Name That Tune

So I walk into the kitchen and there is young Ms. McMenamin, aged 12, doing some nonsense free-form rapping about squirrels or whatever. It was the tune that caught my attention: dum-dum-de-dum/dum-dum-de-dum/de-dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum.
I asked her if she knew what the tune was called, and she searched her memory and came up with a rather hesitant,"..  something about trees?".

"Well... sort of", I say:" ... but there are other words as well". A veil of blankness descends.  I called her 14 year old brother and asked him the same question only to get the same blank response. Now this depresses me, as he is by far and away the most politically aware kid of his age that I know. He wrote to Searchlight magazine asking to do his work experience next year FFS. But, no, he didn't know the words to that tune either.

Of course, my kids are not on their own: I see that whole conference halls full of people who might be expected to know the words need laminated cards to remind them. But when I was 12 or 14 everybody knew them. & I mean everybody, not just those who identified with the words in any way.

 I find it desperately sad to see something slipping away from popular cultural memory. It's not that I think either the words or the tune itself are that wonderful per se, but the idea that they're losing their status as widespread cultural reference points,  something almost like a nursery rhyme, obscurely upsets me. Even when one gets to the stage of doubting , even distrusting, any simplistic identification with 'flags and banners' of any kind, including musical ones, one has to be able to know which 'flags and banners' one is distrusting, or making ironic reference to, or whatever. 

So the kids are on a programme of 'repeat after me till you get it word perfect'. The rest of you can make do with this. 




 

Like e-Bay - but Evil

The economic crisis has led to a sudden and massive collapse in the credibility of previous theories of benign, self correcting free markets and problem free globalisation: for the Masters of our Universe it's like running over an intellectual cliff and looking down to discover there is nothing holding you up.

One of the interesting effects of this is how little shards of knowledge which have always been floating about in obscure bits of academic literature get picked up and re-examined. A new significance is suddenly found in ideas and experimentally grounded data which once, because they didn't 'fit' the prevailing theory, were sidelined as curiosities. This, of course, is classic Kuhnian sociology of knowledge: a paradigm shift occurs. The most obvious way in which this is happening is the sudden and world wide rehabilitation of Keynesianism, 'crass' or otherwise.

But it's not just the economic foundations of previous macro economic norms which are beginning to fail. People are starting to look again at stuff which undermines the very idea of a narrowly rational 'economic man', who bases their decisions on the marginal utility of this or that good or service. It seems Gran was right: most of us really do act as though 'a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush'. This is apparently called 'the endowment effect'.

But it would be a mistake to imagine that paradigm shifts work their way through in the supposedly disinterested cloisters of academe. 'Practical men', as Keynes might have it, may or may not be the 'slaves of long dead economists', but they also create the world which Brahmin intellectuals like John Maynard attempt to corral into some kind of intellectual order. So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that some bastard has discovered a way of making horrendous amounts of money from 'the endowment effect'. Jeff explains how it works and describes it as,

" ...about as close to pure, distilled evil in a business plan as I've ever seen........ It is almost brilliantly evil, in a sort of evil genius way."

Via Marginal Revolution