The Inauspicous Beginnings of Another Week in Muncie

 I got out and about yesterday. I fixed the problems with Xfinity, had brunch at Jersey Mike's and shopped at Aldi's.

I had to schlep my groceries from University to Riverside, a walk about 4 short blocks, and that did me in for most of the day. 

It was a gloomy day and humid. It was one of those Indiana's days when it's like living in a warm, damp sponge.

I slept most of the afternoon and into the evening. Then I could not sleep. I watched a bit more of Penny Dreadful. I had seen most of it years ago and am finishing it up. I like its variations on the idea of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It also made an interesting comment on Frankenstein, that he could create but had no interest in nurture. There is something to think about in that; especially in light of Mary Shelley being Frankenstein's creator.

I went down to the convenience store when I finally felt the energy to move about. A blue, clear sky above, a coolness in the wind, and a pleasant deficit of humidity.

The time since has been spent on reading online articles and answering emails. I do not feel like I have the energy to work on a short story that I have in the works. Perhaps the article.  

CRAFT rejected “After Making Landfall”:

Thank you for sending "After Making Landfall" to CRAFT for consideration. We appreciate the opportunity to review your work. At this time, however, we must say no to this piece. Best of luck placing this one elsewhere soon.

Best,

The Editors 

I did not realize the connection between 9:45 p.m. update: In Madison County: 'Flood cleanup kits,' microbursts and a Fall Creek crest (heraldbulletin.com), One American dinner staple faces a historic shortage with no quick fix (Fox Business) and White River cresting around Martinsville | Monday A.M. River Update Across Indiana (wthr.com) until today. Climate change.

There was some debate during the group session last week about what was meant by a hundred year flood, and I learned with were all wrong. U.S. Geological Survey's The 100-Year Flood explains:

"100-year floods can happen 2 years in a row"

Statistical techniques, through a process called frequency analysis, are used to estimate the probability of the occurrence of a given precipitation event. The recurrence interval is based on the probability that the given event will be equaled or exceeded in any given year. For example, assume there is a 1 in 50 chance that 6.60 inches of rain will fall in a certain area in a 24-hour period during any given year. Thus, a rainfall total of 6.60 inches in a consecutive 24-hour period is said to have a 50-year recurrence interval. Likewise, using a frequency analysis (Interagency Advisory Committee on Water Data, 1982) there is a 1 in 100 chance that a streamflow of 15,000 cubic feet per second (ft³/s) will occur during any year at a certain streamflow-measurement site. Thus, a peak flow of 15,000 ft³/s at the site is said to have a 100-year recurrence interval. Rainfall recurrence intervals are based on both the magnitude and the duration of a rainfall event, whereas streamflow recurrence intervals are based solely on the magnitude of the annual peak flow.

Ten or more years of data are required to perform a frequency analysis for the determination of recurrence intervals. Of course, the more years of historical data the better—a hydrologist will have more confidence on an analysis of a river with 30 years of record than one based on 10 years of record.

Integrity has been so diminished of late but I was shocked by Capitalism, as Told by Its Enemies - Phillip W. Magness, Caleb Petitt (The Dispatch). No one is perfect, no human being sees all; therefore, intellectual integrity requires us to admit as much. Mr. Magness and Mr. Pettit provide what such integrity should look like:

A more balanced entry on capitalism for the SEP could have offered a constructive assessment of this subject, its history, and the contemporary state of scholarship around it. Such an entry could still have room for critics in the Marxist and many other socialist traditions, but they would not have the disproportionate dominance found in Cordelli’s piece. Instead, a better entry might include serious engagement with the Scottish Enlightenment precursors to the emergence of market capitalism in the late 18th century, with references to David Hume’s work on trade and currency, as well as something more than superficial references to Adam Smith. 

It might also discuss how the ideas we call “capitalism” came to supplant an older mercantilist economic order that used government policies to steer an economy for nationalistic objectives. It might also discuss the period of both political and philosophical contestation between the “capitalist” and “Marxian communist” worlds following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and culminating in the collapse of the latter in 1991. It could discuss in greater depth the theoretical contributions of institutionalist economists like Ronald Coase, Oliver Williamson, and Douglass North in the mid-20th century around the theory of a market economy. It might mention Deirdre McCloskey’s work on the Great Enrichment as a positive argument for what we colloquially refer to as capitalism. And it might explore the tensions between these and other theorists of market capitalism. As it stands, this rich and complex academic literature receives nary a mention beyond a few passing citations.

Since capitalism is fundamentally an economic concept, one could reasonably expect to see mainstream economic voices discussed, and competently so, by someone versed in economic theory. There would be a clear description of how profits work both as signals of demand and incentives for entrepreneurship, how competition between firms disciplines market actors, how market prices make economic calculation possible by signaling the relative scarcity of goods in a common denominator, and how government policies contribute to the creation of monopolies. Marxist and socialist critiques of capitalism from the far left would also be balanced with mainstream economic critiques of socialism. Early in the 20th century, there was famously a debate among economists over whether socialist central planners were capable of engaging in economic calculation. The economists who argued against the possibility of socialist calculation ultimately won the debate—though one would not know this from reading Cordelli’s entry.

Welfarist arguments for capitalism would not be confined to a single paragraph, and would describe in detail how free-market capitalism has been responsible for lifting the world out of poverty. The way that capitalism incentivizes entrepreneurship, and the role entrepreneurs play in arbitrage and the creation of new goods and services, would play a more important role than the entry’s single paragraph on Joseph Schumpeter, the first economist to make entrepreneurship central to the understanding of economic development and change. 

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s unwillingness to select an author for the entry on capitalism who could provide a charitable or even neutral assessment of the concept is ultimately unscholarly. In the 20th century, socialism resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people, and capitalism and free markets were the critical factors for lifting billions out of poverty, and yet it is socialism that received the positive encyclopedia entry and capitalism that garnered the hate. Such imbalances could only emerge from an academic environment in which an ideological echo chamber supplants rigorous peer review, and the fashionable socialist perspectives of the professoriate lead it to mistake bad caricatures of a market economy for descriptive fact.

Humility requires we acknowledge our failings.

sch