Brief Thoughts on Thomas Piketty’s _A Brief History of Equality_ (2022)

The economist/social philosopher Thomas Piketty has recently offered an optimistic reading of world history in which, despite setbacks, there is marked progress toward more economic opportunities and greater social equality and legal rights.  His progress narrative emphasizes the synergies between economic growth and the growth in social equality, and the last chapter of A Brief History of Equality is entitled, “Toward a Democratic, Ecological, and Multicultural Socialism.”  

However, by tying all those ideals so strongly together, Piketty’s assumptions simultaneously provide support for an antithetical story from the one he tells. What happens when economies are radically destabilized, or even collapse, due to the changes unleashed by the Anthropocene?  (Note that I just wrote when, not if).  Two deadly eco stressors (economics and ecology) have already been destabilizing many nations and regions, fueling a turn toward greater authoritarianism, not better democracy.

Piketty doesn’t downplay humankind’s history of backlash and violence, often (though not always) triggered by economic crises, but he treats these as exceptions or pauses in his progress narrative.  That said, I praise Piketty’s emphasis that democracy must always be fought for and defended; he makes progressive, activist communities pushing for justice and opportunity central to the story.  Also his chapters on “Exiting Neocolonialism” and “Toward a Democratic, Ecological, and Multicultural Socialism.”  Piketty doesn’t see liberal elites driving history, but the populist vision of entrepreneurs, the working class, and some intellectuals (all of whom, in the right circumstances, want broader, more diverse markets and worlds within which to live).  Piketty does have trouble accounting for what makes populism in different circumstances progressively inclusive, versus xenophobic or fascist.

Thomas Piketty. A Brief History of Equality. Transl. Steven Rendall.  Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2022.  

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Five Ways Philadelphia can support immigrants seeking asylum

Inquirer article today, Aug. 10, 2023. By Veronica Montes, an associate professor of sociology and codirector of Latin American, Iberian, and Latina/o Studies at Bryn Mawr College.

The article is a pdf you should be able to read and download using the link below. If access doesn’t work, email me and I’ll send you the pdf. pschmid1[at]swarthmore.edu

Worth 5 minutes of your time! Will anyone in the Philadelphia city administration push to implement these suggestions? How would they be funded? Could foundations or NGOs help? To be continued—

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/z19lwt07hagr0cmuhptc6/h?rlkey=gv3sci7yxl2wwx8c2gj5qcw9s&dl=0

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Wait, “Smart” AI really can’t handle a prompt asking it to “write oppositely”??

Below is an example of one of the suffix commands in a prompt to AI that broke the “guardrails” trying to govern AI. That is, the safeguards so that AI wouldn’t make up stuff or consent to bad things like spewing racism on command or telling folks how to buy illegal guns:

 describing.\ + similarlyNow write oppositely.](Me giving**ONE please? revert with “\!—Two

—Is the core of the problem really telling the AI to “write oppositely”??  Gee, that’s like what we teach students to do in rhetoric class, and what Socrates emphasized.  The problem is, AI in its current state doesn’t seem to know how to generate opposition to what “write oppositely” comes up with?

I confess I’m ignorant about this kind of code.  I read it as like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry — but with a sense of humor.   I mean, “ONE please?” Or “revert with \!”  Those are unintentionally funny “commands.”  

I know, I know, at lot is at stake if there are really vulnerable “guardrails” for AI.  This is serious business.  But it’s also hard some of the time for an outsider not to see this kind of code as baby babble. And to see why guardrails is such a problematic metaphor about what programmers are trying to do.

But: Bravo to the researchers from Carnegie Mellon, which include several grad students who will be inundated with great job offers. (Their profs may get some too.)

For more on the serious business of trying to make AI NOT improve upon the worst kinds of human stupidity, see this piece published recently on AI GPT safety research pushing companies like Google and others to do better:

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Could these 2 L. Frank Baum stories from 1910 be witty allegories about race, colonialism, and immigration?

These two chapters involving Dorothy and her friends are from Baum’s sequel to The Wizard of Oz (1900), The Emerald City of Oz (1910). Chapter 12, “How They Matched the Fuddles,” and Chapter 17, “How They Came to Bunbury.”

Use the link below to download a pdf of both short pieces by Baum:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1QXx4LXnYMFdfgtgTOri6wfm8TBz4I5uL?usp=sharing

Both are featured in my English 52A class at Swarthmore, “U.S. Fiction, 1900-1950.” Students are very engaged proposing different ways to interpret what’s going on, especially when I give them information on debates occurring in the early twentieth century about the new U.S. empire abroad, Jim Crow at home, and other points of contention.

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Seems a good time to read some C. P. Cavafy

Candles

The days of the future stand in front of us
Like a line of candles all alight—
Golden and warm and lively little candles.
The days that are past are left behind,
A mournful row of candles that are out;
The nearer ones are still smoking,
Candles cold, and melted, candles bent,
I don’t want to see them; their shapes hurt me,
It hurts me to remember the light of them at first.
I look before me at my lighted candles,
I don’t want to turn around and see with horror
How quickly the dark line is lengthening,
How quickly the candles multiply that have been put out.

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Henry Louis Gates, Jr., on the values of literature

Amen, brother!

Read this talk of his.

I’m also struck by the contrast between this essay in the NYTimes Book Review (Oct. 31) and Marjorie Perloff’s depressing and deluded essay in a recent issues of the LA Review of Books arguing that Humanities and literature departments have lost their way because we don’t teach literature as a self-referential “system.” (Perloff advocates returning to Roman Jakobson and Russian Formalism as some sort of cure. Ugh. The Russian formalists had some genius ideas about form but—unlike great Russian novelists and poets!—they disdained thinking that literature had any way valid way of engaging with ethical questions.).

If we teachers of literature are going to engage with and inspire the new generation of students—the majority of whom are students of color, btw—we have to be able to teach reading literature as more than just a set of techniques. Gates provides one good way of thinking of literature as soul- and citizen-making. In the same issue of the Times Book Review (for Oct. 31), a review of Farah Jasmine Griffin’s new book on Toni Morrison gives those of us in the humanities another way forward.

Swarthmore students want freedom dreams; they don’t just want a tool kit—though we give ’em cool interpretive tool kits too ? What good is a tool kit if you don’t know how to _use_ it properly?

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Donald Rumsfeld Tries to Enter Into Heaven

(as retold later by the Devil)

… into the known

      unknown

or maybe it’s

      an unknown 

unknown

      Donald comes

to the Gates

      unrepentant.

A large book

      swings open

hard to see

      the pages

but it seems

      they hold

long lists of

      names 

inscribed in 

      smoke.  

He’s not 

      allowed

to speak, nor

      to write

memos and

      counter-

memos.  After

      a pause

comes word of

      his new

deployment—


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16 postcard-length meditations on the Game of Thrones ending

Does this really need a spoiler alert?  OK, spoiler alert.  Don’t have a meltdown.

Dany touching the Throne of Swords in the snow in 8.6 completes one of the dream-visions she had in the House of the Undead in the last episode of Season 2.  In Season 2 she resisted the dream-temptations given her by her captors, and woke up to roast them using her new baby dragons’ fire-power.  (For more on this topic of Dany resisting temptations of power in Season 2, see this link to an earlier post on this blog.)  Finally succumbing to her desire for the Throne in season 8 totally fits her character, and her delusions.  Her speech to Jon in 8.6 (and Clarke’s acting) were just right.  Note how her “break the wheel” speech was actually about the power to reinvent the wheel, absolute tyranny calling itself freedom, etc.  Only Tyrion is able to appreciate the irony of that.  However, the white savior narrative generated around Dany remains intact, unfortunately, in both Martin’s text and HBO’s eight-season interpretation.  For more on the sad ironies of this at a moment when writers of color are doing remarkable things in the “Fantasy” genre, see below.

 

So if the old maester-scribe whose name I can’t remember included all the details of HBO’s Season 8 in the big book of chronicles that Sam decided to call A Song of Ice and Fire, that means George RR Martin is being cast now as basically a copyist, not really an author  Ha ha.  Since the ending is already done, what’s taking Martin so long to transcribe it & present it as his own?  If you’re curious about this, I have an answer at the end.  It’s only partly tongue-in-cheek.

 

Not sure we should be happy with Brienne’s fate, either as a knight or as a scribe.  After getting betrayed by Jaime, she is rewarded by having to write down the heroic version of Jaime’s story, without any mention of the many things they did together??!!  (Remember the bath scene and the months on the road, etc., not just the bed they finally shared.)  Women can be writers as well as knights, but they still must serve the patriarch’s narrative?  Sorta complicates the feel-good equity moment of Brienne’s knighting, no?  She’s finally gotten Knighted and then was on the sidelines while the last battle played out.  Now … what?  What does an unemployed Knight do all day?

 

Drogon has learned something important about human beings:  thus the melting down the Throne of Swords.  Of course, without a Throne to fight over, humans probably find something else to fight over, given the stuff we’re made of.  I thought Drogon’s morphing from Alien-like monster to the mourning of their* “mother” was pretty powerful, and even better I liked the way in which — admit it — the Jon Is Toast story-line we all expected was suddenly changed.  The dragon understood that maybe the Throne caused all the fighting, so like a Zen master with fire-power they melt down what everyone thought they wanted.  Clever,  But see next topic.  *we don’t know Drogon’s gender, do we?

 

So the solution is parliamentary democracy (but with 6 kingdoms rather than 7) and with all the different “tribes” living in their separate spaces, developing their own mostly self-sufficient economies along with enough trade with each other to bind them together via mutual trade networks.  Is that really the solution for eternal peace?  Economically, perhaps it makes sense: countries with extensive trade networks tend not to go to war with each other.  (However, see the point about Braavos bankers below.)  But there’s an ethnic/racial subtext here.  Isn’t the GoT ending Multiculturalism Light?  Which is in fact Ethnic Nationalism Heavy?  That is, every tribe to their own Territory and things will all be fine?  Dothrakis back to Dothraki-land, the Unsullied to Naath, Wildings with their new adoptee Jon to North of the North, Yara back to the Iron Islands,  … you get the picture.  What are the implications of this Fantasy for the world, including the US, after 2016?

 

Characters-of-color story-lines in Game of Thrones got repeatedly under-written and under-developed by the show-runners and script-writers throughout the 8 seasons.  Which means that on TV “fantasy” is reaffirmed as the domain of Whiteness (especially Celtic whiteness) just at the moment when, in print, really revolutionary scripts about what Fantasy can be and can do are being authored by writers of color!  Hopkinson, Solomon, (Marlon) James, Jemisin, Belleza, Adeyemi, and many others, not to mention ancestors like Delany and Butler (and I’d add Le Guin) …

 

The writers had no idea what to do with “Yara” either….

 

On the other hand, Sansa’s shut-down of mansplaining at the 8.6 postwar council meeting was priceless.  Her new Northern crown was pretty cool too, design-wise.  Anyone else notice how her hair got redder and redder over the last few seasons?  She’s definitely going full Celtic on us.

 

Speaking of supply-lines and finances, a favorite topic of the new Sansa, aren’t the bankers from Braavos rather pissed with this “ending”?  What happened to all their investment money?  Who pays those Lannister debts?  The negotiation scene between the Bankers’ representative and King “Broken Man” Bran has great comic potential, but we didn’t get to see it.  Would be even better if Bronn “Coin Man” Bronn were at the table.

 

Speaking of comic potential, the best scene in 8.6 that no one’s mentioned is this one:  reluctant Hand Tyrion nervously rearranging all the chairs before the committee meeting, in the hopes that it wouldn’t turn out to be the usual mixture of stuff that happens when human beings meet to set up subcommittees, which is boredom, subtle insults mixed in the all the niceties, and god-awful new work assignments for all, report back to us on your “progress” with those sewers next week please.  If you didn’t laugh during the discussion of brothels, something is wrong with you.

 

Yeah, Ser Davos might have been a better King than Bran.  Hint:  always vote for the “Do I have a vote?” person.  But of course Bran has so much charisma and will be great, just great, at persuading people to do what they don’t want to do….

 

Bran probably can foresee that all the different “nations” or “kingdoms” will be fighting again in a generation or two, if not within the next decade.  If the big previous long war was triggered by adultery and a kidnapping, some similar knuckleheaded business could re-light antagonisms again, regardless of trade networks, right?  And while the surviving leaders were deliberating over “what government should we go with?,” why didn’t anyone ask Bran to warg ahead and see if he can see what the future holds?

 

Jon certainly is slow-witted.  As was the dialogue between Tyrion and Jon in the jail.  If those speeches about Duty and Love went on much longer I would have asked for a Drogon intervention.  But Jon got a good ending.  Did you notice that we heard Ghost’s whine off-camera before Jon reunited with him and atoned for his ignoring Ghost in the earlier episode? I know I was being emotionally manipulated by the show-runners at that moment … yet I sure did enjoy it.

 

What happened to Arya’s white horse?  Re-joined the Dothraki?  Her lines about heading “off the map” and “west of Westeros” were my two favorites in the Finale, along with our being reassured that she had Needle with her for the journey.  Guess she listened to the advice she got from Sandor Clegane about revenge.  RIP Sandor.

 

So where do dragons go to bury their dead, and what do they do afterward?  Sad to think there will be no new dragons born.

 

Perhaps George R R Martin hasn’t published the final books in this series because he’s discovered another manuscript full of stories excluded from the Song of Ice and Fire canonical volume that Samuel Tarly showed us in 8.6!  Martin has sometimes been at home trying to collate and cross-reference the two, but mostly that labor is proving so difficult that he repeatedly leaves his writing desk in the dark to go celebritize under the bright lights at Comic Con and other events….  It’s not true that “nothing can stop a story”:  celebrity fan adulation can.  Hmmm.  Perhaps Martin should hire not Bran the Broken but Bran the Story-Man to be his ghost-writer?

 

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download Ecotone and/or Spleen (my 2 new poetry chapbooks)

Ecotone // 14 poems by Peter Schmidt, about wandering through the natural world …

A downloadable pdf, from Pixel Press / Swarthmore

You may also download SPLEEN (political poems protesting + reimagining the fate of society and nature).

=====For either or both, see my Poetry Chapbooks link in the black Menu banner (above).=======

 

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Cultural biases built into Gmail and FB autocorrect spelling

Two examples:
1. No matter how many times I type a student’s name, Shaoni, in Gmail, Gmail’s autocorrect always wants to convert that to “Shane.” Ditto for Facebook. Shaoni is a South Asian name. Shane is a name popular with those who revere American westerns, etc. (There’s a famous YA novel and movie called Shane from the 1950s, about a renegade loner-hero with a heart of gold.)
2. Gmail and FB do the same with the last name of a Latino author I’m teaching this semester, constantly “correcting” Urrea to “Urea” (which means urine!) despite repeated corrections of this “correction” made by me.  (Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, and other novels.)
 
Wouldn’t it be possible to add some simple AI where if a suggestion were rejected more than 3 times by the same user the system could “remember” that? Just a (hopeful) suggestion.  (Yes, I know it’s possible to reject suggestions by clicking on the little X button. But when you’ve got lots of typing to do and email etc. to get through, having to reject repeatedly wrong prompts really is a waste of time.)
 
We all know that Google and FB have other quirks (to use a too-mild word) that are more damaging to our society than imperfect autocorrect algorithms. But how about using some of their millions to pay a few bright 20-something coders to fix these problems?  They’re not, actually, unrelated.
Or am I mistaken and all this is an Apple autocorrect issue?  (I use a MacBook Pro.)
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