15February2008
Posted by Sara under: Reviews; Internet Timewasters; fiction.
A free online comic by Warren Ellis? I was curious, and the first panel made me even more so. The teaser, however, promises pretty standard fare. In a mere four panels it manages to summarize why feminist readers get so pissed off at most comics:
Panel 1: Up close body shot.
Panel 2: Up close boob shot.
Panel 3: The tantalizing promise that this one will be different, that we’ll have a strong yet complex female lead.
Panel 4: That strong female superhero is depicted as abnormally (for a superhero) vulnerable, more Rogue than Superman. And this vulnerability is eroticized by being paired with more gratuitous boob and crotch.
17January2008
Posted by Sara under: Reviews; non fiction.
I’ve given up on considering Basic Economics as the economics primer that it purports to be and just reading it as the bible of the free market that it really is. (Well, I guess Wealth of Nations would be the bible of the free market, and this is more like one of those interprative bibles that are marketed to specific groups, like teenagers, explaining how certain verses fit their lives.)
It’s been helpful to me in my thinking to have someone so clearly spell out the attraction of the free market and what the free market should look like when it’s working optimally. Typically, we use the reality of Western economics to make assumptions about free markets, but Western economies are not truly free markets, so pundits can always retort that the problem is not capitalism but our inability to adhere to the codes of capitalism. Here things are laid bare, presented in their most ideal form, the invisible hand of the market made visible.
Things that struck me:
The (relatively new) study of economics is the business of businesses. Businesses are more invested in the study of economics than consumers, which creates an inequity in the marketplace. The market is the meeting of willing buyers and willing sellers; the study of economics and business management have taught the sellers how to maximize their gain, while the buyers are left with consumer reports magazines and coopted media to do their work for them. The most basic rule of selling a product is this: try to create the maximum return for the least amount of input. It seems quite obvious to us that a seller wants yo to spend as little on producing and marketing the product as possible so that the profits are larger.
And yet, consumers do not follow the same practice. Now, consumer do try to get the most product for their limited money, but “product” is not what consumers really want and need. What they want is, to simplify, more happiness and less anxiety and pain. So consumers should be looking at the marketplace and thinking, how can I spend less and gain more in happiness? Since economics has been the dominion of businesses, however, even the consumer ends up thinking of what would be good for a business, not a consumer. How do I spend more, the consumer wonders, without even considering what they’re spending that money for. Instead being able to participate in transactions on the marketplace becomes the goal, instead of getting something of value out of those transactions.
The less input for more output rule is not considered by consumers. We input 8 hours a day no matter what, because that’s what’s typical. It does not matter if we don’t like our jobs or if we only need 5 hours a day to get what we want. And since we already input the work to get the money, we feel obligated to spend the money, just to justify the time we spent at work or because of some vauge duty to “help the economy.”
Another thing I noticed is how old-fashioned some of the talk of the free market is. Economics, as Sowell reminds the reader again and again in the book, is the study of the distribution of scarce resources. Sowell defends the need for a competitive economy with the fact of scarcity; as long as there is not enough of something, we will need to compete for it. Some resources will always be scarce, but some need not be. We no longer, for instance, live in a time of scarcity as far as food is concerned. One statistic that is bandied about when discussing world hunger is how according to a 1997 study, 78% of malnourished children live in countries with food surpluses. We need to change the definition of economics then to “the study of the distribution of resources.” How do we adequately distribute the non-scarce resources? And what economic system will displace competition in a post-scarcity world?
Those last two questions are actually at the crux of my desire to investigate economics in the first place. It’s time we start imaging a system to cope with modern problems, rather than relying on 18th and 19th century philosophies based on a social systems completely foreign to what we have today.