Alan Jacobs points to a wonderful passage in Claude Levi-Strauss’s Triste Tropiques:

In Martinique, I had visited rustic and neglected rum-distilleries where the equipment and the methods used had not changed since the eighteenth century. In Puerto Rico, on the other hand, in the factories of the company which enjoys a virtual monopoly over the whole of the sugar production, I was faced by a display of white enamel tanks and chromium piping. Yet the various kinds of Martinique rum, as I tasted them in front of ancient wooden vats thickly encrusted with waste matter, were mellow and scented, whereas those of Puerto Rico are coarse and harsh. We may suppose, then, that the subtlety of the Martinique rums is dependent on impurities the continuance of which is encouraged by the archaic method of production. To me, this contrast illustrates the paradox of civilization: its charms are due essentially to the various residues it carries along with it, although this does not absolve us of the obligation to purify the stream. By being doubly in the right, we are admitting our mistake. We are right to be rational and to try to increase our production and so keep manufacturing costs down. But we are also right to cherish those very imperfections we are endeavouring to eliminate. Social life consists in destroying that which gives it its savour.

Comments Alan: “The underlying philosophy of liberalism, and the consumer culture it generates, condensed into nine sentences.” I love the fact that he gave in to the urge to count the sentences. That seems so . . . Bacardian.

Image: Christina Hsu.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, responds to the uproar about the company’s clandestine psychological experiment on its members:

“This was part of ongoing research companies do to test different products, and that was what it was; it was poorly communicated. And for that communication we apologize. We never meant to upset you.”

So an experiment designed to explore how the delivery of information can be programmed to manipulate people’s emotional states was just part of routine product-development testing? No worries. I apologize for getting upset.

Image: Detail of Andre Brouillet’s “Une Leçon Clinique à la Salpêtrière“

Mother Jones excerpts my brief essay on the malleability of our sense of time, “The Patience Deficit,” from the anthology What Should We Be Worried About? Here’s the essay’s first paragraph:

I’m concerned about time — the way we’re warping it and it’s warping us. Human beings, like other animals, seem to have remarkably accurate internal clocks. Take away our wristwatches and our cell phones and we can still make pretty good estimates about time intervals. But that faculty can also be easily distorted. Our perception of time is subjective; it changes with our circumstances and our experiences. When things are happening quickly all around us, delays that would otherwise seem brief begin to seem interminable. Seconds stretch out. Minutes go on forever. “Our sense of time,” observed William James in his 1890 masterwork The Principles of Psychology, “seems subject to the law of contrast.”

Read on.

Image: detail of “Forest (4)” by Gerhard Richter.

Throwing his considerable weight behind the post-autistic economics movement, Robert Skidelsky offers a calm but blistering critique of the “mainstream economics” curriculum that has come to dominate university teaching. Arguing that mainstream economics, with its pseudo-scientific mathematical models, is at heart an “ideology of the free market” that can circumscribe thinking and excuse failed policies, Skidelsky argues that the context of economics teaching needs to be broadened to include history, philosophy, politics, and psychology — to reflect the true economic lives of people.

It has become an article of faith that any move toward a more open or “pluralist” approach to economics portends regression to “pre-scientific” modes of thought, just as the results of the European Parliament election threaten to revive a more primitive mode of politics. Yet institutions and ideologies cannot survive by mere incantation or reminders of past horrors. They have to address and account for the contemporary world of lived experience. For now, the best that curriculum reform can do is to remind students that economics is not a science like physics, and that it has a much richer history than is to be found in the standard textbooks.

I suspect that Skidelsky’s piece will provoke a productive debate. Brad Delong has already responded:

We have no business offering a narrow economics B.A. at all. At the undergraduate social-science level, the right way of organizing a major curriculum is to offer some flavor of history and moral philosophy: enough history that students are not ignorant, enough sociology and anthropology that students are not morons, and enough politics and philosophy that students are not fools. (And, I would say, a double dose of economics to ensure that majors understand what is key about our civilization and do not get the incidence of everything wrong.)

And here (pdf download) is the report of the Post-Crash Economics Society that spurred Skidelsky’s comments.

Via The Browser. Image by Penguincakes.