Year of Economics – June 30, 2003 – 3: The Tooth Problem
Dear Abhay,
As I read your letter, feeling began to return to the numb and distorted left side of my face. Accompanying the feeling a dull pain throbbed with increasing frequency in my first upper left premolar. I understood these severe oral sensations to be the aftereffects of the afternoon’s visit to the dentist. Nevertheless, I had to wrestle my mind to prevent it from relating them to the experience of reading The Mangoes Problem.
Lin and I sat side by side on The Twilight Limited, the train heading east from Chicago to visit my parents outside of Jackson, Michigan. Approximately once every forty-five seconds, we increased our distance from Chicago and reduced our distance to Jackson by one mile, describing a line that curved gently around the southern shores of Lake Michigan, through the Indiana sand dunes. Behind us the sun, true to the train’s name, began to set. With each mile of track, and as I read each page of your response to my first letter, I felt as if I were travelling deeper into economic thought, closer to the place of my birth in Flint, further into the incessant agony building in my mouth. I repeated to myself like a mantra: nothing connects these events; nothing except a coincidence of timing, and perhaps the persistent, common feelings of inadequacy aroused by mathematics, my place of origin, and the dentist. This, I told myself, is not a journey into my tooth.
Or is it? That initial coincidence of timing (mangoes, train, dentist), in the weeks since it occurred, has led me to certain unexpected conclusions. My initial notes, feverishly written on that train, with the rational intent of responding to The Mangoes Problem and the irrational intent of subduing my throbbing tooth, now seem to make a peculiar, if slightly delirious, kind of sense. I can see that I must have desired to set (or unset) the limits of economics before going too far into the topic. While your grasp of economic thought daunts me, I believe I understand how to proceed, as I now see my role in this correspondence in a new “light.”
I believe I possess the ability to formulate an economics problem with the same facility with which I formulate a cavity. I can do it without trying, or even knowing I am doing it. I can simply go about my affairs, happy, oblivious, and all the time I am formulating an economics problem/cavity. My cavities will give my dentist Dr. Bonanno (Larry) an opportunity to display his dental genius (he is truly gifted, as you will see), and my economics problems will give you the opportunity to display your expertise in this field in which I have so willfully interloped. I am moderately proud of my cavities. Larry has told me that I have presented him with dental conundrums so obtuse and vexing that only twelve patients in his entire thirty years of practice have challenged him thus. Paradoxically, he says I have exceptionally good teeth. Twenty-five of my teeth remain flawless and impervious to decay. The other three, of which this letter concerns one, he calls “teeth from hell.” I can only hope for a similar success rate in my formulation of economics problems.
At least that is how I make sense of my notes now, in retrospect, with the sensible clarity of hindsight. At the time, my thinking may have been a bit more confused, interweaving dentistry and economics to the point of indistinguishablility. I will try to explain.
The cavity Larry filled for me that day shows when I smile, since it “shadows” (his word) the smaller tooth in front of it. Thus, he explained, he would use a new tooth-colored filling material. After anesthetic, and the drilling out of the decay, he sculpted the material in place, and then announced, ‘Now we’ll light this baby up.” He then illuminated the inside of my mouth with what appeared to be an extremely bright light shining out of the end of a dental instrument like ET’s finger. After thirty seconds of this peculiar experience, which produced no sensation whatsoever except for the feeling that my mouth had suddenly transformed into a miniscule movie set, he shut off the instrument, resculpted the filling, had me bite on a thin metal strip, then illuminated the filling once again. After three such illuminations, he declared the procedure finished. “You have to explain this technology to me,” I managed to articulate through a mouth bloated with anaesthetic.
He patiently explained the simple workings of the light-sensitive, crystalline polymer filling. This is the latest dental technology, he claimed, and it allows him more work time than previous fillings, which hardened quickly like auto-body cement when two substances mix together. This filling remains soft in the dark. A high intensity full-spectrum light aligns its crystal molecular structure, causing it to harden permanently.
His explanation reminded me of a radio story I had recently heard about why birds sing. As the days grow longer, the increased sunlight activates a gland which produces a secretion. This secretion enlarges the bird’s brain, prompting it to start singing and seeking a mate. I did not hear whether successful mating reduces the bird’s brain to normal size, but I felt oddly sympathetic to the birds during this hormone release party we call spring. Perhaps I was struck by the notion that mating was somehow secondary to singing. Or maybe the story impressed me because I have trouble sleeping mid-May mornings every year, awakened by the sunrise at 5:30, and the singing of birds. Maybe the light enlarges my brain, or the sound of birds singing itself triggers some unseen gland in me. In the garden on the morning before our train trip, Lin pointed out a peony bud covered with ants. Each spring we measure our garden’s success partly by this phenomenon. The ants, drawn to the sweet secretion of the peony bud, swarm it and collect its nectar. This collection in turn allows the bud to open slightly, releasing more nectar, attracting more ants. One does not think that natural interplays such as this were ever invented. By this I mean that we do not observe ants annually celebrating the birth of the ant who discovered peony nectar secretion, nor do we even think such an ant existed. We think ants simply smell the peony anew each year, or have the knowledge wired into their genetic code. But a tooth with a light-sensitive filling? Why does this feel miraculous? Maybe because at some point somebody must have made the leap between two independent fields of thought: crystal technology and dentistry. What could they possibly have to do with one another? They are both infinite. One could labor for a lifetime in one field and never encounter the other. A crystal technologist perfects a substance that hardens when exposed to light, with no understanding of its use value. It is an answer with no question. A dentist struggles with filling materials that harden too quickly. It is a question with no answer.
In your mathematical model from The Mangoes Question, you layer one infinite set B within another infinite set A, thus suggesting the infinite set within the other produces a greater infinity, if such a thing can be possible. In order to visualize your proposal, I reduced it to a limited series of 1 – 3, and saw it as a kind of upside-down pyramid with the subset series getting ever smaller.
1 2 3
1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 2.3
1.11 1.12 1.13 1.21 1.22 1.23 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.21 2.22 2.23
While your model produces infinities of differing magnitude (the mathematics infinity B always outdoing the humanness infinity A) the model above produces infinities of the same magnitude (as one grows larger, they all grow larger in equal proportion). As I gazed at my notes, the little I know about chaos theory stimulated by mind like the secretion of some obscure gland, suggesting I had drawn a fractal – a set of infinite repetition of diminishing scale. Larry’s words echoed in my head, “A high intensity full-spectrum light aligns its crystal molecular structure, causing it to harden permanently.” The rumbling of the train seemed to grow distant, to shrink and diminish like my neatly pencilled numbers. The throbbing in my tooth simultaneously grew larger, until the two converged in an impossible double-exposure: the image of a tiny train speeding along inside my tooth. Inside that train I sat with my throbbing tooth. Inside that tooth, a train, and inside that train, a tooth, train, tooth, train…
Like a thunderbolt, the realization struck me: crystals are fractals. In illustrating your infinities, I had sketched the very mathematical representation of my new filling! “If all things are connected,” a voice in my head insisted, “what if the nature if their connection is… is…”
“Matthew…” another distant voice called out to me, interrupting the first voice.
“What if the nature if their connection is…”
“Matthew…what’s your problem? …Matthew…”
“It’s The Tooth Problem!” I answered ecstatically.
“Will you calm down. You keep laughing and talking to yourself. I can’t concentrate.”
It was Lin in the seat beside me, trying to read her book.
“Oh,” I mumbled, “It’s just this letter from Abhay. I mean, it’s… it’s my tooth…”
“You think too hard sometimes. Anyway, I thought you were going to the café car.”
Five minutes later, as I waited in line, I revisited my insight with a calmer head.
When kept in the dark, the filling material looks like this, the misaligned numbers representing the soft, unstable crystal polymer.
1 2 3
1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 2.3
1.11 1.12 1.13 1.21 1.22 1.23 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.21 2.22 2.23
Then the addition of light energy causes them to expand, a bit like the brain of a bird, and aligns them into crystalline stability.
1 2 3
1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 2.3
1.11 1.12 1.13 1.21 1.22 1.23 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.21 2.22 2.23
+ LIGHT =
1 2 3
1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 2.3
1.11 1.12 1.13 1.21 1.22 1.23 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.21 2.22 2.23
Now I felt I understood how my filling had come to exist in the world. Somehow, by insight or accident or both, the answerless question had met the questionless answer, crystal technology had aligned with dentistry. These two fields, these parallel infinities, had linked to produce a transinfinite phenomenon.
Granted, I am guessing, and my analysis of the the link between these disciplines may have the mercurial nature of amateur thought. But since I had been unable to separate the numbness and pain of my jaw from the exhilaration of reading your letter, I thought, why try? Maybe the two belong together after all.
Yet despite the joy of this discovery, one question continued to nag me.
What does this have to do with economics?
I returned to my seat, presented Lin with her cup of tea, and sat down with my cup of coffee. I opened my yellow file with the title Year of Economics hand written on the tab. Maybe the answer lay inside. It contained only two items: my letter, The Numbers Problem, and a newspaper clippings from the April 26th Business Section of the Chicago Tribune which I had clipped, hoping to return to someday: U of C’s Levitt takes different road to honor. The article described the work of Steven Levitt, recent winner of the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economics Association.
A University of Chicago economist who describes his work as “offbeat” has been honored for his efforts on corruption in sumo wrestling…
Steven Levitt applies economic principles and research to social phenomena.
Fascinated by corruption, Levitt has studied how Japanese sumo wrestling is seemingly rigged during the final days of tournaments.
Corruption of another kind – teachers changing test results to make themselves look good, is another topic Levitt enjoys.
“What we are doing is using statistics to search for suspicious patterns on the answer sheets,” Levitt said. “One suspicious pattern would be if half the students in the classroom gave the same answer to seven questions in a row.”
Because the odds against such a result are so high, it indicates someone is manipulating events.
What is a “suspicious pattern?” If I understand Levitt’s work, a “suspicious pattern” is one that is not complex enough, that defies statistical expectations, suggesting the contribution of a hidden energy source. In the case of the manipulated test results, the will of the teacher supplies the energy. The energy source organizes the material, which in its normal state would remain more chaotic, of a more complex organization, unstable. The simplification, the stabilization of the material, in this case, suggests corruption.
Levitt I think has taken an answerless question (corruption) and linked it to a questionless answer (statistics). In doing so, he has produced a transinfinite result, which grounds both infinities in reality, in a sense reducing them. Statistics has an application – it proves that corruption has patterns. Statistics reveals corruption as not chaotic, but more orderly than non-corruption. His work resembles my crystalline filling in two ways. 1: It combines two disciplines that seemingly have little or nothing in common (social phenomena and economic theory; crystal technology and dentistry). 2: It shows how the addition of an energy source (the will of the teacher/a high intensity full-spectrum light) may stabilize an unstable material (normal test results/my filling in the dark).
On a more profound level, Steven Levitt’s work has left me feeling less alone in the world, and allowed the question of this letter to crystallize. In my tormented state on the train that evening, I had to close my yellow file with the incipient and maddening question: “If all things are connected, what if the nature if their connection is economics itself? What then is not economics?”
Certainly, in the classical definition of the word (the intake and outflow of resources in a household) all events have their innate economic qualities. But now, with some distance on those events, I can reformulate this question more accurately, and pose a subtler and maybe more significant problem to you.
Consider doubleness, or the combination of two seemingly discrete, unrelated events: light and crystal; light and birdsong; ants and peony; Sumo wrestling and statistics. It would seem that the overlay of these pairs produces a transinfinite result, which simplifies each item of the pair, giving rise to a reduced set of possibilities. Can we call this reduced set, in the sense that it suggests a household, or meeting place, with particularities of intake and outflow, economic? Here is the question of The Tooth Problem:
Does the combination of any two events produce an economics?
As I said at the start, I can see now that the implicit intention of this letter was to set, unset, or re-set, the limits of the topic. Is this an intention of an amateur interloper, needing to frame the field according to his own limitations? Or is it simply a retroactive attempt to make sense of the ravings of a pain-addled mind? Or is it yet another possibility…
The pain subsided. The coffee cup sat empty. Outside the window the last of the low sunlight cast long shadows, as the trees of southwest Michigan began to replace the wetlands of northwest Indiana. Soon I knew I would see the rusted factories around Kalamazoo, where I went to college, factories which would seem to increase in frequency as the train neared its last stop of Dearborn, outside of Detroit, birthplace of the automotive industry, and the reason I grew up where I did. The subject of cars will have to wait for a future letter. For now, I will only say that the events of the world make a different kind of sense as one returns to the place of one’s origin. One feels the familiar tug at the heart, the sense of both belonging and being an outsider. X + Y = Economics. Could such a formulation be of any value at all? Why not say X + Y = Philosophy, or X + Y = Music?
Maybe that was my point all along.
Matthew
Year of Economics 4: The Negative Railway
July 25, 2003
My dear Matthew,
1.
I am sitting with Krista on a foam-covered wooden plank in a first class air-conditioned compartment. The air outside is dense with a peculiarly Bombay humidity mixed with diesel fumes, cigarette smoke, and soot from the ageing textile mills. Inside, the air is thick and stale, oddly foreign-smelling and very, very cold.
2.
An old woman with just two lower front teeth in her mouth sleeps.
As she breathes, in the absence of teeth, her mouth puffs up and empties like a bladder.
Her two lower front teeth protrude upwards and outwards, well beyond her lower lip, and clasp her upper lip tightly.
3.
A cavity starts with a dot, a point, perhaps a perfect miniscule circle. That may be incorrect but that is how I imagine it. At that point it is something.
A miniscule something but still something.
Then it grows bigger, and if the cavity belongs to you, Matthew Goulish, creates the most fascinating and perplexing formations.
As the cavity expands it becomes clear that it is no longer a thing, however miniscule, but an unthing, a void, an absence.
Eventually, the cavity will have expanded to the point that the tooth ceases to exist. And at that point the cavity itself ceases to exist.
4.
Frederic Bastiat was a French economist who explored the cavities of foolish economic policy-making in the first half of the 19th century. When the Paris-Madrid railroad was being debated in the French Assembly, a suggestion had been made to create a gap in Bordeaux. The gap was to enrich the local porters, hotel-keepers, etc. and in doing so enrich the nation.
Bastiat brought out the foolishness of this proposal by suggesting the idea of a Negative Railway made up entirely of gaps, so as to enrich not only Bordeaux but also all the other towns along the way and in doing so enrich France like never before.
5.
I want to show Krista the place of my birth, but so far I have managed to show her only the inside of the five-star Taj Mahal Hotel where we are served Folgers Decaf Instant coffee crystals for the price of ten hot meals. Being here effectively seals us from everything I experienced growing up: the crowds, the street foods, the unbelievably crowded ‘local’ trains, the air of Bombay.
6.
When William Harvey discovered the circulation of blood, he created a questionless answer. This was of course not a questionless answer in the field of biology but rather a questionless answer for economics. Economics did not exist then. In fact economics did not exist for the first six thousand years of recorded human history. The answerless question existed all through those six thousand years: What determines the wealth of nations? But until the answerless question met the questionless answer, economics simply did not exist.
As long as the answer to the question, what determines the wealth of nations, was given in terms of the stock of gold and other valuables in the nation, economics remained unborn. Simply asking the economic question did not create economics because the answer to the economic question was the wrong one.
Adam Smith, now widely known as the founder of classical economics, reimagined the economic system in Harvey’s terms. If the economy were to be imagined more as the human body rather than a warehouse to be filled with accumulated products, it would be the flow of products and services in the economy rather than accumulated gold that would determine its wealth. Now the human circulatory system has the heart at its center acting as a pump. In its economic equivalent, having a heart at the center of the economy would mean the advocating of centralized command at the heart of the economic system. This would not fit in with Smith’s vision at all. He in fact created a cavity in the circulatory system of the economy and inserted an unthing: the principle of self-interest. The economy existed as a flow of resources and was powered by nothing tangible. In the absence of a controller the system would not self destruct because each participant would be driven by his or her self-interest to act in a way that insured the survival of the entire economic circulatory system.
7.
An old man arrives home on reindeer and lovingly caresses the yellowing paper on the wall with the Russian pin-up girl.
He caresses her brittle paper breasts lingeringly and lights a short stub of a cigarette that he has found.
8.
Karl Marx was the greatest critic of classical economics who ever lived. He not only took apart economics as it stood (the classical model of Adam Smith and David Ricardo) but created a new economics. Marx took the Dialectic from (the non-materialist) Idealist Hegel and Materialism from the (non-dialectic) Metaphysical Fuerbach.
Marx’s methodology was unique since it involved stepping into the cavity. Think of the tooth as materialism. Materialism is the view that matter and its properties in space and time come before consciousness. In the matter of the tooth it is easy to see that tooth-matter comes before tooth-consciousness. That may be a matter of neglect or even prejudice, but the observation remains largely true.
Now Marx inserted in this (material) tooth a dot, a point, a cavity that we call the Dialectic. The very nature of the cavity is that it is a dialectic, an ever changing unthing.
Now the precise moment when Marx was able to imagine this, perhaps after a visit to his dentist such as you recently made my friend, he recreated economics. For the very foundation of the system of Dialectical Materialism is economics. Marx reinvented economics as the study of the cavity in the tooth.
The unthing operating within the thing creates economics. This was perhaps Marx’s greatest vision.
What this means in terms of the basic Goulish equation is:
A + B = Economics where A = thing; B = unthing,
and the process involves stepping into the cavity.
9.
The images I describe in this letter are from the Lithuanian filmmaker Sarunas Bartas’s film, Few Of Us, about a woman who journeys to a near-forgotten people on the edge of extinction. Bartas is not interested in narrative content. All his films are explorations of the cavity in different stages of decay left behind following the demise of communist governments. Bartas descends, camera in hand, into cavities that are vast, multidimensional, and speechless, and in exploring thing and unthing together, creates an economics.
10.
A recent application of the idea of stepping into the cavity involves the idea of social capital. Robert Putnam and his collaborators have spent over two decades in the cavities of northern and southern Italy, studying social institutions and their effects on economic development. The study of social capital was initiated by the French cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu and (separately) by the American sociologist James S. Coleman. They provided the questionless answer which Putnam combined with the simple answerless questions: What determines economic development? Why do some countries and regions develop economically at a quick pace and others lag behind?
Putnam and his associates have found that what really matters for economic development are the long standing norms of reciprocity in the society and the resultant networks of civic engagement, what Putnum calls social capital. Putnam reports in his book, Making Democracy Work: Civic Tradition In Italy, that the northern region which enjoyed effective government and economic development enjoyed a civic tradition that went back to the Middle Ages. Regions in the north were characterized by dense networks of local associations, an active engagement in community affairs, and a high level of reciprocity, trust and law-abidingness. The southern regions, on the other hand, were characterized by vertical rather than horizontal social, political, and religious alignments. The historical presence of the powerful church in the context of a rigid feudal order ensured that people felt powerless and exploited. Government in the southern regions was predictably ineffective and economic development slow or nonexistent.
11.
Economics is not an idle occupation reserved for the mathematically clever. Economics is about poverty, hunger, making a living, the future of our children, all issues that concern each one of us, in our own ways, very urgently. We can, and should, all have something to say about economic matters. You, my dear Matthew, exhibit an unusually astute ability and willingness to explore economic issues, trace its boundaries, dive into its cavities, and emerge with alchemical enlightenment. I enjoy that very much. If we look at the origins of the word economics, we find the Greek root eco, meaning home or hearth, and nomos, meaning natural law. Economics, to go back to its roots, is not a set of rigid principles to be memorized and accepted as Truth, but rather a complex web of natural laws to be stumbled upon, examined, probed, all in the warm comfort of what we consider our home. Perhaps that is why you discovered economics so effortlessly and gracefully on the train ride aboard the Twilight Limited. You were headed right into the cavity of what was once your home.
12.
I did not grow up wealthy in this teeming city. Why then do I crave to show Krista my city, whose streets I have walked for twenty two years of my life having neither car, nor scooter, nor even a bicycle, from behind the security of double paned windows and forced air-conditioning? From where we sit, this is a negative city, and we are now aboard the negative railway.
Much love
Abhay
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