer, is just amazing to me—as well as with the unearthly world of mines, caves, and all things underground, but I had not really ever imagined that these interests might somehow come together someday, wherein fake glaciers and peaceful drifts of pure white snow were actually something scraped out of the planet by the extraction industry.

As if suggesting the plot of a deranged, Dr. Seussian children's book, the idea that winter is something we pull from a mine in the middle of the California desert and then scatter over the warm Mediterranean cities of the coast is perhaps all the evidence you need that life is always already more dreamlike than you had previously believed possible.

(Very vaguely related: See also BLDGBLOG's earlier coverage of California City).