The handwringing about Harris not giving press conferences is beginning to produce pushback like this, questioning the whole claim that The Press (as represented by the NY Times etc) is an essential element of democracy. The Press has failed miserably to defend democracy, and this won't be forgotten, whether or not democracy survives.
I think that if you have to ask about the connection between respecting the place and doing these extreme adventures, then you'll never know, as Louis Armstrong would put it. In particular, I would expect that "because it's there" would make a lot of sense as an explanation for someone who tries to do parkour in historic cathedrals.
Yes, in the sense that I think most people who do extreme things of some kind or another are actually not all that introspective about it. "I like it, I'm good at it, and it is fun" might be what the interior thoughts come down to for many. "Because it is there" is a way of saying, "Stop asking", or at least I think that's part of what George Mallory meant when he said it. Though it's also a bit of an American asking "Why is there gun violence?" in the country that has most of it--"because it is there" is a way that several generations of decidely Western explorers didn't have to say, "Because I feel like I ought to do as I please wherever I want to do it, and especially places that not-white people live". The cathedral parkour person kind of knows in a different way that he's likely to get stopped, and to offend people whose sense of offense will actually interfere with his pleasures.
Which is where I think things always get complicated: if the cathedral parkourist set out to explain it to *other people*, perhaps to gain permission, they know they'd have to do better than "because I want to".
How much have you read by people who do extreme things (like Mallory's successors)? Late Victorians like him tended not to be that reflective but climbers particularly are an incredibly reflective bunch. But there are also some pretty fundamental ways in which the perspective cannot be communicated, which is (maybe) the point of Mallory's comment.
Intense physical ordeals are hard to write about. But I do think there's something unspoken by the unreflective and reflective alike, which is that the rush to go to a place that is sentimentally described or imagined as a place no one has been--and then to go there again only in some new way (by oneself, without oxygen, using a new conveyance) often feels to me as if it's got a kind of family relationship to modern colonialism--a kind of compacted feeling of owning a place, of planting a flag, of being in a place better or more thoroughly than any previous inhabitant, of seeing a place with better eyes or a more refined sensibility or in the name of science. Rather than just personal or self-work, which makes sense, since a lot of 20th C. extreme exploration and exertion isn't just personal--it is expensive and requires specialized technology and lots of people assisting, both hired and volunteering. The infrastructure tends to disappear in the recounting and mythologizing--I remember being stunned as a twentysomething reading Lewis and Clark's journals and finding out that they were in charge of a substantial military expedition, since I thought it was just them and Sacagawea in a canoe for most of the trip.
Since only human beings seem to use categories like “beautiful” and “sacred,” then I suspect the answer to your final question has to be no. Without human beings to project their aesthetics and religious understanding onto a geological feature like the Grand Canyon (noting that “geological feature” is also a human category), it simply is there.
As for the NYT, I cancelled my subscription after many years of having one earlier this year. I couldn’t take it anymore. Their coverage of Biden vs. Trump was so specious—ignoring all of Trump’s madness and truly fascist intent, while groaning about Biden’s age. (No mention of Trump’s age, of course.) Now we get the “economics” slam on Harris, because…woman? If not, then why not say the true elephant in the room, that Trump knows precious little about anything, including economics, besides his self-conceit. He is uneducated, sly but unintelligent, and has lived off inherited wealth and bankers’ generosity for his entire adult life. I’ll take Harris, when it comes to whose economic policies will actually be something that she can understand.
Conceptually, they're not wrong that the price gouging narrative is quite nonsensical. One thing that stuck with me from my undergrad years is a professor, I'm recalling it might have been Mark Kuperberg or Dominic Tierney, quipping that you won't get far trying to explain a change with a constant. And the constant in this case is greed. Companies don't flip a greed switch to hike prices, nor do they flip an egalitarian switch when prices fall. Companies have always set prices at around the market-clearing price. During Covid, for instance, the price of eggs surged because there was an especially virulent strain of bird flu one year. They fell because that strain went away. Smart economists, regardless of ideology, more or less roundly reject price gouging as an explanation for inflation because it just doesn't fit the facts.
But it is true that the way that the media covers economic policy is broadly a caricature. But the piece that struck me as the prime example this week was this one from the Washington Post's Catherine Rampell (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/15/kamala-harris-price-gouging-groceries/?itid=ap_catherinerampell). It took what amounted to an applause line about price gouging, built a whole-cloth straw man of a policy out of that line, and proceeded to declare what a terrible idea this imagined policy would be. Which would I suppose be fine in a deep internet blog post entitled "this price control policy I made up would be really really bad"; but not so much when that price control policy she made up is attributed to a candidate. Worse, this approach is only taken in one direction. When Trump would spout some line about replacing Obamacare with "something great," the same legacy media would rush to try to piece the incoherent scraps into the most generous imaginable version of a policy, furrow their brows, and analyze what it could mean.
Meanwhile, to the extent Trump has proposed concrete policies, they refuse to actually analyze those policies in any way, much less with the enthusiasm they reserve for the straw manned versions they make up for Democrats. You'll find lots of analyses on various professors' substacks of the inflationary impact of Trump's concrete proposals to slap across the board tariffs on all imports, including massive ones on Chinese imports, and his promises to extend his deficit-exploding tax cuts and deport several million agriculture workers, all while politicizing the Fed, but the closest thing you'll find to that analysis in the legacy media is maybe Ezra Klein's podcast.
It all appears to be in the service of "balance" or "fairness" or "high mindedness" or some other virtue they imagine themselves to have. In reality, they're deep in the weeds of "opinions differ on the shape of the Earth" journalism. I doubt it's going anywhere.
I think if you assume greed is a constant, you do get far explaining a change as allowing greed to move down new channels. So sure, yes, if a dam breaks, that is the cause of a flood, but if you want to know why the flood went precisely where it did and did the specific damage that it did, you need to talk about some properties of water and some properties of topography. (And hence, you have a more precise understanding of what dangers the dam is guarding against and why you need to maintain it.) Meaning, you might judge that "supply chain disruptions" were a real first-order cause of price increases, but you might judge that opportunistic greed was a significant cause of their continuation past the point at which supply chains were in fact meaningfully disrupted. That is the case in some real historical cases of more localized price gouging/hoarding: it tends to persist until there is political attention on the gouging/hoarding. That attention can come in the form of legal consequences, political pressure, or regulatory action. But it's not a "natural market correction": monopolies don't have to behave naturalistically in that sense unless they're made to do so.
But also yes on "nobody seems to be analyzing what the GOP proposes to do", considering that what HAS be said concretely would be catastrophic by almost any sober centrist yardstick you could dream up. "Balance" here is bizarre: it applies only to the responsible people who propose policy adjustments that are basically within the spectrum of reasonable possibilities.
I think the issue is that what you see in practice is that food and energy prices are particularly volatile and sensitive to circumstances. The idea that retailers have particular pricing power just doesn't hold up. The proof is in that in other circumstances where those prices spike, they then come down. Yet politicians declare that those are a one-way ratchet-- that prices rise because of greed, but they fall because of pressure. So they turn to things like price controls that, uniformly and across the board, fail spectacularly. What annoys me about the reporting isn't that they don't give price controls their due as a good and valuable policy tool-- it's that they take an applause line about price gouging and turn it into a chin-stroking claim that a prospective Harris administration is going to turn the US into Venezuela with Chavez/Maduro-style price controls.
It's more broadly an issue with leftist policy thinking-- the notion that when markets deliver results that are bad, that the problem must be that the issue is the terrible and immoral market participants, and not the design of the markets. It's the converse of the right wing notion that in order for markets to deliver prosperity to lowly citizens, everyone needs to bow at the altar of the job creators to deliver their benevolent wealth from above.
In the case of Covid, inflation surged, in part due to a big fiscal expansion, but primarily because of supply chain issues (as evidenced by prices surging globally and not just in the US). Since then, it has come more or less back to normal. The "price gouging" story doesn't make sense at all in that context-- we just had a textbook price surge due to a simultaneous supply and demand shock, and what looks to be (knock on wood) a soft landing engineered by competent civil servants. From where I sit, we should take our win and go home...
On price gouging, here's a piece arguing that it can make inflation worse https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165176522003822#preview-section-cited-by
The handwringing about Harris not giving press conferences is beginning to produce pushback like this, questioning the whole claim that The Press (as represented by the NY Times etc) is an essential element of democracy. The Press has failed miserably to defend democracy, and this won't be forgotten, whether or not democracy survives.
I think that if you have to ask about the connection between respecting the place and doing these extreme adventures, then you'll never know, as Louis Armstrong would put it. In particular, I would expect that "because it's there" would make a lot of sense as an explanation for someone who tries to do parkour in historic cathedrals.
Yes, in the sense that I think most people who do extreme things of some kind or another are actually not all that introspective about it. "I like it, I'm good at it, and it is fun" might be what the interior thoughts come down to for many. "Because it is there" is a way of saying, "Stop asking", or at least I think that's part of what George Mallory meant when he said it. Though it's also a bit of an American asking "Why is there gun violence?" in the country that has most of it--"because it is there" is a way that several generations of decidely Western explorers didn't have to say, "Because I feel like I ought to do as I please wherever I want to do it, and especially places that not-white people live". The cathedral parkour person kind of knows in a different way that he's likely to get stopped, and to offend people whose sense of offense will actually interfere with his pleasures.
Which is where I think things always get complicated: if the cathedral parkourist set out to explain it to *other people*, perhaps to gain permission, they know they'd have to do better than "because I want to".
How much have you read by people who do extreme things (like Mallory's successors)? Late Victorians like him tended not to be that reflective but climbers particularly are an incredibly reflective bunch. But there are also some pretty fundamental ways in which the perspective cannot be communicated, which is (maybe) the point of Mallory's comment.
Intense physical ordeals are hard to write about. But I do think there's something unspoken by the unreflective and reflective alike, which is that the rush to go to a place that is sentimentally described or imagined as a place no one has been--and then to go there again only in some new way (by oneself, without oxygen, using a new conveyance) often feels to me as if it's got a kind of family relationship to modern colonialism--a kind of compacted feeling of owning a place, of planting a flag, of being in a place better or more thoroughly than any previous inhabitant, of seeing a place with better eyes or a more refined sensibility or in the name of science. Rather than just personal or self-work, which makes sense, since a lot of 20th C. extreme exploration and exertion isn't just personal--it is expensive and requires specialized technology and lots of people assisting, both hired and volunteering. The infrastructure tends to disappear in the recounting and mythologizing--I remember being stunned as a twentysomething reading Lewis and Clark's journals and finding out that they were in charge of a substantial military expedition, since I thought it was just them and Sacagawea in a canoe for most of the trip.
Since only human beings seem to use categories like “beautiful” and “sacred,” then I suspect the answer to your final question has to be no. Without human beings to project their aesthetics and religious understanding onto a geological feature like the Grand Canyon (noting that “geological feature” is also a human category), it simply is there.
As for the NYT, I cancelled my subscription after many years of having one earlier this year. I couldn’t take it anymore. Their coverage of Biden vs. Trump was so specious—ignoring all of Trump’s madness and truly fascist intent, while groaning about Biden’s age. (No mention of Trump’s age, of course.) Now we get the “economics” slam on Harris, because…woman? If not, then why not say the true elephant in the room, that Trump knows precious little about anything, including economics, besides his self-conceit. He is uneducated, sly but unintelligent, and has lived off inherited wealth and bankers’ generosity for his entire adult life. I’ll take Harris, when it comes to whose economic policies will actually be something that she can understand.
Conceptually, they're not wrong that the price gouging narrative is quite nonsensical. One thing that stuck with me from my undergrad years is a professor, I'm recalling it might have been Mark Kuperberg or Dominic Tierney, quipping that you won't get far trying to explain a change with a constant. And the constant in this case is greed. Companies don't flip a greed switch to hike prices, nor do they flip an egalitarian switch when prices fall. Companies have always set prices at around the market-clearing price. During Covid, for instance, the price of eggs surged because there was an especially virulent strain of bird flu one year. They fell because that strain went away. Smart economists, regardless of ideology, more or less roundly reject price gouging as an explanation for inflation because it just doesn't fit the facts.
But it is true that the way that the media covers economic policy is broadly a caricature. But the piece that struck me as the prime example this week was this one from the Washington Post's Catherine Rampell (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/15/kamala-harris-price-gouging-groceries/?itid=ap_catherinerampell). It took what amounted to an applause line about price gouging, built a whole-cloth straw man of a policy out of that line, and proceeded to declare what a terrible idea this imagined policy would be. Which would I suppose be fine in a deep internet blog post entitled "this price control policy I made up would be really really bad"; but not so much when that price control policy she made up is attributed to a candidate. Worse, this approach is only taken in one direction. When Trump would spout some line about replacing Obamacare with "something great," the same legacy media would rush to try to piece the incoherent scraps into the most generous imaginable version of a policy, furrow their brows, and analyze what it could mean.
Meanwhile, to the extent Trump has proposed concrete policies, they refuse to actually analyze those policies in any way, much less with the enthusiasm they reserve for the straw manned versions they make up for Democrats. You'll find lots of analyses on various professors' substacks of the inflationary impact of Trump's concrete proposals to slap across the board tariffs on all imports, including massive ones on Chinese imports, and his promises to extend his deficit-exploding tax cuts and deport several million agriculture workers, all while politicizing the Fed, but the closest thing you'll find to that analysis in the legacy media is maybe Ezra Klein's podcast.
It all appears to be in the service of "balance" or "fairness" or "high mindedness" or some other virtue they imagine themselves to have. In reality, they're deep in the weeds of "opinions differ on the shape of the Earth" journalism. I doubt it's going anywhere.
I think if you assume greed is a constant, you do get far explaining a change as allowing greed to move down new channels. So sure, yes, if a dam breaks, that is the cause of a flood, but if you want to know why the flood went precisely where it did and did the specific damage that it did, you need to talk about some properties of water and some properties of topography. (And hence, you have a more precise understanding of what dangers the dam is guarding against and why you need to maintain it.) Meaning, you might judge that "supply chain disruptions" were a real first-order cause of price increases, but you might judge that opportunistic greed was a significant cause of their continuation past the point at which supply chains were in fact meaningfully disrupted. That is the case in some real historical cases of more localized price gouging/hoarding: it tends to persist until there is political attention on the gouging/hoarding. That attention can come in the form of legal consequences, political pressure, or regulatory action. But it's not a "natural market correction": monopolies don't have to behave naturalistically in that sense unless they're made to do so.
But also yes on "nobody seems to be analyzing what the GOP proposes to do", considering that what HAS be said concretely would be catastrophic by almost any sober centrist yardstick you could dream up. "Balance" here is bizarre: it applies only to the responsible people who propose policy adjustments that are basically within the spectrum of reasonable possibilities.
I think the issue is that what you see in practice is that food and energy prices are particularly volatile and sensitive to circumstances. The idea that retailers have particular pricing power just doesn't hold up. The proof is in that in other circumstances where those prices spike, they then come down. Yet politicians declare that those are a one-way ratchet-- that prices rise because of greed, but they fall because of pressure. So they turn to things like price controls that, uniformly and across the board, fail spectacularly. What annoys me about the reporting isn't that they don't give price controls their due as a good and valuable policy tool-- it's that they take an applause line about price gouging and turn it into a chin-stroking claim that a prospective Harris administration is going to turn the US into Venezuela with Chavez/Maduro-style price controls.
It's more broadly an issue with leftist policy thinking-- the notion that when markets deliver results that are bad, that the problem must be that the issue is the terrible and immoral market participants, and not the design of the markets. It's the converse of the right wing notion that in order for markets to deliver prosperity to lowly citizens, everyone needs to bow at the altar of the job creators to deliver their benevolent wealth from above.
In the case of Covid, inflation surged, in part due to a big fiscal expansion, but primarily because of supply chain issues (as evidenced by prices surging globally and not just in the US). Since then, it has come more or less back to normal. The "price gouging" story doesn't make sense at all in that context-- we just had a textbook price surge due to a simultaneous supply and demand shock, and what looks to be (knock on wood) a soft landing engineered by competent civil servants. From where I sit, we should take our win and go home...