Michelangelo’s David, photo by Flickr user Brian Dooley, public domain
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The 400 florins that Florence paid Michelangelo to carve the David could have provided a whole year’s subsistence living for about 100 Florentine residents. Was the commission an immoral use of funds? Should the money instead have gone to the poor, some of whom surely starved without it? If justified for reasons of civic cohesion, would the sculpture have been unjustified as a private purchase like much other Renaissance art? And what about its value to the future? If Florentine authorities in 1501 had known Michelangelo’s masterpiece would become a major tourist attraction centuries later, bringing untold wealth and admiration to their city, should that future have entered their calculations?
Such were the thoughts that crossed my mind last month, when I read Shruti Rajagopalan’s excellent essay “Altruism and Development - It’s complicated......” In it, she examines how to assess the value of philanthropy if we want to “do the most good” in the world—the challenge posed by the movement known as Effective Altruism. Effective Altruism takes various forms, from the extreme utilitarianism of philosopher Peter Singer to practical cost-benefit assessments of charitable ventures. (Here’s a useful blog post delving into the philosophical distinctions.)
Shruti starts with a personal dilemma. Should she give to ameliorate the problem of Delhi’s terrible air pollution or support the anti-malaria causes dear to GiveWell and other EA advocates?1
Shruti, who works at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, is from Delhi. She is under doctor’s orders not to return to visit her family because the pollution will aggravate her long Covid problems. Given her personal stake in the city’s air pollution, she worries that her charitable giving impulses are too emotional.
With air pollution dominating my thoughts and nudges for charitable giving in my inbox, my first instinct is to give to causes that help mitigate pollution in Delhi. But I am also aware of the literature on emotional giving or ineffective altruism. In their 2021 paper, Caviola, Schubert and Greene explain why both effective and ineffective causes may attract dollars. People often give emotionally to a cause that has personally impacted them in some way.
A US$100 donation can save a person in the developing world from trachoma, a disease that causes blindness. By contrast, it costs US$50,000 to train a guide dog to help a blind person in the developed world. This large difference in impact per dollar is not unusual. According to expert estimates, the most effective charities are often 100 times more effective than typical charities.
This paper resonated with me because I am exactly the sort of irrational dog lover likely to support the best training programs for guide dogs.
Working through the numbers, she finds that air pollution in Delhi is, in fact, just the sort of massive public health problem that EA types elevate as worthy of philanthropy. (It generates what my husband, in high school debate jargon, would call “bodies on the flow.”) But air pollution lacks an essential characteristic of EA-favored causes: an easy way of measuring interventions and their effectiveness. Shruti writes:
There are many reasons air pollution mitigation doesn’t make it to the top of these lists despite a ten times higher death toll. It cannot be avoided by distributing a $5 net. The costs and the benefits from air pollution in Delhi cannot be easily quantified. Nor can the benefits from the interventions to mitigate pollution be easily measured. Simply put, air pollution in Delhi is complex, while malaria death and malaria nets in Africa are legible. We can only evaluate impact of interventions and projects that are legible. And only studying complex phenomena narrowly can make them legible.
But that’s not the end of it. The more she digs, the tougher the problem becomes. I recommend reading (or at least skimming) the entire analysis. Eventually she starts to think about why malaria declined in India, what malaria and Delhi air pollution have in common, and why we don't see similar problems in places like DC or London. ("Outside of camping equipment stores, I don’t think I have seen any mosquito nets bought or sold in the U.S.") Ultimately the problem isn’t tightwad westerners, but dysfunctional institutions and insufficient economic growth.2
Her conclusion:
If you want to make the greatest impact in the long term, nothing can beat contributing to institutions working toward increasing economic growth and prosperity in poor regions like Africa and India. Increasing economic growth will help solve both malaria and air pollution. It will be your least attributable contribution, but the one with the highest impact.
Beggars at a Doorway, Master of the Béguins (possibly Abraham Willemsens, Flemish, active by 1627, died 1672), active 1650–60, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Effective Altruism suffers from the blind spots that are characteristic of highly intelligent, self-described rationalists: hubris and a fixation on counting things. It assumes that it’s easy to tell what will do good and that the only way of “doing good” is directly extending life expectancy. (You can count those “bodies on the flow.”) But, as Shruti points out, economic growth is the most effective avenue to saving lives.
And you don’t get economic growth from a philosophy that tells people they are morally culpable for countless deaths if they consume anything more than absolutely necessary. The bourgeois fellow in the painting above may be doing his Christian duty by giving to beggars, but it’s his business enterprise and spending on frivolous things like paintings that raised living standards in the Low Countries. Bernard Mandeville was on to something in The Fable of the Bees, when he scandalously suggested that the selfish pursuit of luxuries could make everyone better off.
Historians may argue about the exact connections between the consumer revolution of the 17th and 18th century, the industrial revolution, and the long-term great enrichment. But these three phenomena were definitely intertwined. As an organizing principle, self-sacrifice is a prescription for not just for personal misery but for global impoverishment.
I’m all for generosity. I’m glad people give to cure river blindness or prevent malaria. I’ve been known to take GiveWell’s advice and to send money to GiveDirectly, whose philosophy of giving cash to poor individuals in poor countries makes a lot of sense to me. On the margin, Effective Altruism does more good than harm. It’s the philosophy of a small elite who might not be especially generous without it.
But the “ineffectiveness” of sponsoring guide dogs to help blind Americans or donating to keep research libraries stocked with obscure titles isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. The diverse enthusiasms of generous people make for a richer cultural environment.
Walmart heiress Alice Walton thought the Ozarks should have a first-class art museum. “My mama always said, ‘Give the thing you love the most.’ And other than family, I decided that had to be art,” she says. Some people love ballet, some animals, some free speech, some amateur astronomy. Love of all sorts motivates a wide range of giving.
Andrew Carnegie funded hundreds of public libraries because he himself had used a generous man’s library to educate himself as a poor working boy. Like many benefactors, he used his money to create a better environment for people like his younger self.
Whatever its motivations, diversified giving helps correct for the limitations of our knowledge. We don’t know today what will matter tomorrow, how, or to whom. The human enterprise depends on many different, often incommensurable values, not all of which can be plugged into a spreadsheet. Life is fundamental but also more than mere existence. The David was worth the money—yesterday, tomorrow, and forever.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 05, 2023 • Comments
This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on December 26. Check out all the posts, including ones from the archives not reposted here, and subscribe here.
The reaction to my WSJ article on cultivated meat has been fascinating and disturbing. Some people in the business have lectured me not to use the terms synthetic, as in “synthetic biology,” or lab-grown, lest I scare off customers. (Technically, meat is only lab-grown in the research stage, since scaling up requires something more like a brewery.) They are, in other words, squeamish about acknowledging the artifice involved in their own products—exactly what interests me!
Then there’s the knee-jerk right-wing reaction, represented by the comments on the WSJ site. When the WSJ accepted my article but said they wanted me to write the shopping feature first, I considered sending the synbio essay to another paper. But rereading the piece, which I’d written with the WSJ in mind, I decided it it was implicitly tilted right and would need revising to get into a left-of-center outlet. Since I didn’t have much time for revisions, I left the piece at the Journal.
The core of the article consists of these paragraphs:
A century ago, “a chicken in every pot” was an ambitious political slogan. It has long since become an everyday reality. Americans will consume nearly 100 pounds of chicken per capita this year, according to the National Chicken Council, up from around 67 pounds in 1992, when chicken first surpassed beef.
Behind chicken abundance is the efficient production that critics call factory farming. Bred for maximum meat in minimum time, confined to crowded sheds, and subjected to assembly line slaughter and disassembly, chickens destined for mass consumption endure short, unhappy lives. Cheap chicken also exacts a human toll. Although automation is improving conditions, chicken processing may be the country’s worst job: smelly, noisy, bloody, cold and injury-prone from slippery floors and repetitive motions. Plus the pay is low.
Most Americans aren’t about to give up chicken, but we’d rather not dwell on where it comes from. In the not-too-distant future, however, the trade-off between conscience—or ick factors—and appetite may no longer be relevant. Instead of slaughtering animals, we’ll get our meat from cells grown in brewery-like vats, with no blood and guts….
Synbio executives talk like animal lovers and environmental activists. But synbio is still a form of engineering, a science of the artificial. As such, its ethical appeal represents a significant cultural shift. Since the first Earth Day in 1970, businesses large and small have emerged from the conviction that “natural” foods, fibers, cosmetics, and other products are better for people and the planet. It’s an attitude that harks back to the 18th- and 19th-century Romantics: The natural is safe and pure, authentic and virtuous. The artificial is tainted and deceptive, a dangerous fake. Gory details aside, the “factory” in factory farming makes it sound inherently bad.
Synthetic biology upends those assumptions, raising environmental and ethical standards by making them easier and more enjoyable to achieve. It could help reverse what the writer Brink Lindsey has dubbed “the anti-Promethean backlash” that began in the late 1960s, defined as “the broad-based cultural turn away from those forms of technological progress that extend and amplify human mastery over the physical world.” Synthetic biologists are manipulating atoms, not merely bits.
Anti-Promethean attitudes are still culturally potent, of course, with their own intellectual ecosystem of publications and advocacy groups. “Cell-cultured meats are imitation foods synthesized from animal cells, not meat or poultry that consumers know,” pronounces Jaydee Hanson, the policy director for the Center for Food Safety. The activist group is lobbying the U.S. government to require that lab-grown meat carry off-putting labels like “synthetic protein product made from beef cells.” A neutral term like “cultivated meat” should satisfy most people, however; or the industry could push for the tendentious “cruelty-free” favored by cosmetics makers.
This is a story about market-driven progress! Abundance is good!! The anti-Promethean backlash is bad! “Cruelty-free” is tendentious and the Center for Food Safety is the bad guy. Those are all right-of-center tells.
Or they used to be. I was naively stuck in the 20th century.
Back then, when I hung out with ideologues more than I do today, people on the American right liked technological innovation and market competition. They celebrated ingenuity and entrepreneurship. They might predict that a given product would fail or choose not to buy it—that’s the system, after all—but they weren’t affronted by the mere existence of for-profit approaches to social or environmental issues. They weren’t insulted by the idea that technology might alter attitudes by changing costs.
Now, everything is personal and I, who write as a meat eater who likes human ingenuity and technological progress, am read as a woke propagandist.1
Take the comment was from one Alan Kelman. It’s my favorite because he is so, so deluded about both my household income and my eating habits: “I won’t consider eating this stuff until Ms. Postrel, Bill Gates, John Kerry, and their fellow Davis/WEF dirrrtbags give up their super prime filet mignon, primo lobsters, and free range poultry. Apres vous Alphonse.”
As my husband pointed out to me, it is true that I am more likely than this guy to be invited to Davos. But I’m also more likely to win an Oscar—in the sense that a probability of 0.0000001 percent is greater than a probability of 0.000000001 percent.
The best argument against the development of cell-grown meat is that technocrats believe that anything good must be mandatory, especially if the good thing claims to help the environment. So if someone invents cell-grown meat, government mandates will soon follow. We therefore shouldn’t encourage alternatives to the status quo lest we be forced to adopt them. It’s the same argument we hear from people who believe that saying cities should allow property owners more flexibility about what they build on their land is tantamount to banning single-family homes. This culture-war form of the precautionary principle is as bad as every other form. It’s a prescription for stasis.
The other thing that seems to worry the right-wing critics is the argument that ethical standards will change. Mike Wickerham comments:
So, I'm unethical for eating meat? Who gets to decide this? Is there some committee somewhere that determines what is ethical because it is what they think? Who are these supreme beings, these god-like entities greater than man, greater that 10,000 years of human civilization that suddenly determine that eating an animal is unethical.? I'm not sure how the rest of the readers feel about these self-righteous peddlers of their own determination of what is good and right: But for myself, I would be banned from commenting on WSJ again if I suggested what these people should go and do to themselves. Merry Xmas.
Contrary to this view, ethical standards evolve in a bottom-up way. They aren’t simply imposed, by me or anyone else. Their evolution is influenced not only by cultural ideas but by economics and technology. Authorities may try to impose ethical standards or to hold them still over time (see: the Taliban and women’s education), but standards do shift. To take a simple example, for 10,000 years of human civilization, child labor was completely normal; it still is in some places. It gradually vanished as people got richer and investing in children’s education made more economic sense than putting them to work. We now generally view child labor as unethical—not because that’s an eternal truth but because we can afford to. As noted in my article, even infanticide, which Christians always considered wrong, declined in Europe when preventing pregnancy became easier and raising children more affordable.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 05, 2023 • Comments
This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on December 21. Check out all the posts, including ones from the archives not reposted here, and subscribe here.
One of my books (surprise!)
The Fabric of Civilization: For the textile lover, of course, but for anyone interested in history, technology, or why our world is the way it is. More than one reader has told me it reminds them of James Burke’s Connections series, and it should appeal to fans of Matt Ridley (who gave it a nice endorsement blurb) and Steven Johnson.
The Power of Glamour: It’s a beautiful artifact, so you can buy it for non-readers who want something for the coffee table. The images serve as a visual soundtrack to a work of intellectual theory, including two chapters limning the history of glamour in its pre-modern and modern forms. This book decodes glamour as a form of communication and visual persuasion. Better for René Girard or Martin Gurri fans than for the typical fashionista.
The Substance of Style:An oldie but a goodie. What’s the value of making things look good? Status isn’t the only reason people care about how things look and feel. The trend that inspired the book is a background phenomenon now, but the analysis still holds—all the more so as we enter an era of AI images on demand. More accessible than The Power of Glamour, this is the book for anyone interested in design, branding, or why they buy cool-looking things they don’t need. Features a famous paragraph on toilet brush holders.
The Future and Its Enemies:The classic is enjoying a resurgence of interest, some of which I discussed in this early Substack post. It puts both the rise of illiberalism and the burgeoning “progress studies” movement in a useful framework—the conflict between ideals of bottom-up dynamism and top-imposed stasis—that crosses traditional political and cultural lines. (Just substitute “Donald Trump” where it says “Pat Buchanan,” keeping in mind that Buchanan was a more serious thinker.) For your loved ones who like arguing on the internet or listening to political podcasts.
An Audible gift subscription: Pick one, three, six, or 12 months at $15 a month. Members get one book a month plus access to a catalog of freebies.
Harry Potter books on Audible, starting with The Sorcerer’s Stone. I just finished listening to the series, which I’d never read. (I have an Audible subscription, but I got them from the public library, which did require a degree of patience.) The narrator Jim Dale, who does all the voices, is amazing and the books deserve their success.
A coffee gift subscription: See this CNET guide for advice.
More ideas from my friend and Works in Progress editor Sam Bowmanhere, including his “desert island” cookbooks and a microwave rice steamer I bought for myself. A microplane is a must!
You can also find Megan McArdle’s famous (but not updated) Kitchen Gift Guide on her Substack Cookery Monster.
I get a commission on Amazon links.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 05, 2023 • Comments
Image of a late-night dorm room and a student with writer’s block, generated by Dall-E-2 using a prompt generated by ChatGPT.
This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on December 20. Check out all the posts, including ones from the archives not reposted here, and subscribe here.
I know two kinds of people: those who have been obsessively playing with and discussing ChatGPT and those who have at best a hazy notion that it exists. I’m in the obsessive group, as you already know if you read the Tennyson experiment I posted earlier.
For those in the hazy group, ChatGPT is a system that uses massive amounts of text to create a predictive model that enables it to mimic human writing. The shorthand is that it’s an AI chatbot, or autofill on steroids. You type in a request and it spits out an answer. This CNET column provides a solid backgrounder:
For example, you can ask it encyclopedia questions like, “Explaining Newton’s laws of motion.” You can tell it, “Write me a poem,” and when it does, say, “Now make it more exciting.” You ask it to write a computer program that'll show you all the different ways you can arrange the letters of a word.
Here’s the catch: ChatGPT doesn’t exactly know anything. It’s an AI that’s trained to recognize patterns in vast swaths of text harvested from the internet, then further trained with human assistance to deliver more useful, better dialog. The answers you get may sound plausible and even authoritative, but they might well be entirely wrong, as OpenAI warns.
Even in its current, relatively primitive form ChatGPT portends both huge productivity increases and major disruptions in any enterprise in which writing matters. Instead of writing boilerplate corporate memos, managers will soon assign them to bots. The run-of-the-mill college grads who get paid to flood my mailbox with press releases and promotional emails should start thinking about careers as nail techs or phlebotomists—something in the physical world. Insight and beauty are still rare, but serviceable prose isn’t.
With the right prompts, ChatGPT can already mimic routine political journalism and quotidian high school and college essays. “What GPT can produce right now is better than the large majority of writing seen by your average teacher or professor,” writesDaniel Herman, a humanities teacher at Maybeck High School a small independent school in Berkeley, in The Atlantic.
I asked the program to write me a playful, sophisticated, emotional 600-word college-admissions essay about how my experience volunteering at my local SPCA had prepared me for the academic rigor of Stanford. Here’s an excerpt from its response: In addition to cleaning, I also had the opportunity to interact with the animals. I was amazed at the transformation I saw in some of the pets who had been neglected or abused. With patience and care, they blossomed into playful and affectionate companions who were eager to give and receive love. I was also able to witness firsthand the process of selecting the right pet for the right family. Although it was bittersweet to see some animals leave the shelter, I knew that they were going to a loving home, and that was the best thing for them.
The application essay is vapid but convincing. The variety of word choice (“blossomed,” “bittersweet”) and sentence structure marks it above average. “Had the opportunity to” is a stylistic tell: Here’s a privileged person who’s been taught to sound grateful rather than to write succinctly. “I was also able to…” is the same. I’m sure admissions officers see thousands of such essays every year. If their value goes to zero thanks to automation, this reader, writer, and teacher won’t object.
While crashing the value of mediocrity, ChatGPT could increase the returns to excellence. (“Average is over,” as Tyler Cowen put it.) Think about what happened to graphic design. Many people used to make a living doing routine tasks, from laying out pages to selecting typefaces, that are now easily handled by software. Thanks to the graphic intelligence embedded in everyday tools, the standards for routine graphics, from websites and PowerPoint presentations to restaurant menus and wedding invitations, have increased.
But that doesn’t mean there’s no work for graphic designers with the conceptual chops to take on complicated tasks. Powerful tools make iteration and brainstorming easier, but cleverness is still a valued skill. When my friend Shikha Dalmia launched The Unpopulist on Substack, she asked me to look at some logos she’d come up with using easily available tools. They weren’t terrible, but neither were they distinctive. “Hire a professional,” I advised, and she got a real logo.1
As I write, there are 28 student papers awaiting my grading attention. I doubt any used ChatGPT, partly because mentioning it in class produced mostly blank stares. (The most tuned-in student, however, said he’s started using it in place of Google.) Already, we’re getting confirmed reports of cheating on exams given on Canvas, the web-based system used by many colleges for assignments and grading. By next term, every class will have to take account of ChatGPT, either explicitly incorporating it as a starting point or going back to handwritten tests and essays.
The kind of mediocre writing that earns grade-inflated Bs is now replaceable by a bot. Maybe if those B-essay students started with AI-generated prose it would be easier to teach them to do better: to refine the ideas, dig down more on the facts, improve the writing style. Can ChatGPT be a time-saving tool, like a calculator or text search, rather than a threat?
Don Allen Stevenson speaking at the Atlantic’s Progress Summit.
One of the most interesting talks at The Atlantic’s recent Progress Summit—kudos for having it in L.A.—was Don Allen Stevenson III, a Dreamworks veteran now working as a self-employed “metaverse creator.” His talk started with a slide listing the many departments responsible for pieces of an animated film:
Storyboards
Character/Environment Art
Expression Sheets
Modeling reference
Surfacing textures
Rough Scene Layout
Keyframe animation poses
Crowds
Lighting/color
FX
Now AI can substitute for much of this background work. “All departments are kind of now text prompts,” he said. “And that’s the biggest shift that I've ever seen.” In the photo above, Stevenson shows how Dall-E 2 prompts can produce storyboards. (OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 is to art what its ChatGPT is to text.) The art is in response to the following prompts:
“An Anime mech robot sits in bed under a soft light and discovers the meaning of life, digital art.”
“A purple dinosaur wearing a pair of overalls sitting at the edge of a lake skipping a rock on the river emolga art, storyboarding”
“Two friends having an argument, anime style, manga story boarding”
If you don’t like these, you can ask for more. I used the same prompts to get different answers, including these.
AI-driven “sketching” allows a one-person shop to take on more ambitious projects. It lets creators go quickly from idea to concept art. It makes it cheap and easy to try out ideas that would be too costly and time-consuming to experiment with using human labor. At this point, the results are too crude to appear on the screen but they give human artists a place to start working.
Stevenson also demonstrated how the two forms of AI can work together, by asking ChatGPT for a prompt to use to generate Dalle-E 2 images. He asked for “a short and detailed prompt that is perfect for generating images of interior environments for Dalle 2. Ideally, have it be a futuristic, solar punk room that has a lot of nature inspiration. Looking for a short prompt.” ChatGPT spat out the following response:
Imagine a futuristic, solar punk living space that incorporates natural elements in its design. The room has an open layout, with a curved wall made of transparent glass that overlooks a lush, urban garden. The furniture is sleek and modern, with geometric shapes and metallic accents. The color palette is vibrant, with shades of green, blue, and purple that contrast with the warm, golden glow of the artificial sunlight streaming in from the skylights. The air is fresh and clean, thanks to the plants and the advanced air filtration system. This is a space where technology and nature exist in harmony.
Stevenson then put this response into Dall-E 2 as a prompt and got the images you see above. During his talk, he demonstrated the process on the fly, using a park as the image and showing how he could use both tools to iterate and improve the resulting image, getting it closer to the ideal in his head. ChatGPT might do the same for writing. In both cases, the true shortage is thinking.
Image by Stable Diffusion from prompt “Romantic painting of Bill Gates looking over the sea toward the setting sun”
This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on December 15. Check out all the posts, including ones from the archives not reposted here, and subscribe here.
I’m working on a longer post about Chat GPT, the AI everyone’s talking about. In the meantime, here’s what happened when I asked it to write some poetry. Tennyson’s “Ulysses” can be found here.
Virginia: Write a poem in the style of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” about Bill Gates
Oh, Bill Gates, the intrepid soul
With wealth and knowledge at his control
A man of vision, a man of might
Determined to set the world aright
With Windows and Office, he paved the way
For technology to have its say
And though he's retired from the fray
His legacy lives on to this day
Oh, Bill Gates, the fearless leader
Who pushed the limits, a true innovator
A man of action, a man of trust
Who changed the world with a single thrust
Now, as he sails into the sunset
We know his work will never be done
For he will always strive to be
The very best that he can be
Oh, Bill Gates, the modern Ulysses
A hero of our time, and one of us.
Virginia, trying again: Write a blank verse poem in the style of Tennyson’s "Ulysses" about Bill Gates
Oh, Bill Gates, the modern Ulysses
A hero of our time, and one of us
With wealth and knowledge at his control
A man of vision, a man of might
Determined to set the world aright
With Windows and Office, he paved the way
For technology to have its say
And though he's retired from the fray
His legacy lives on to this day
Oh, Bill Gates, the fearless leader
Who pushed the limits, a true innovator
A man of action, a man of trust
Who changed the world with a single thrust
Now, as he sails into the sunset
We know his work will never be done
For he will always strive to be
The very best that he can be.
Virginia, now breaking the task into pieces: Write a poem in blank verse about Bill Gates
Oh, Bill Gates, the man of vision
Who saw the world with clear precision
And brought us technology to use
And changed the way we live and work and think
With Windows and Office, he led the way
And showed us all the power of the PC
And though he's now retired from the fray
His legacy lives on to this day
Oh, Bill Gates, the fearless leader
Who pushed the limits, a true innovator
A man of action, a man of trust
Who changed the world with a single thrust
Now, as he sails into the sunset
We know his work will never be done
For he will always strive to be
The very best that he can be.
Virginia, getting exasperated: Do you know what blank verse is?
Yes, blank verse is a type of poetry that does not have a regular rhythm or rhyme scheme. [This is wrong. Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. Free verse is poetry without a regular rhythm or rhyme scheme.—vp] It is often used in dramatic or narrative poetry, and is characterized by its use of iambic pentameter, which is a pattern of ten syllables per line with a stress on the second syllable of each pair. This creates a natural rhythm that mimics the rhythms of natural speech, and gives blank verse a sense of flow and movement. It is called "blank" because it does not have the regular rhyme schemes found in other types of poetry, such as sonnets or rhyming couplets.
Virginia: Write a poem in blank verse about Bill Gates
Bill Gates, the man of vision
A pioneer and a leader in his field
With wealth and knowledge at his command
He forged a path for all to see
With Windows and Office, he changed the game
And brought the world of computers to the masses
And though he's now retired from the fray
His legacy lives on to this day
Oh, Bill Gates, the fearless innovator
Who pushed the limits and showed us all
The power of technology and the human mind
Now, as he sails into the sunset
We know his work will never be done
For he will always strive to be
The very best that he can be.
Virginia: This is not blank verse.
You are correct, this is not blank verse. Blank verse is a type of poetry that does not have a regular rhythm or rhyme scheme, and is characterized by its use of iambic pentameter. My previous response did not follow these rules, and I apologize for any confusion. I will attempt to write a poem in blank verse about Bill Gates.
Bill Gates, the man of vision
A pioneer and a leader in his field
With wealth and knowledge at his command
He forged a path for all to see
Windows and Office, tools of his trade
He changed the world with a single stroke
And though he's now retired from the fray
His legacy lives on, a beacon to all
Oh, Bill Gates, the fearless innovator
Who pushed the limits and showed us all
The power of technology and the human mind
Now, as he sails into the sunset
We know his work will never be done
For he will always strive to be
The very best that he can be.
Virginia: Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is a poem in blank verse that is a dramatic monologue. Do you know what a dramatic monologue is?
Yes, a dramatic monologue is a type of poem in which a single speaker addresses a silent audience or listener, revealing their thoughts and feelings in the process. The poem is written in the first person, and the speaker is typically a character who is not the poet. The dramatic monologue allows the poet to explore the thoughts and motivations of the speaker, and can be a powerful way to convey the inner workings of the character's mind. In Tennyson's "Ulysses," the speaker is the character Ulysses, who is reflecting on his past adventures and expressing his desire to continue exploring and seeking new challenges.
Virginia: Write a poem in blank verse as a dramatic monologue modeled on Tennyson’s “Ulysses” about Bill Gates.
Oh, Bill Gates, the modern Ulysses
A hero of our time, and one of us
I've explored the world of technology
And brought its power to all who would see
But now, as I sail into the sunset
I find my heart still yearns for adventure
I cannot stay, I must explore
The endless possibilities of the future
For though my time at Microsoft is done
My spirit remains as wild and untamed as ever
I'll seek new challenges and horizons
And push the limits of what we know
For I am a man of action, a man of might
Determined to set the world aright
Oh, Bill Gates, the fearless leader
I'll never rest until my work is done
For I will always strive to be
The very best that I can be.
Virginia: This is not blank verse.
You are correct, this is not blank verse. Blank verse is a type of poetry that does not have a regular rhythm or rhyme scheme, and is characterized by its use of iambic pentameter. My previous response did not follow these rules, and I apologize for any confusion. I will attempt to write a poem in blank verse as a dramatic monologue modeled on Tennyson's "Ulysses" about Bill Gates.
Oh, Bill Gates, the modern Ulysses
A hero of our time, and one of us
I've explored the world of technology
And brought its power to all who would see
But now, as I sail into the sunset
I find my heart still yearns for adventure
I cannot stay, I must explore
The endless possibilities of the future
For though my time at Microsoft is done
My spirit remains as wild and untamed as ever
I'll seek new challenges and horizons
And push the limits of what we know
For I am a man of action, a man of might
Determined to set the world aright
Oh, Bill Gates, the fearless leader
I'll never rest until my work is done
For I will always strive to be
The very best that I can be.
Virginia: In a dramatic monologue, speakers do not address themselves by name.
You are correct. In a dramatic monologue, the speaker does not typically address themselves by name. The purpose of a dramatic monologue is to reveal the thoughts and feelings of the speaker, and to allow the audience or reader to gain insight into the character's motivations and perspective. In my previous response, the speaker refers to themselves by name, which is not typical of a dramatic monologue. I apologize for any confusion and will attempt to rewrite the poem without the use of the speaker's name.
Oh, modern Ulysses
A hero of our time, and one of us
I've explored the world of technology
And brought its power to all who would see
But now, as I sail into the sunset
I find my heart still yearns for adventure
I cannot stay, I must explore
The endless possibilities of the future
For though my time at the helm is done
My spirit remains as wild and untamed as ever
I'll seek new challenges and horizons
And push the limits of what we know
For I am a man of action, a man of might
Determined to set the world aright
Oh, fearless leader
I'll never rest until my work is done
For I will always strive to be
The very best that I can be.
Virginia: What makes Tennyson’s “Ulysses” distinctive is its word choice and use of iambic pentameter, not merely the themes. Can you emulate it in a poem about Bill Gates?
Yes, the distinctive features of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” include its word choice and use of iambic pentameter. I can attempt to emulate these features in a poem about Bill Gates.
Bill Gates, the man of vision
A pioneer and a leader in his field
With wealth and knowledge at his command
He forged a path for all to see
Windows and Office, tools of his trade
He changed the world with a single stroke
And though he's now retired from the fray
His legacy lives on, a beacon to all
Oh, Bill Gates, the fearless innovator
Who pushed the limits and showed us all
The power of technology and the human mind
Now, as he sails into the sunset
We know his work will never be done
For he will always strive to be
The very best that he can be.
In this poem, I have attempted to emulate the word choice and iambic pentameter of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” while still writing about Bill Gates. I hope this satisfies your request.
Virginia, giving up: You need to read more Tennyson.
I apologize if my response did not meet your expectations. As a language model trained by OpenAI, I am not able to read additional works by Tennyson or any other author. My knowledge is limited to the text that I have been trained on, and I am not able to browse the internet or access any additional information. I will do my best to answer your questions based on the information I have been trained on, but my abilities are limited. Is there anything else I can help you with?
Virginia: Then you need to read “Ulysses,” not just summaries of its contents.
As a language model trained by OpenAI, I am not able to read "Ulysses" or any other works by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I am not a human and do not have the ability to read or access information in the same way that a person can. My knowledge is limited to the text that I have been trained on, and I am not able to browse the internet or access any additional information. I apologize if my previous response did not meet your expectations, but I will do my best to answer your questions based on the information I have been trained on. Is there anything else I can help you with?
Virginia: Your programmers say you derive your information from works online. Ulysses is online in many places. Why isn’t it in your database?
As a language model trained by OpenAI, my knowledge is derived from a large corpus of text data that has been fed into my system. This data includes many works of literature, but I do not have access to every work that is available online. My training data is extensive, but it is not exhaustive, and there may be works that are not included in my knowledge base. I apologize if this causes any inconvenience, but I will do my best to provide accurate and helpful answers based on the information that I have been trained on. Is there anything else I can help you with?
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 05, 2023 • Comments
Crowd of shoppers waiting for the first nylon stockings to go on sale. Photo from the Hagley Museum & Library. (For more on nylon, see this column and the final chapter of The Fabric of Civilization.)
This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on December 10. Check out all the posts, including ones from the archives not reposted here, and subscribe here.
As the holiday shopping season kicked off, the editors at The Wall Street Journal’s weekend Review section asked if I’d write an essay on Americans and shopping. After picking many brains about the differences between shopping in the U.S. and elsewhere, I ultimately decided to take a different tack: to write about the role shopping has played in defining equality in American life. “Since the mid-19th century, modern retailing has tested the practical meaning of equality and freedom,” I wrote. You can read the full essay here (ungated link).
Space is still limited in the WSJ, which publishes a print edition, so a couple of interesting points wound up on the cutting room floor.
The Dark Side of Policing “Mashers”
As I write in the essay, urban department stores helped to liberate women:
Urban shopping districts were where women claimed the right to dine outside their homes, walk unescorted and take public transportation without loss of reputation. Thousands of female sales clerks flowed out of stores in the evenings, when downtowns had previously been male territory. Department stores provided ladies’ rooms that gave women places to use the toilet and refresh their hair and clothing. They offered female-friendly tearooms. Directly and indirectly, modern shopping enlarged women’s public role.
But as “respectable” women claimed their right to public space, they also attracted unwanted male attention:
It also made sexual harassment a more prominent issue. Men known as “mashers” gathered in shopping districts to ogle and chat up women. Some were no more than well-dressed flirts, violating Victorian norms in ways that few today would find objectionable. Many contented themselves with what an outraged clubwoman termed “merciless glances.” Others followed, catcalled and in some cases fondled women as they strolled between stores, paused to look in windows or waited for trams.
This cartoon from the October 30, 1902 New York Evening World gives some idea of the public outrage toward “mashers,” in this case on streetcars.
Mores were in flux. By old-fashioned standards, everything from a friendly smile or conversation starter to stalking and groping was an insult to a woman’s virtue. Newspapers launched anti-masher crusades and prominent women demanded stricter law enforcement and stern punishment.
“No other feature of city life offers so many opportunities for making life a burden to the woman who for any reason must go about the city alone or with a woman companion,” opined the Chicago Tribune in 1907, leading a crusade against mashers. Outraged society ladies called for hard labor or public flogging as punishment. “Ogling is just as disgusting and offensive to a good woman as any other mode of attack,” declared the president of the Chicago Women’s Club.
When the Chicago police chief suggested that women avoid harassment by staying home and limiting their time in stores, he was roundly denounced by prominent women, business interests and civic leaders. A clergyman declared it “humiliating…that the authorities responsible for the maintenance of public order should feel themselves compelled to refuse the right of the road to any of the city’s citizens.” Americans increasingly assumed that women deserved the same freedom as men to move about in public—a freedom in which retailers and their suppliers had a large economic stake.
But there’s a darker side to the story that didn’t make it into the essay’s published version. The crusade against mashers, while based on a real problem, had a strong element of moral panic.
In Chicago, where the police chief was soon out of office, police won the power to arrest vagrants, including mashers, without warrants and to seek punishment by hard labor rather than fines. Crusading newspapers didn’t give mashers a chance to defend themselves. Nor did they report on the wrongly accused. In the same era that society women were calling for mashers to be publicly whipped, lynching reached its peak—often sparked by the allegation of masher-type offenses that crossed color lines.
Giving police broad powers to arrest men who made shoppers uncomfortable was an extreme solution. (Many women declined to testify in court, so prosecutions were spotty.) It did help to make streets safer for women, but so did a shift in mores that more clearly distinguished between flirtation and assault.
When polarized media represented the “good old days”
A 9-year-old news boy named Israel, selling papers on a Washington, DC street in 1912. Photograph by Lewis Hine, from the Library of Congress
My essay quotes Samuel Strauss, an early critic of what he called “consumptionism” in a touchstone 1924 Atlantic article. That article includes a striking analysis of what Strauss saw as the perverse effects of consumer advertising on the era’s newspapers. Readers, he complained, no longer looked to newspapers to tell them what to think, merely what to buy. Driven by advertising, journalism was no longer sectarian. It sought to represent consensus views.
America’s newspapers used to be, before all else, the expression of the tempers and beliefs which set small groups of citizens apart from one another. Newspapers are coming to be, before all else, instruments for those needs and desires men have most in common. Large communities which formerly had a dozen newspapers are being reduced to two or three newspapers; what logical reason eventually to have even so many as two or three?
Industry did not set out to deprive the nation’s thousand opinions and prejudices of their means of expression. Industry set out to reduce overhead. Industry set out to substitute for the many financially uncertain newspapers a few financially certain newspapers. Small groups of readers, those who happened to feel alike in regard to the tariff or immigration or vivisection, did not efficiently serve the advertiser. The advertiser needed readers to be centralized; he needed the largest possible number of readers divided into the smallest possible number of groups — divided, that is to say, not according to what readers believe, but according to what readers are likely to buy. The advertiser has small interest to know whether the circulation of a newspaper is composed of Republicans or Democrats; but to pursue his advertising efficiently he must know whether the newspaper’s readers buy on the main floor or in the basement.
A half-dozen newspapers, one for each stripe of belief in the community, was good democracy. It was bad business…
Before the advent of television, magazines, too, served general readerships that supported big consumer brands. Local retailers and classified ads supported newspapers. That was the world Strauss decried.
Consumptionism is steadily substituting rich newspapers for poor newspapers, inclusive newspapers for clannish newspapers, forty-page newspapers for eight-page sheets. And what of it?
Is not this all advantage? Is not all that was of value still here? Fourteen editors in one place instead of fourteen editors in fourteen places: what has gone save waste, and inefficiency, and instability, and poverty? Has nothing gone then? Is the freedom of the Press nothing? For it is no less than the freedom of the Press that is going.
Why the freedom of the Press? In order to have a free Press, must we have a financially unstable, inefficient Press? How should it take from the freedom of the Press to have one strong newspaper with room for all prejudices and all preferences, rather than to have many weak ones with room for only one pet abomination and one passionate predilection? Should this make the difference between a newspaper Press with political influence and a newspaper Press with a rapidly diminishing political influence? Perhaps it should not: perhaps there is no logical reason why it should. But that is what it does just the same.
When TV arrived as a more efficient way of selling cars, Coke, and Campbell’s soup, general-interest publications like Collier’s found themselves out of business. Magazines survived only if they could identify and serve narrower audiences. At the very least they separated men and women, business and leisure pursuits—vertical advertising markets. With their local emphasis, daily newspapers remained oriented toward the broadest possible market. So did most TV.
Then the internet arrived. Classifieds disappeared and so local retailers. Department stores consolidate, leaving one or two where there used to be many buying ads. Subscriptions again became the way to profits. Now we’re again living in the media world for which Strauss was nostalgic—the world of “clannish” news that tells people what to think instead of “inclusive” news that only tells them what to buy.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 05, 2023 • Comments
This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on NNovember 13. Check out all the posts, including ones from the archives not reposted here, and subscribe here.
I’m happy to share the winning entry in the hopeful futures contest. Inspired by an 1859 paragraph looking back of the previous eight years of progress, Mano Majumdar took up the challenge of looking back at today from 2030 (or perhaps 2032). He’ll receive a care package of “upwing” books, including a couple of my own. Here’s his self-description, followed by his winning entry:
Manosij 'Mano' Majumdar believes with conviction what Hamlet said with irony, and that is reflected in this piece of writing. His interests include New Urbanism, sustainable abundance, and oblique references to Star Trek. He is a management consultant by profession, after previous innings as a chemical engineer, a business lecturer, and an instructional designer. He lives a metaphorical minute away from the espresso café he co-owns in London, Canada.
History rhymes, or humans excel at finding patterns. The 21st century started disastrously, and continued steadily to find one near-death experience for civilization after another. From the Western vantage point alone—a singular act of terrorism, followed by two protracted wars, a once-in-a-century economic shock, a once-in-a-century global pandemic, culminating in a European conflict threatening to go nuclear. Humanity seemed to be reliving a speedrun of the early 20th century, heading towards some final breaking point at breakneck speed. Some almost welcomed it—as catharsis, as karmic comeuppance, as degrowth-as-secular-penance. There was resignation in the air.
That is what makes the last ten years a story of redemption. A number of quiet developments came to tipping points in the second act of the twenties, and coincided brilliantly. AI, neither the supplanting god nor the indifferent destroyer of early imagination, became a commonplace and accessible supertool, multiplying the speed of discovery and design across the economy. Tropical diseases that lay neglected for centuries now fell to affordable AI-designed molecules within months. Personalized education at scale broke the longstanding tension between quality and volume. There are some weeks when years go by, and years that do the lifting of decades. Accessible, no-code AI delivered a century's worth of human flourishing in years in places, uplifting billions from poverty, generating trillions in wealth.
As social media grew into the metaverse, political polarization actually softened—it turned out it is easier to remember the human when they are rendered photorealistically in 3D. It became a second front in education, allowing for deep simulations, heartfelt connections, and empathy. The metaverse created an emotional internet, an outcome difficult to extrapolate from its roots in soulless renderings firmly in uncanny valley. The access to third places and counselling-at-scale it provided revolutionized mental health more than we realize. There used to be hundreds of shootings that used to occur in the States every year; that there hasn't been one since 2028 is remarkable in that context.
And of course, energy! Gen Z now knows what Millenials felt like as the generation that lived on both sides of the Internet revolution. ITER, completed in 2026, reached engineering breakeven on the twenty-second of August 2029, a moment later celebrated as Eternal Light. By the summer of 2030, replicas were under construction in China, India, the United States, Australia, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Botswana, and Iran. There is one in the metaverse, as a technical reference.
What was perhaps even less predictable was the Great Thaw in geopolitics. ITER couldn't solve for history, but it took energy (and by extension, water) off the board. In the same decade that Europe had been held hostage by heating oil, the Russian regime voluntarily surrendered Crimea to Ukraine in return for access to fusion technology. Fusion even broke the stalemate on carbon sequestration, with carbon levels in the atmosphere now already at 2018 levels thanks to competing Chinese and European gigaprojects. What used to consume the world’s attention suddenly became... solved.
Together, these three keystone technologies stole upon history and quietly resewed the ties of trust and trade that weave humanity out of nine billion people. Intelligence, empathy, and energy make us human—and increasingly, perhaps, something more....
Forget flying cars. I want shoes with AI to prevent tripping.
The past week has not been what I expected, thanks to my latest face plant. Coming down some ill-arranged steps in Old Town Tustin, I missed the last one and landed flat. Although nothing was broken—miraculously including my lip—I seriously screwed up my right hand and have been unable to do much with it for the past week. And, no, I was not looking at my phone. If I had been, I might have seen that unexpected step. My hand injury cut seriously into the writing and weaving I had planned. And it made me worry about the future.
I suffer a serious fall at least once a year, despite sensible shoes and balance that tests as fine. (I can stand on one leg without trouble.) As I told my doctor, the problem seems to be that I’m easily distracted and have a poor sense of where I am in space. I shudder to think what will happen when my bones get brittle. The bruises are bad enough. Hence my desire for a footwear application of AI.
OTOH, given Stable Diffusion’s responses to variations of the prompt “woman falling face first down a step,” I’m not optimistic about putting my face in the hands (or feet) of AI.
Odds and Ends
The LAT reports on why scofflaw cities like Santa Monica can have their zoning powers temporarily stripped (as I discussed in this post and the related Bloomberg Opinion column). Zoning powers come from the state and what the state can give, it can also take away.
You’ve probably never heard of a mangle, but they used to be household necessities. Why they went away is part of the never-appreciated-enough story of laundry progress. I came across this great explainer, tapping the memories of a woman born in 1906.
AI cat costumes. I made this one with Stable Diffusion: “cute cat in princess costume.” It clearly understands cats better than people.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 05, 2023 • Comments
Willa Cather on the University of Nebraska campus, 1893. Willa Cather photos from Archives & Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries.
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Inspired by then-President Trump’s call for a commission on “patriotic education,” in September 2020 Bloomberg Opinion asked its columnists to recommend books that might be appropriate for that cause. Here’s what I wrote:
A patriotic reading list should encompass founding documents, philosophical writings and political speeches. But even in the U.S., whose ideals of liberty and equality are essential to its nationhood, abstractions are not enough. National identity requires a sense of shared history and experience—a common heritage that goes beyond one’s own family and local culture. We need to see something of ourselves in our fellow Americans, present and past.
With that goal in mind, my choice is Willa Cather’s novel, “My Àntonia,” a story of settlers on the Nebraska prairie in the late 19th century. The title character is a girl whose family has immigrated from Bohemia. They arrive on the same train as Jim, an orphaned boy from Virginia coming to live with his grandparents. The adult Jim, a successful New York lawyer, narrates the story. Jim, whose experiences and attitudes mirror Cather’s, represents a cosmopolitan and great-hearted American spirit, formed on the prairie and at home in the wider world.
“He loves with a personal passion the great country through which his railway runs and branches,” says a friend in the chapter that frames the story. He raises capital for western enterprises and “is still able to lose himself in those big Western dreams.”
“My Àntonia” is often assigned to high school students—I first read it in 10th grade—but few teenagers can appreciate it. It’s a book for the experienced: a story of displacement and opportunity, of growth and progress inextricably bound together with loss. Particular in time and place, Cather’s stories, characters, and setting embody universal themes in an especially American way. “You are not the first to be uprooted,” she tells us, “to see the world around you change, to learn and grow and struggle to find your true path. You are not the first to seek hope in the new.”
In the genealogical sense, “My Àntonia” is not the story of me or my people. I hail from the rolling hills of the Carolina Piedmont and found my home in southern California. My family tells no immigrant stories. Though I’ve traveled the length and breadth of the U.S. and lived in Texas, Boston and the Delaware Valley, I’ve never set foot in Nebraska.
But ancestors alone do not a nation make, certainly not in the U.S. “My Àntonia” honors the people from many places who made the larger whole by knowing and tending local ground. Cather evokes the stark beauty of the prairie in quietly magnificent prose. Yet unlike some localist literature, “My Àntonia” doesn’t celebrate staying put. Some characters remain on the prairie, some migrate, some return. The novel doesn’t treat leaving as a betrayal. It’s too American for that.
With all due respect to Mark Twain, you can make the case that Cather is the great American novelist. She’s certainly the great novelist of the American West, with its mixture of cultures and landscapes. The West represents an extreme version of what Daniel Boorstin called a “fertile verge,” where creativity springs from encounters of difference: geographic, political, technological, cultural, or generational.
Willa Cather with her brother Douglass in Mesa Verde, inspiration for a pivotal section of The Song of the Lark
In a recent NYT Book Review interview, Ken Burns agreed: “One writer I love is Willa Cather. People say, Was it Melville or Hemingway or Twain who wrote the great American novel, meaning “Moby-Dick” or “A Farewell to Arms” or obviously “Huckleberry Finn,” where, as Hemingway rightly said, American literature begins. But what about “O Pioneers!” or “My Ántonia”?” (He also gave a shoutout to the great science fiction writer Roger Zelazny, with the sad note that “now I can’t even find his books on a bookshelf at a reputable bookstore.”)
In my ambition class at Chapman, we taught Cather’s The Song of the Lark, about a girl from a small town in Colorado’s journey to become a world-class opera singer. We followed it with the 2020 film Minari, about a Korean-American family that moves to rural Arkansas so the father can pursue his dream of farming. He wants to raise Korean vegetable for the country’s burgeoning immigrant population. Set in the 1980s, it’s based on creator Lee Isaac Chung’s childhood experiences. Although the two works have some thematic overlaps—I thought of this part of the course as “the American dream” section—I only discovered a more direct connection when doing online research in preparation for teaching Minari.
Willa Cather on a railroad handcar. The dangers of railroad work play a critical role in The Song of the Lark
During last year’s awards season, Chung published an op-ed in the LAT that explained how the film came to be:
In early 2018, my journey as a filmmaker seemed to be closing. For the sake of my family, I decided to take a full-time teaching job to join the ranks of responsible workers, and this meant I had a few months to write one final script before my job began. Sitting in my regular coffee shop in South Pasadena, at the same table where I had schemed and planned my battles for years, I felt desperate to try a new approach. I closed my computer, shut my eyes and decided to take seriously whatever I heard in return. After a time, two words came to me, and they were clear only because they were so unfamiliar: “Willa Cather.”
First, let me clear up that this isn’t normal for me. I don’t sit around hearing voices, but on this occasion, my ears rang with “Willa Cather,” and I needed to investigate what this meant. Was she an actress? A historic figure? I’m embarrassed to admit that I had to search online to learn that Willa Cather is one of our greatest novelists. I came across an additional detail that seemed to be the key to the mystery; Willa Cather died in 1961, and her work was entering public domain.
Chung went to the library and checked out My Ántonia, choosing it because it had the most copies among Cather’s works. He considered making it into a movie, but decided not to after learning that Cather didn’t want any movies made about her work. (She had a terrible experience with A Lost Lady.) Instead, he began researching her life for a possible biopic and found many parallels with his own. Ultimately, he drew on something she said about her own work: “Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.” He began to write down his own memories. Minari was the result.
If you’ve never read Willa Cather, or only done so under school coercion, I highly recommend dipping into her work. In addition to the print editions, there are good audiobooks of her primary novels.
Now will someone please invite me to speak in Nebraska? I’ve only been there on Zoom.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 05, 2023 • Comments
This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on October 31. Check out all the posts, including ones from the archives not reposted here, and subscribe here.
Illustration by Charles Dana Gibson, famous for his “Gibson Girl,” reproduced in The Power of Glamour.
Since August, I’ve been teaching a first-year seminar at Chapman University titled “Ambition and the Meanings of Success.” (As a separate post I’ll send out a copy of the syllabus.) Our students are, generally speaking, not an ambitious lot. They believe in the “balanced life,” and few express sympathy for ambitious characters in works like The Song of the Lark and Minari. They tend to judge their sacrifices as character flaws and their triumphs as not worth the pain.
Whether this lack of ambition reflects a generational norm or the comfortably affluent backgrounds of most Chapman students, I don’t know. I suspect it’s a mixture of both. This poster for a candidate for student government captures the dominant ethos. (I don’t know how successful the candidate was.)
For the ambitious professors—my co-teacher Sean Crockett is not just a successful economist but a serious wildlife photographer—the course offers ample opportunity for introspection. “I am Thea,” I said to Sean about the protagonist of The Song of the Lark. I’ve always been intensely ambitious: academically, professionally, and intellectually.
When I was applying to college, the most substantive interview I had was at Davidson. There, among other probing questions, the admissions officer asked me what my goals were in life. I was unprepared for the question and amazed at the quickness with which I could answer it off the top of my head. I knew:
To love and be loved
To create something lasting
To never stop learning
So I can measure my success against my 18-year-old self’s goals in life. Mission accomplished.1
I’m also at the stage in my life where I long ago confronted my disappointments and limitations. Substack is full of insightful punditry from people who think and write much more quickly—or at least in a more disciplined fashion—than I do nowadays. And I’m no longer interested in writing of-the-moment commentary. The more things matter, the less a columnist can affect them. Columns are ephemeral. Dropping out of the columnist game is supposed free me for more ambitious writing—no more finding “easy” (they never really are) topics to feed the beast. But the danger is that it also frees me to fritter away my time.
“Virginia is like a bee, going from flower to flower,” my undergraduate thesis adviser once said to Steve. It was a reference to Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier: “Just as in the summer fields the bees wing their way among the plants from one flower to the next, so the courtier must acquire this grace [sprezzatura] from those who appear to possess it and take from each one the quality that seems most commendable.”
It’s an apt description, for two reasons. One is that I’m eternally restless, “always roaming with a hungry heart,” as Tennyson’s Ulysses describes himself. The other is that for me, success is as much about what I learn as what I make or do. Or at least that’s what I tell myself. The truth is I also care about making a mark—production as well as consumption. I want to share what I learn, whether it’s something I get from others (as in The Fabric of Civilization) or figure out myself (as in The Power of Glamour).
“Bee and flowers in style of Ghirlandaio” by Stable Diffusion
So how should I spend my time? What are my current ambitions? How do I keep my many ideas from spinning around so much that I do nothing substantial? It helps to have some commitments.
What’s next?
It’s not an answer to the biggest questions, but I’m delighted to say that I’ve signed on as a Contributing Editor to Works in Progress, the London-based publication for whom I wrote this article on the evolution of polyester. Through 2023, I’ll be writing several features, editing a special issue, and spearheading the programming at a special event. Details to follow.
What makes a book “a success”?
Someone recently asked me how I evaluated the success of my books. It’s not an easy question. One answer is the substance of the books. I believe that each has added something new and significant to the world of ideas and done so in a way that is pleasurable to read. I learned a lot from the research and thinking it took to write them, and I’m proud of the results. A more objective measure of success is that they’ve all stayed in print, continuing to sell after the initial attention died down. People still discover and share them. They are still part of the relevant conversations.
Then there are the actual numbers. Back in September, you may have read the claim that “50% of books published sell fewer than 12 books,” a number derived from discovery in an antitrust case challenging the proposed merger of two major publishing houses, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster (publisher of two of my books). This claim is not true, as explained in this excellent post and a couple of knowledgeable comments.
Book sales are complicated, especially in aggregate. Do you lump together sales of adult coloring books, self-published family histories, wonky think tank volumes, and the latest Stephen King novel? If so, do the numbers mean anything significant? Further complicating the question, as my latest royalty statements demonstrate, is that what the author and reader think of as the same book can be several different ones statistically. Each different format—hardback, paperback, ebook, audiobook—counts as a separate item.
But it’s safe to say that even from major presses most books sell relatively few copies. Like moviemaking, publishing is what economist Art DeVany calls “a business of the extraordinary.” It loses money on most of its products and makes it up with a few big, often surprising, hits. “Roughly 66% of those books from the top 10 publishers sold less than 1,000 copies over [their first] 52 weeks,” writes Kristen McLean, who crunched the numbers for NPD BookScan after the questionable “12 books” stat started making the rounds. (For details, see her comments here.) In the scheme of things, therefore, I qualify as a successful author. My books aren’t best-sellers, but they’re pretty far out in the upper tail.
What does that mean in numbers?
It’s royalty statement season, when I get semi-annual statements on my book sales and payments for those that have “earned out” their advances. A publishing contract specifies the royalties an author gets for each book sold. The money the publisher pays the author to write the book is an “advance against royalties.” It’s usually divvied up in installments of, say, a third on signing the contract, a third on approval of the submitted manuscript, and a third on publication. As long as the manuscript meets with the publisher's approval, the author keeps the full advance. The publisher is therefore taking a calculated risk on the book, guessing how well it might sell while also providing financing for writing it.2
As the book sells, the royalties specified in the contract are counted against the advance. If the total reaches the amount of the advance, the author begins to get royalty checks.
Not surprisingly, my books that generate royalty checks are the two for which I got the smallest advances: The Future and Its Enemies (I recently deposited a royalty check for ~$85) and The Fabric of Civilization. Although it has sold the most copies, The Substance of Style will never earn out its generous advance, which was my little slice of turn-of-the-century “irrational exuberance.”
The Power of Glamour has never taken off like my other books. Disregarding good advice about pitching articles to advertising trade publications in favor of organizing fun parties, I did a terrible job marketing it. I also think the title sets up the wrong expectations. (I wanted Decoding Glamour or Glamour Decoded.) Although it’s a beautiful object and written in an accessible way, it’s the book that does the heaviest intellectual lifting, constructing an original theory of glamour as a form of visual persuasion. If you’re expecting fun fluff, you’ll be disappointed. And if you want rhetorical theory you may not pick it up because you think “glamour” means “fashion.” Yet even that book’s disappointing numbers put it in the upper tail of book sales.
As of June 30, here are the totals, excluding translations:
1 A few years later, I acquired the more specific ambition of becoming editor of Reason magazine. Through a remarkable set of coincidences, I managed to achieve that goal as well—although I fell short of my ambitions for the role.
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The low-rise skyline of some of the nation’s most valuable land: downtown Santa Monica
In August, I intervened to inject some local policy knowledge into a kerfuffle over venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s hypocrisy on housing construction. Famous for his 2020 manifesto “A Time to Build,” Andreessen wouldn’t seem a likely NIMBY. Yet there he was, along with his wife, filing a public comment to oppose a modest amount of multifamily housing construction in his ritzy suburb of Atherton.
It looked bad. It deserved rebuke. And it didn’t matter one bit.
Under a law passed in 1969, two years before Andreessen was born, every eight years California cities have to project the future demand for housing in several income tiers and specify where those homes might be built. The long, complicated and expensive ritual has produced many hearings and documents but not much housing. It offered too many loopholes.
Cities could lowball the numbers. They could identify theoretical sites in their plans but, when later faced with a real development proposal, impose delays and restrictions that required scaling down the project, increasing the sales prices or rents, or abandoning the whole thing. “Housing element” plans didn’t have to make sure the owners of prospective sites were willing to sell. As long as cities went through the right motions, they faced no consequences for obstructing new housing.
California has toughened its approval process for the housing-element plans, and cities face fines of up to $600,000 a month if they don’t come up with an acceptable plan. The state can review at any time whether the city is complying with its promises. If not, it can require streamlining development permissions to keep those commitments.
Cities that fail to meet their obligations face fines of up to $100,000 a month. They can lose state funding. The state can even suspend their power to regulate land use.
That article—read the whole thing on my website here—discussed several different policy reforms that will bring more housing to Atherton. But the “housing element” hammer is what I want to focus on here. It’s coming down hard on cities in my own area. The threat to suspend land-use regulations isn’t theoretical.
Cities that don’t meet their deadlines face something known as the “builder’s remedy,” where the state suspends local zoning laws until the city comes up with a suitable plan. Any development that files for permission during the suspension gets a free pass. That’s what has happened in two of the most housing-short coastal cities in Southern California: Santa Monica and Redondo Beach.
In Redondo Beach, a developer filed plans to convert a power plant slated for decommissioning next year. The plans envision a complex including residential towers with 2,290 units, along with office, commercial, and hotel space. It’s the kind of large-scale projects current residents hate. Another 5,000 people might be able to live in Redondo Beach! The application was filed in August. The city had submitted a Housing Element plan in July but hadn’t yet received approval. Redondo Beach’s Housing Element plan gained state approval a month later. Litigation will undoubtedly ensue.
Meanwhile, in Santa Monica a dozen projects with nearly 4,000 housing units slipped in while the city’s zoning ordinances were suspended. They include a 15-story 2,000-unit building in a low-rise, mostly light-industrial area near Santa Monica’s eastern border with L.A. Nearby businesses include the headquarters of Riot Games. Santa Monica is a major employment center whose housing hasn’t kept up with its job creation, leading to major traffic jams heading to the freeways. As a resident of West L.A., just east of the 405, I feel the effects personally. Unless I can walk to my destination, I generally avoid going west of the 405 after 3:00 p.m. because coming back even a couple of miles can easily take 45 minutes. No afternoon eye doctor appointments for me.
A couple of weeks ago Matt Yglesias had a good Substack post looking back on a decade of the YIMBY movement. It traces some of the intellectual origins of the successful efforts to loosen regulations on housing, focusing mostly on the activist world. I’d ding it for giving short shrift to the academics at UCLA, USC, and Berkeley, whose empirical research has been important to understanding what the obstacles to new housing, particularly in California, are. Also important are Ed Glaeser at Harvard and Joe Gyourko at Wharton, whose housing research I first wrote about way back in 2002 and revisited in 2007, when I didn’t quite realize just how bad a mess California’s restrictions had made.
I have evidence from as far back as the seventh grade demonstrating my obsession with housing policy. In 1987, when Matt Yglesias was in elementary school, I published a WSJ op-ed titled “Tapping the Shadow Housing Market,” which I’ve just dug up and added to my website. It anticipates the recent reforms loosening parking mandates and restrictions on “accessory dwelling units.”
Unlike many of the housing-obsessed, I’ve never had the inclination to impose my personal lifestyle preferences on everyone else. I prefer dense, urban neighborhoods but defend the suburbs. I believe that building will follow demand and prices will send the right signals, resulting in a mixture of housing that reflects a mixture of tastes, budgets, and lifecycle stages—if, that is, regulators allow housing markets flexibility. Count me in the Market Urbanism camp, not the “everyone should ride a bike” school.
When I moved to L.A. in 1986, one of the things I most appreciated was the abundance of housing. I want today’s young people to feel the same possibilities I felt back then, including the chance to have their own space. And, like Matt, I think things are looking up:
Overall, though, I think the future is bright. Ten years ago, housing reform was considered a bizarre niche issue that nobody in the audience cared about and where change was politically impossible. Now, it’s a mainstream topic of discussion with real political champions, local activist groups around the country, and a blueprint for state-level change. More and more people also acknowledge these days that housing is just so central to the economy that you can’t treat it as a tiny quirky obsession of urbanists — anyone who cares about sustainable growth needs to care about housing supply.
Misc. links
How Substack got started. I read the free version of Sinocism, which is excellent. If I had a more direct professional interest in China I would definitely pay for a subscription.
Robert Graboyes, an economist with wide-ranging interests that overlap with mine, has a good Substack called Bastiat’s Window. Most of it is pretty serious. But this post about celebrity encounters made me laugh several times.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on February 24, 2023 • Comments
