Asymmetrical Information

That's Stirling!

Tyler Cowen and Will Wilkinson have both recently linked to one of my favourite writers, Stirling Newberry, and so I thought this might be a good time to call attention to his underappreciated talents.

Mr Newberry's work first came to my attention on TPMCafe. Frequently on TPMCafe, I would read some piece of econoimc commentary so bizarre that it put me in mind of that famous quote about American diplomacy: "You Americans never do anything simply stupid. No, you only do enormously complex stupid things, that make the rest of us wonder if we might be missing something." Shortly, I began to notice that every time I read some perplexing bit of economic nonsense that fretted my brow with the elusive search for its meaning, the author turned out to be one Stirling Newberry.

Now, lots of economics writers, especially those found on political sites, make claims that are wildly exaggerated, misleading, or frankly untrue. But the errors are generally all of a piece: they distort reality in order to support their ideological biases. Not so Mr Newberry. He distorts reality for no apparent reason. His grandiose fantasies are Art for the sake of Art.

The essential insanity of the last decade has been this - by creating a vast dollar glut, the United States has managed to create an inflationary rev up of the world economy. By moving much farther up the curve of diminishing returns of oil production, it has manged to create a small amount of extra growth, and a great deal of extra profit and ownership for those involved in the oil production.

The back end of this is flooding the middle east with dollars, which allows theocratic, dictatorial and criminal regimes to fund various destabilizing activities. Both the US invasion of Iraq and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon were the second part of the insanity - that the brute military instrument could be used to deal with the second order effects of the dollar glut. The continuous failure of this policy benefits both extremes - both the oilarchies which can fund radicalism, the militarism of the right wing, and the conflict between the two which persuaded ordinary people that they must choose sides.

His writing calls to mind my very favourite piece of English literature: Mark Twain's A Cure for the Blues. Mr Twain's description of G. Ragsdale McClintock fits Stirling Newberry so perfectly that I half expected to find the ghost of Samuel Clemens breathing over my shoulder as I read, gathering notes to transmit, perhaps in a dream, to his younger self:

No one can take up this book and lay it down again unread. Whoever reads one line of it is caught, is chained; he has become the contented slave of its fascinations; and he will read and read, devour and devour, and will not let it go out of his hand till it is finished to the last line, though the house be on fire over his head. And after a first reading he will not throw it aside, but will keep it by him, with his Shakespeare and his Homer, and will take it up many and many a time, when the world is dark and his spirits are low, and be straightway cheered and refreshed. Yet this work has been allowed to lie wholly neglected, unmentioned, and apparently unregretted, for nearly half a century.

The reader must not imagine that he is to find in it wisdom, brilliancy, fertility of invention, ingenuity of construction,
excellence of form, purity of style, perfection of imagery, truth to nature, clearness of statement, humanly possible situations, humanly possible people, fluent narrative, connected sequence of events--or philosophy, or logic, or sense. No; the rich, deep, beguiling charm of the book lies in the total and miraculous ABSENCE from it of all these qualities--a charm which is completed and perfected by the evident fact that the author, whose naive innocence easily and surely wins our regard, and almost our worship, does not know that they are absent, does not even suspect that they are absent. When read by the light of these helps to an understanding of the situation, the book is delicious--profoundly and satisfyingly delicious.

. . . He liked words--big words, fine words, grand words, rumbling, thundering, reverberating words; with sense attaching if it could be got in without marring the sound, but not otherwise. He loved to stand up before a dazed world, and pour forth flame and smoke and lava and pumice-stone into the skies, and work his subterranean thunders, and shake himself with earthquakes, and stench himself with sulphur fumes. If he consumed his own fields and vineyards, that was a pity, yes; but he would have his eruption at any cost. Mr. McClintock's eloquence--
and he is always eloquent, his crater is always spouting--is of the pattern common to his day, but he departs from the custom of the time in one respect: his brethren allowed sense to intrude when it did not mar the sound, but he does not allow it to intrude at all.

Mr Newberry has so far been largely unheralded, and I gather, unrewarded, for his labours on our behalf. So let me be perhaps the first to say: bravo, sir! Well done! You will the world an infinitely richer place than you found it. And kudos to Josh Marshall, for having the courage to introduce some comic relief into economics coverage.