Angina Monologue 26

G. tells us his muse is a goober. Mine is a crusty old retired Sith Lord.

Who, this morning, appeared to have descended into goobertude.

I found him curled up in the easy chair, surrounded by the pride. Whose rapt attention he was holding by blowing enormous soap bubbles.

The cats? Their official names are Angel, Sakura, Stormy, and Zoe. Angel is a Siamese mix with wonderfully soft fur, Sakura is almost purebred Siamese, Stormy is a Siamese mixed calico, and Zoe, the oddball (in more ways than one), is a tuxedo cat. Based on their personalities, I have privately renamed them Ming the Merciless, Squeakums, Bear, and Monkey.

Ming the Merciless received her epessë when I settled into the meditation chamber one evening, popped off the helmet, and seconds later felt a paw full of prickly little claws bat at my bare and heavily scarred noggin. Squeakums is a very large, dominating cat with a very small, squeaky meow. Bear walks like a bear, acts like a dog, and is the only cat I’ve ever known who was downright clumsy. Monkey is the smallest and most agile of the cats, with a malicious streak rivaling Ming’s.

Regardless, they were all clustered around His Majesty, watching in fascination as he blew enormous bubble after enormous bubble, each six inches or better in diameter, which went oscillating across the room until they hit a surface, were batted by a paw, or simply evaporated, whereupon they disappeared in an instant. To the great puzzlement of the felines.

See here, Lord Vader. The physics of bubbles is fascinating; you really ought to investigate it for yourself. For example, it’s clear that soap is needed to reduce the surface tension enough to give stability to a thin film of water. But is it possible to reduce the surface tension so much that it becomes counterproductive? I can’t imagine blowing enormous bubbles of diethyl ether, with its very low surface tension, though it might entertaining to try.

If I want a room full of stoned cats, we have catnip for that.

And does the viscosity of the soap solution play a role? Soap increases the viscosity of water enormously. And now I find myself wondering what would happen if I made a soap solution with ether as solvent.

Drunken cats.

You make a powerful case, but I think the explosive nature of ether in air rules out any such experiment.

I think His Majesty misses Mon Calamari ballet. Calamari means something a bit different on this planet.

It’s a shame. Giant soap bubbles are a wonderful metaphor for so much in our civilization today.

Well, you had to know that was coming.

The metaphor is familiar enough: A bubble takes up space and appears substantial, but there is very little real substance to it. It is also only metastable, and a sufficient disturbance causes an abrupt transition to a more stable state. The bubble reverts to a few small drops of water, which accurately reflect the real substance present.

The classic economic bubble is the tulip mania of the Netherlands in the 17th century. Tulips were already the rage, since they had more colorful blossoms than indigenous northern European flowers, and then a number of tulips cropped up that showed color breaks — very likely from a virus infection, though this was not known at the time. These fancy tulips soon commanded premium prices. Which led to speculation, which drove their prices even higher. At the height of the mania, you could buy a sizable house with a single tulip bulb. The bulbs had modest value as producers of unusual flowers; their price at the peak of the mania was grossly in excess of that value. Speculators were, in effect, gambling on each other’s greed.

Sounds like a good gamble to me.

It is, until it isn’t. Eventually a few of the speculators regained their senses. I can almost imagine some speculator’s wife clapping him over the head with a “Sukkel! You’re investing our life savings in verdomme flower bulbs?” and the speculator sheepishly trying to sell off his bulbs before the other speculators got clapped over their heads by their wives. And then everyone was rushing to sell off his bulbs before the price collapsed completely — and most were unsuccessful.

Such economic bubbles are fairly common occurrences. They are ruinous for the speculators directly involved, and sometimes there is a significant penumbra of hardship, as other sectors of the economy that have adjusted to accommodate the bubble find it painful to readjust. But the net effect is to transfer assets from speculators to prudent investors, which is good for the economy in the long run. Bubbles destroy the unsound but generally spare the sound.

Certain factors can help the bubble along. Bubbles are most common in durable markets, such as housing, where it is difficult to ramp up the supply quickly and the good remains around for a long time after its price collapses. Tulips take several years to mature to blooming size, and then can bloom for years. Houses take a long time to build but remain standing for decades to centuries afterwards.

One can almost always spot a bubble. One need simply compare the prices being commanded with the actual credible value of the underlying asset. For example, when a plot of land goes for $40K, and the cost of constructing a house on it is $80K, and yet houses are selling for $250K, you have to conclude that there is a significant housing bubble. The speculators who drive a bubble are almost always well aware that it is a bubble, but they hope to be the lucky one who cashes out at just the right moment with a fortune. It’s massive self-deception.

It’s the same with stocks. The old rule of thumb is that, if your stock is not returning about 10% per annum, it’s overvalued. There are rare exceptions: A company that is investing heavily in expansion may show a low rate of return, but you should be able to verify that the company’s assets are actually growing. But unless you have good reason to believe the company has found a new market niche, or has its hands on a valuable new technology, or has some other good reason to believe it can usefully expand, caution is strongly advised.

But caution is boring and won’t make you rich quickly.

Which is how all con games work. The sucker is greedy and practically asking to be conned.

These single-sector bubbles are usually pretty harmless to the economy as a whole. More damaging is the macroeconomic business cycle, which is a kind of bubble encompassing the entire economy. The analogy is imperfect; there is a vast literature on the business cycle that boils down to no one really knows. It’s not even clear it’s genuinely cyclic. But there are certainly elements of inflated expectations involved.

This rule of 10% is useful in other contexts as well. When a man inherits a fortune of $500 million in 1982, and is worth $10 billion in 2015, it sounds impressive. But at the average S&P return rate of 11.86 per cent, he should be worth $20 billion.

Which brings us to the matter of inflated reputations.

Just so. But let’s come back to that in a moment. For now, consider what happens when a government inflates an entire economy, propping up both prices and wages beyond their natural level. There is good evidence that this is exactly what took place in the two years prior to the 1929 Wall Street crash. And the subsequent efforts to continue inflating the economy, in order to continue propping up wages, created some winners (workers who manged to hold a job at their existing wage) and some serious losers (workers who found themselves chronically out of work.) We’re seeing very much the same pattern today.

But these are not the most interesting examples. Economics is, after all, the dismal science.

A celebrity is basically a person with an inflated reputation. You recall my favorite bumper sticker.

Yeah. The one that says “Quit making stupid people famous.” On the evidence, no one is reading it.

Oh, they’re reading it, all right, and all are sagely nodding their heads in agreement. The disagreement is over who the stupid people are.

The first people that came to mind when I first saw the bumper sticker were Paris Hilton and the Kardashians. I suspect the great majority of people would agree with those choices. But there is apparently a significant audience who thinks these people are actually significant.

Others will think of politicians, invariably of the other party. Which is kind of ironic, given that the vast majority of politicians are quite bright people. Their failings lie elsewhere: Self-deception, narcissism, and psychopathology come to mind. Which is the biggest problem with the bumper sticker: It’s not just stupid people we need to quit making famous. We need to quit making wicked people famous.

Does this have anything to do with your quiet retirement to this flyspeck of a planet?

Why, yes, I did it out of consideration for you, Lord It-was-all-Tarkin’s-fault-the-man-was-insane.

I have not yet decided what Trump is really up to, but I’m leaning towards “brilliant Democratic false flag operation.” The secret of Trump’s success, so far, is that he is extraordinarily good at two things:

First, he is extraordinarily good at being a celebrity. There is actually a modest talent involved here. We may be repelled by bombast of that magnitude, but it seems to appeal to a lot of people. Collecting and disposing of trophy spouses is practically a signature of the professional celebrity. The bad toupee may actually be calculated; it deceives people that he is human.

Second, Trump has a genius for pandering to the worst in the Republican party. The instinct is simply uncanny. And the reason I suspect a false-flag operation is that the more Trump endears himself to the lunatic fringe of the Republicans, the more he reduces his chances in the general election, in the unlikely event he actually secures the nomination. But I don’t believe he is actually planning on that, nor do I believe for a moment that he won’t run as an independent when he is passed over for the nomination. He means to split the party and give the Presidency to his old friend, Hillary.

The amazing thing is that the bubble has not burst yet. It has lasted this long only because of the deep anger felt by so  many Republicans towards basically everyone from their own party who has actually gotten elected. The reality is that politics is the art of the possible, and what is possible is surprisingly limited when the other side controls the Presidency, the judiciary, the bureaucracy,  the academy, and the media, and all you control is Congress. Which is an astounding inversion of the expectations of the Founders.

But, interesting as Trump’s case is, it is but a symptom of a far larger and more interesting bubble.

Oh?

Secular Western civilization.

Like George Santayana, I see the need for the transcendent even if I can’t bring myself to actually believe it. Western civilization was originally built on the transcendent values of Christianity, with its emphasis on personal responsibility and its amazing combination of a doctrine of the Fall and the doctrine of the Atonement. Christianity believes in a human race whose choices are consequential and which is simultaneously infinitely flawed and infinitely worthy. Oh — don’t make that hopeful face behind your mask; I’m not coming around to your hokey religion; it’s all balderdash. But very useful balderdash for building a decent civilization.

But secularism has eaten away at the heart of Western civilization, while simultaneously inflating expectations among its citizens. A cultural bubble, if you will. And just as the U.S. government is now practically giving away money to keep the monstrous bubble that is the U.S. economy inflated, so the progressive Left is blowing hot air in a frantic attempt to keep its cultural bubble inflated. This involves ever more strident promulgation of ever more ridiculous causes. Gay marriage is merely the most recent, most flagrant, and most ridiculous — but, don’t worry, they’ll find something even more ridiculous to keep the crusade growing.

Unfortunately, this bubble has a very significant penumbra, and there will be a lot of pain when it bursts — even among those who would otherwise be swimming in schadenfreude.

His Majesty is a pessimist. Unfortunately, also a realist.

But I have something he has not: A testimony of the Second Advent. Which is worth keeping in mind as we celebrate the first Advent.