BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-08-07 Mo
… Biden’s anti-Global Warming industrial policy after one year; & Scialabba, Burke, Kedrosky, & Wallace-Wells on hopes for aristocratic populism, how tech does not help organizations use information, þis automation wave, & þe rapidly rising costs of global warming…
MUST-READ: Þe “Spartan Mirage” in Full Bloom:
What sources did Plutarch have, writing as he did in the late 00’s, that we do not, that gave him such confidence in this interpretation of Spartan history?:
Plutarch: Life of Lycurgus: ‘for fourteen generations after him not one of the kings [of Sparta] made any constitutional changes, until the time of Agis the son of Archidamus…. It was during Agis’ reign that money first poured into Sparta, and along with money greed and admiration of wealth assaulted the land. This was Lysander’s fault: even though he was impervious to money himself, it was because he brought back gold and silver from the war, flouting Lycurgus’ laws, that the country became infected with love of wealth and with luxury. Previously, under Lycurgus’ laws… with no more than a single skytale and a thin cloak Sparta ruled Greece with the willing consent of its inhabitants, dissolving unjust power blocks and overthrowing tyrannies in various states, mediating in wars, putting an end to civil strife-and managing to do all this often without any military intervention at all, but by sending a solitary envoy….
All this shows that Sparta had lawfulness and justice to spare…. People tended not to ask the Lacedaemonians to send them ships or money or hoplites, but a single Spartiate leader, and when they got him they treated him with the kind of respect and awe that Gylippus received from the Sicilians, Brasidas from the Chalcidians, and Lysander, Callicratidas, and Agesilaus from all the Greeks living in Asia. They called them ‘harmosts’ or imposers of order and discipline on people and rulers everywhere, and they regarded the Spartiate city as a whole as a tutor or teacher of respectable living and stable government…
Plutarch is, usually, not a dumb guy. And he does pick up that there is nothing about mythical Spartan legislature Lykourgos that is not disputed. As I understand the balance of scholarly opinion today, it is that Plutarch’s Lykourgos and Plutarch’s Sparta are most likely what the Sparta of -380 or so wished they had been and were, and that Thermopylai was at least as likely to have been the spur to the creation of the full-blown Spartan Mirage as to have been a result of a Spartan culture and society preëxisting before -500 that was traditionally attributed to Lykourgos. Or perhaps the Lykourgan Mirage was created between -245 and -192 as Agis IV, Kleomenes III, and then Nabis attempted to radically transform Sparta by claiming that they were returning it to the roots that had made it so powerful between -550 and -350.
But after his initial concession that everything about Lykourgos is disputed, Plutarch then goes all-in. Why? I do not know. I do have some guesses:
First, Plutarch is not what we call a historian but rather primarily a moralist—a neostoic life-coach, perhaps—and a biographer. (Or, rather, before our day historians were primarily moralists, storytellers, and biographers rather than “historians”. Hence while he has a desire to paint a consistent picture of Lykourgos and contrast him with the Roman King Numa Pompilius, it is not within his purview to acquire too deeply into factual accuracy as opposed to a sense of appropriateness. He is painting a picture of ethical and practical lessons drawn from the vibrant and chaotic fabric of human life—studies of character and virtue.
Second, recall Plutarch’s audience: upper class Græco-Romans in the age of the Antonine Dynasty, under the rule of the Emperor Trajan. Plutarch’s readers would have seen both Numa Pompilius and Lykourgos as establishing systems that (a) stood the test of time, and (b) punched well above their weight, and a good deal of that was that under the institutions they were supposed to have built the Republican Roman/Spartan paradigm—discipline, austerity, moral rectitude, and the absence of decadent luxury—flourished. To local notables or to potential players in the Roman aristocracy in the aftermath of the Bad Days of Domitian, how Numa and Lykourgos did it would have been something of great interest. And “did they in fact do it?” was a big side issue. Rome in Trajan’s time was a society that thrived on conquest, grandeur, and wealth that was seen by its élite as having narrowly escaped a situation even worse than Domitian’s tyranny. How to deal with the corruption and moral decay of late-Flavian times would have been on their minds. Numa and Lykurgos offer possible models.
Third, Plutarch offers a critique that might have resonated with his Roman readers, fearful of the future. Sparta’s downfall begins “during Agis’s reign… money… poured into Sparta, and… greed and admiration of wealth assaulted the land. This was Lysander’s fault… because he brought back gold and silver from the war, flouting Lycurgus’ laws…” Plutarch’s rendition of Spartan austerity, discipline, and virtue would have struck a chord as an exemplar of societal organization and as a critique of contemporary societal excesses.
One thing that Plutarch does not address because he does not see it at all is the extent to which stories that false stories the Spartans told became true stories of who they were. After Thermopylai, the Spartans needed to paint over the clusterfuck at the Hot Gates—a Spartan king, 300 full Spartiates, and 4000 Hellenes in total dead, 4000 fleeing, only 1000 visible Persian graves, and a naval victory at Artimesion that should have protected Boiotia and Attike from Persian devastation fatally undermined by land defeat at a pass that it should have been straightforward to hold against a land army so large that it had no freedom of maneuver at all. So they told their stories, and Herodotos picked them up. And thereafter, up to Leuktra, Spartan forces and allies under Brasidas, Gylippos, Archidamos, Lysandros, and Agesilaos seem to have made those stories true to a remarkable extent.
Somebody should, I think, write something about the Spartan army from -470 to -350, the German army from 1866 to 1944, and the U.S. Marine Corps from 1950 on. Thermopylai, the Wars of Friedrich der Grosse, and Guadalcanal as founding stories of mighty heroes that became true for those who then, later on, strove to emulate them.
David Hume wrote somewhere:
Courage… is… most precarious…. If courage be preserved, it must be by discipline, example, and opinion. The tenth legion of Cæsar, and the regiment of Picardy of France… having once entertained a notion that they were the best troops in the service, this very opinion made them really such…
ONE IMAGE: Þe American Music Industry”:
ONE AUDIO: Ezra Klein & Robinson Meyer on Biden’s Anti-Global Warming Industrial Policy After One Year:
<https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-robinson-meyer.html>
The Inflation Reduction Act was the largest piece of climate legislation ever passed in the United States, setting aside hundreds of billions of dollars for decarbonizing the economy. But the money was always just a first step. The fate of the act’s goals hinges on whether those investments can build the energy system of the future — everything from transmission lines and wind farms to electric vehicle factories and green hydrogen hubs.
It’s now been almost a year since the I.R.A.’s passage. So, how’s it going? Are we on track for a decarbonized economy?…
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Angus Deaton: How Misreading Adam Smith Helped Spawn Deaths of Despair: ‘A Nobel Prize–winning economist reflects on the dire consequences of libertarian economics…
Edward Luce: America’s feel-bad Biden boom: ‘The US president must find ways of spreading benefits of economic growth to society as a whole…. A big gap remains between the macroeconomic picture in the US and how Americans are feeling…. Bidenomics fits with future reality: it has the potential to lift middle class income growth. The question is how long it will take for that future to arrive…
Robin Wigglesworth: The global* inflation slowdown: ‘*if you ignore the UK…
Nick Timiraos & Tom Fairless: Why the Drivers of Lower Inflation Matter: ‘Competing effects of central banks, healing supply chains affect recession odds…
Pilita Clark: Working from home is full of surprises: ‘From return to office demands to productivity levels, a lot of what we think we know about remote work is wrong…. Workers are prepared to fight for a benefit that many did not have pre-Covid…. Hybrid working seems to have a zero or slightly positive impact on performance…. [In] the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In all five nations, work from home levels were higher than in other rich, but non-English-speaking countries such as Japan, France and Italy…
Global Warming: Stefan Rahmstorf: ‘Here’s a thread in pictures about the Atlantic overturning circulation #AMOC which is making headlines this week. I’ve studied this topic since 1991 and will show key data and models & some video…
GPT-LLM-ML: Dan Davies: identifying the edges: flies in bottles and other decision makers: ‘At present it seems that the direction AI applications are going in is the opposite one—the use of specialised training data to make models which are better at giving correct answers in specific problem domains. It seems to me that these models, when they fail, will fail hard and will tend to double down on mistakes like a politician…
Plague: Lisa Jarvis: If You Never Got Sick From Covid, Thank Your Genes: ‘Researchers are learning that asymptomatic bouts of the virus are often due to variations in the human genome…. People who carried one copy of a version of… HLA-B*15:01 were more than twice as likely to remain asymptomatic… people who inherited two… were eight times more likely to never suffer symptoms…
Liberty & Democracy: Dan Slater & al.: The Origins of Military Supremacy in Dictatorships: ‘Unless an autocratic regime created the military, it will struggle to control the military…
Neoliberal Order: Patrick Deneen seems to hope for something that never ever was: “Then none was for a party; Then all were for the state;/Then the great man helped the poor, And the poor man loved the great:/Then lands were fairly portioned; Then spoils were fairly sold:/The Romans were like brothers In the brave days of old…” A political program that has that as its aim is, IMHO, highly, highly fantastical:
George Scialabba: How do you purge an elite?: ‘Patrick Deneen’s hostility to liberalism has made him a leading intellectual of the “New Right”. But his aristocratic populism is one that most Americans would rightly reject…. Initially concerned with opposing child labour laws, workmen’s compensation and trade unions, these [neoliberal-to-be] groups shifted into a higher gear to portray the New Deal as “socialism”…. Their efforts were crowned with… the Great Oversimplifier, Ronald Reagan. At which point they began to sabotage the New Deal’s legacy…. Trying to understand the decline of liberalism without reference to this decades-long business-sponsored propaganda blitz would be like trying to understand the decline of literacy without reference to advertising, television or the internet. Liberalism did not fail; it was assassinated by a large and open conspiracy…. To regain our former happy condition, Deneen prescribes “aristocratic populism”…. The new elites will not be irresponsible…. And the many will… be a multi-ethnic, multinational working class, able to constrain and discipline their elites when necessary. It is an appealing picture, though much too lightly sketched…. Modernity has its problems[, and while] Deneen[‘s]… proposed solutions will strike most people as far-fetched or eccentric, but they deserve to be debated…
Techtopia: Say, rather, you need to distinguish between (a) the information that the best self of the supposed head of the putatively command-and-control organization would want to have, (b) the information that the head of a putatively command-and-control organization wants to hear, (c ) the information that the lower bureaucratic layers provide to the top, and (d) the information that the organization viewed as a decision-making and acting entity actually processes and responds to:
Tim Burke: Dare Not to Know: ‘If you haven’t built a strong values-driven culture (for real, not just as p.r. fluffery), better data collection (AI-aided or not) and more transparent communication up and down the hierarchy about what is known isn’t going to help with decision-making…
GPT-LLM-ML: How key a difference is it that in this wave of automation silicon is cheap and both circuit design and program are write-once run-often? It may turn out to make a huge difference indeed:
Paul Kedrosky: Demographics, Automation, and the Future of Work: ‘The gist: There are many parallels between this wave of automation and prior ones, but the differences are at least as important. A key difference includes the lower capital cost of automation at the purchaser end, which will drive faster adoption and a more rapid and disruptive change in the nature of work. This should be weighed against structural changes in the nature of workforces, where aging societies will increasingly lack workers, and appropriate automation can be a remedy for that. There remains a risk that so-called “so-so” automation predominates, which isn’t wealth or productivity increasing, and leads to periods to like Engels’s pause, where individuals do worse, on average…
Global Warming: We in the Clinton administration came within one vote in the Senate of actually starting to deal with this thirty years ago. One vote. One f***ing vote:
David Wallace-Wells: Gazing into the future should really make us sweat: ‘On the last day of July, Phoenix finally registered a temperature high below 110 degrees Fahrenheit—the first time that had happened in 31 days…. António Guterres leaned into a typically vehement formulation. “The era of global warming has ended,” he said. “The era of global boiling has arrived.”… June was the hottest June on record. August appears poised to be the hottest August. Every single day for four straight weeks, as Canada burned and Sicily burned and Algeria burned, global temperatures surpassed the daily record set in 2016 and matched last summer, when 61,000 Europeans are estimated to have died as a result of the heat. But what else do you expect as greenhouse gas emissions continue? Hot-tub ocean temperatures off the Florida Keys, a year’s worth of rain falling in 36 hours in parts of Beijing… 100-degree temperatures in the mountains of Chile… an Argentina-size gap between this year’s Antarctic sea ice and the typical extent….