View From The Couch - 30/Oct/2015

The World Series Game 2

For the first time in a decade, I was able to sit down with my father and watch the World Series. The post-season used to be more fun in the late 1990s and the early 2000s when the Yankees were there almost inevitably, and with good teams even if they didn't win. This year's post-season didn't work out well for the Yankees who were one-and-done as they bowed out to the Astros, who then lost to the Royals. What can I say, if you don't hit, you can't win.

Anyway, it occurred to me that there aren't too many World Series left where I could sit down with my father and take in the game. Who knows what my circumstances will be next year, and having just turned a venerable eighty, there are far more MLB post-seasons in the rear mirror than ahead for my father. It was just good old family stuff I've been missing out on because I've been at the Events Lighting company all these years. It's nicety get off the carousel of work and experience family life.

Game 2 was notable for Johnny Cueto pitching a complete game 2-hitter for the Royals. The first guy to do so since Greg Maddux in 1995. The Mets looked like they were never going to hit off Cueto. They also looked terrible in the field. The Yankees outplayed the Mets this year and the hallmark of those games were the errors the Mets made when put in the crunch, which allowed the Yankees to get on top. The Mets didn't look to have improved with the glove since the Subway series, so it's really not looking good for them as they fell to 0-2.

A 2-hitter is a terrible thing, given the context where you're botching it up in the field. Curtis Granderson looked out of sorts with the bat; David Wright looked like he couldn't hit a watermelon travelling at 92mph; Yoenis Cespedes looked like he was drowning in a deep slump; and Daniel Murphy who might be the Mets' hottest hitter right now, went 2 strike outs, 2 walks, and no hits. What can I say, if you don't hit, you can't win.

Sort Of Unrelated...

I went to see Fleetwood Mac on the weekend with Walk-Off HBP. At some point during the concert he offered the opinion that some of the songs were a little too sexy and jarring to be sung by a 70year old (Stevie Nicks is actually 67, but you get the drift). I offered up the counter opinion that Fleetwood Mac were like Wilmer Flores, the shortstop for the Mets. Quite serviceable but it's not like he's A-Rod or Jeter or Nomar. Fleetwood Mac are quite a serviceable pop rock band, but it's not like they're Led Zep or The Who or Pink Floyd.

I tried writing up a crit for Fleetwood mac, but couldn't be bothered finishing it. Ultimately, I feel I've got them well pegged as the Wilmer Flores of rock music.

From The Reading List

I'm still working my way through Piketty's 'Capital in the 21st Century' on my Kindle. It's actually too big a book to have on Kindle in my opinion, as it is hard to reference multiple pages on the fly, unlike a physical book.

I'm also muddling through 'Who Owns The Future' by Jaron Lanier but I've also picked up 'Ill Fares The Land' by Tony Judt. Amazingly, all three of these books cover the rise of the post-war middle class as a historic anomaly. Piketty demonstrates that it was indeed anomalous through figures; Lanier arrives at it through the weight of anecdotal evidence he has gathered, and Judt goes through the philosophical ructions that led to heavily socialist programs to limit wealth disparity after the two world wars.

While it may be the zeitgeist that we are discussing wealth disparity and inequality in a way we haven't up to now. The Reaganomic and Thatcherite economic program of deregulation and privatisation have essentially undone the efforts of the post-World War II thinkers, politicians an institutions, so it insult natural to see a return to the sort o wealth disparity and inequality we saw in the 1920s. Perhaps  this is even why we've seen TV productions such as 'Boardwalk Empire' which brought the disparity in the late 1910s and early 1920s into sharp focus, as well as 'Mad Men' which delineates the pinnacle of society where there was much less wealth disparity and inequality, albeit with terrible, inexcusable sexism.

It may not seem to be an immediately solvable problem, but if politicians don't address these problems soon, they're going to make conditions for the rise of extremist ideologies once again. Dare I say we may even be seeing it already, given that we did elect Tony Abbott to be prime minister, and even after having been removed, he's proven himself to be ideologically indistinguishable from being a flat out fascist.

The Lanier book is particularly instructive in telling us that the creative destruction of capitalism as described by Schumpeter doesn't reconstitute itself in a more egalitarian society, but that it reorganises itself to suit ever smaller numbers of people with the accumulated wealth concentrating in ever fewer people. The Judt book is a little more disturbing in that it dissects the ideological roots of economic thought that has led us to our present day and it is clear that the welfare state that gave rise to a middle class could only offer one-size-fits-all solution, when in fact the middle class got accustomed to being consumers and consumers necessarily demand choice. In the case politics, this descended into the fragmenting New Left of the 1970s centred around a misunderstanding of Marxism and the proliferation of identity politics. meanwhile the return of the Right is merely a self-justification of those with wealth to justify their disproportionate wealth built on the destruction of the middle class.

In other words, the futures bleak, the past was bleak and the present is like a meatloaf going cold on the table. Piketty's massive tome merely gives us the numbers on just how bleak the past was and why, and the likely bleakness of the future based on the slowly dying consensus of today.