3 April 2010 with View Comments
Joshua Green’s recent profile of Timothy Geithner in The Atlantic’s April issue is well-written and fascinating. It provides rare insights into the upbringing and career of Geithner and how the financial crises (Japan, Mexico, Asia) he encountered during his career shaped his thinking. He is truly an intellectually awe-inspiring man. But one thing really stuck with me: How rare it is that we get a good glimpse of the background of events.
You could have been reading dozens of books and articles about the recent financial crisis and the U.S. government’s response to it and still be inclined to believe moral hazard and ‘bail-outs’ as a preferred mode of response to crises were something unheard of. Which just goes to show how ignorant one can be.
Joshua Green’s profile really helped me put events into perspective. Geithner learned first-hand about the dangers of taking a gradualist approach to a banking crisis as an assistant Treasury attaché in the U.S. embassy in Tokyo. He was part of the crucial team that helped Mexico sustain its troubles. And by the end of the Clinton era, a basic method of responding to financial crisis had emerged: quickly flood the market with money to restore confidence.
There is a lot more in that article to make you think, but that point really made me flinch. If you’re convinced that this exact response mechanism creates more problems than it solves, like I do, although you can just as well see things differently, then you have a much larger and much more established problem at hand than you previously thought.
This profile also reveals how much of our prevailing thinking about the origins of crises and whom to blame etc is shaped by story-telling that bears little to no resemblance to actual reality. As Nassim Taleb’ said, “the narrative fallacy [...] is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths.”
20 February 2010 with View Comments
It has recently been discovered that a critically acclaimed young German author, 17, has plagiarised parts of her novel “Axolotl Roadkill”. In one case, she lifted an entire page from an obscure book with few, if any, changes.
The German feuilleton and ‘literary establishment’ have been discussing this for the last few weeks, accomplishing nothing. Whole magazine issues have dealt with the plagiarism charges, coming to no concrete result whatsoever.
Of course, art is an utterly subjective manner and basically follows arbitrary rules all the time.
But there is a clear distinction to be made between remixing the works of others and purporting that one has written an original novel. Both are forms of art, but while remixing derives its value at least to a certain extent from the parts that are remixed, originality by definition derives its value from creating something original.
It is a distinction that has to be made independently of any specific work as it’s a basic issue of authorship, originality and the moral compass of an author. Plagiarism is not limited to works of fiction. It is also – perhaps even more so – an important issue in academia and science. Both fields recognize the importance of acknowledging previous works and established authors. As original research is not possible without knowledge of the current status quo within your academic field, creating your own voice similarly consists of having acknowledged and imitated the voices and narratives of others beforehand.
But you accomplish originality only when you transcend incorporating the work of others and add your very own distinctive contribution to it.
I think the concept of originality has to be adamantly defended in today’s remix culture. One should always distinguish clearly between the concept and value of both remixing the work of others and creating something entirely on your own.
It’s perfectly admirable for a young author ‘just’ to remix the work of others. Many famous authors have slaved away for decades before accomplishing now famous works of originality.
Clearly establishing a moral straight line between copying others and standing on the shoulders of giants to add your own contribution is what’s lacking in recent discussions. I consider this to be a failure of the ‘literary establishment’ who have proven themselves to be moral relativists and therefore deemed themselves, at least for me, not worthy of any further consideration.
