Citizen Spitzer or keeping up with the Johns'
Like many I took a moment last week to speculate on New York governor Eliot Spitzer's behavior and mores if not his rationality. I'm not ready to institutionalize that level of hypocrisy in governance yet, so that he had to give up the job and leave public life in disgrace is not troubling for me. He painted his own exit - stage left. What I liked particularly, though, was that periphery of press commentary that looked to Spitzer's behavior to discovery what rational or societal mechanisms lay behind them, because, gee I love that kind of talk. A Diane Rehm segment the other day on modern day public apologies touched on and underscored the quality of the non apology he gave. It suffices to say he has not hit the introspective stage of this "greek tragedy" yet. We are shy of Oedipus' arrival at Colonius, left examining behavior in only non moral dimensions. Mostly this centered on what it means to pay nearly $5,000+ for 'services rendered'. Oddly it seems to be mostly male commentators dwelling on this. It would be easy to see this as gambling behavior. Deliberate courting of risk, thrill-seeking. Like dropping five large on the outcome of an undistinguished back nine of a county golf course. It seems like conspicuous consumption - in its deliberateness - in its ostentationess. It is difficult to conceive how conspicuous such behavior was intended to be. I consider the possibility here of an interior dialogue that would fulfill the role of envious inspecting peers. I might suggest further such narratives may not be that unusual in the scarcely rational decision making of economic man. Celebratory behavior is what some suggested. That this was something that Spitzer allowed himself to signal, to himself, that he had arrived, that he was a player. In this view the rewards were all the sweeter for their expensiveness, exclusivity and risk, the appearence of ignoring an apparent inevitable. Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post wrote that in economic theory these things are called Positional Goods
Harold Meyerson - What $5,500 an Hour Buys - washingtonpost.com. Goods that rely on their relation to other things, what properties or facets that attach to them. Their exclusivity, Their hidden forbidden nature. Moreover, Spitzer's treats seemed to fall into a related category that of Veblen Goods. Goods for which the demand curve is inversely inelastic to price. The more costly the higher the demand. Here though you cant't deny the intrinsic value - because that would be a Giffen Good, a whole other category. Washington Post columnist Shankar Vedantam weighed in with a modest article on the notion the price-placebo effect which concerns the ability of price alone to raise estimation of a good
Shankar Vedantam - Eliot Spitzer and the Price-Placebo Effect - washingtonpost.com. (I read recently some where else a description of a study where arbitrary figures - the last two digits of your social security number - can establish bounding valuation for entire ranges of goods). It is useful for economics to have idiot transgressing politicians and an Internet bordello to illustrate these concepts.
But (to quote) "Beyond all this good lies the terror the grip of the mercenary hand." To me what this really illustrates is the meaning of money. Minor differences in medium degrees of wealth simply serve distinguish among the leisure classes. We are expected to focus on our material comfort. We are told we are all living like the richest of previous times, living in the style that properly is the provence of Kings. Why then question the distribution of providence? True wealth, living as a king has only ever meant one thing: to have subjects abject at your feet. To have power over others lives. Over their well-being and choices. Over and outside of their possibilities and being. This is the eternal meaning of wealth. The aspirational classes merely wrestle over mid-tempo demarcations and strive to be tools. The desire for this more escaping wealth is a malady embedded in the material, but beyond any particular material, relational to other souls.
What elites have to fear is other elites. Elites are insulated from ordinary rules and trouble. They do not fall unless enemies they have manufactured among the powerful tip them to the mob. All this is no more than tempest in a teapot. A theatre in which celebrity is the usual echo or shadow.
A observation (via Laura Rozen's War and Piece) made by Jack M. Balkin in the web log he maintains,
The Spitzer Case and the National Surveillance State - Balkinization, that the newly created rules for financial transaction observations under the Patriot act were leveraged against Eliot Spitzer. This as he argues point out the potential danger of such surveillance being continually refined, extended in scope and narrowed in focus until it can be used to target anyone and anything. Protected from observation of its decision process, out of reach of any meaningful oversight, by its National Security status. The only outcome of the confluence of such degrees of power and secrecy is immediate even instantaneous malfeasance corruption and criminality. You damage more than you protect.
The defensive and entranced nature of the security state into which the United States is descending looks towards a coming class of supremely empowered elites who will place themselves with deliberate care at the head of technological and particularly informational apexes, out of which they will declare a protected property. We glide smoothly towards a gilded era of mass society police state.
8:19:59 PM  ;;
|
|
