Nothing can satisfy me anymore. During the day, I pass the time doing something I convince mysef is useful, but when dusk falls I tiptoe restlessly around my apartment counting the mosquitoes, not daring to kill for fear of staining the freshly painted walls. After a couple of teas and some chess, even lazy late night attempts at something approximating masturbation fail to awake my imagination, much less my body. The only urges I have left are urges to write; they attack me now and then, in between times, usually when I have not the slightest intention of acting on them. After I let them escape, they keep wandering around my mind like shadows of people I almost met. So I put on my favorite music to try and chase them away entirely, but I can feel them soundlessly resting their feet on my memory, clinging to its walls much like those mosquitoes I dare not strike.

I realize after a while that the only way to recover some peace of mind is to try to sort them out: past ideas from past events. Then again, I reflect, once an event is passed, is it anything more than an idea, my idea of what it is that happened?

So let us begin: the weekend before last was my first real weekend of socializing in Warsaw, my hometown. On Friday I went to Mateusz’s place and had some wine there and talked to some Claude guy I will probably never see again. We all went to Kamieniołomy and danced it out. Łukasz was there, I did not say hello, but he did, by poking my shoulder and dancing, in his endearing, dysfunctionally gleeful way. His new/old girlfriend later danced up to me and said something like Hi, I am Łukasz’s girlfriend, … (whatever her name was), and I just wanted to say I am very happy to meet you and thank you for everything you’ve done for him back in Paris, (oh, you’re more than welcome), and you know I could really be jealous of you, cause you’re pretty (right), but you seem honest and not like the kind of girl who would go around stealing other girls’ boyfriends (no kidding), so … and then she just lost it and resumed dancing. Suffice it to say that I thought the world of her as long as I was drunk.

But that is not what matters, it isn’t the dancing, it isn’t Łukasz nor his sweet, overbearing girlfriend nor even the fact that all of a sudden, around two, I saw Maurycy close to the bar, and he saw me, and we talked and danced like in junior year so that even when all my friends left, we were still there, until almost five, when we got a vodka-juice to go in a plastic cup and had to wander around the barely waking town.

What matters is something I cannot quite recall in detail because it is lingering like a fly of an idea caught up in a web of events. I remember I was waiting, sitting and waiting and it was not the regular hour for waiting there nor for hearing what I heard. I remember thinking: Here it is again, but I will not write about it. After all, there is no Street Cat Sightings Bureau that I could report to and say: I confess! I am the one who sees all the street cats as they soundlessly step over to the other side. So why should I feel compelled to describe what my mind saw in that waiting place? Just because there is a voice telling me to do so? That voice thankfully bears no authority.

Now I remember. It was the Friday after that Friday. It was an empty multi-level mall, around midnight. Nobody save a few gentlement in blue suits cleaning the floors on strange brush-wheeled machines was around. Save them, and Maurycy and me. We had just left the movie theater and he needed to find a toilet. So I sat there in the empty mall and tried to remain completely motionless. I noticed a man cleaning the escalator a couple dozen feet behind me, who didn’t seem to care much for my unexplained presence. The good thing about cleaning the escalator is you don’t have to move at all. I noticed the ceiling was full of sensors of various sorts. There may have been cameras, black eyed in their white eyeball-like form, unless those were just infrared sensors. There were small silver sprinklers looking like they could fly away at any moment with dazzling speed and solid white plastic smoke detectors, which were not going anywhere but focused on staying alert. Every now and then, the alarm in some window display a few floors below would go off, like a lonely voice in an empty ballroom, regretting a long-lost dance partner. But the boutique directly in front of me had a very unpleasant voice when its alarm went off. It didn’t sound inspiring at all, it sounded hostile and impatient. As if its red gleams were daring me to make but a single move in their direction. And what, may I ask, did you expect to find here at this hour?

Much more noteworthy things happened between that first Friday and today (today is Tuesday). For instance, Maurycy took me to Powiększenie for the first time, and there I met twins, Ola and Zuza, who were very nice, and we talked and had some beer, and Ola was leaving for New York the same day, at five PM. Everybody left little by little, freeing up precious couch space, but Maurycy and I stayed on, we lingered on just like that first Friday in Kamieniołomy. We sat on the large black couch, opposite a huge picture of the club’s facade. We talked about his brother Ignacy, who had been taken from this world in mysterious circumstances: supposedly, cancer, but actually, some kind of higher calling that would not suffer disobedience, that was stronger than freedom itself. He mentioned how disgraceful and unpleasant some people’s comments were: We mourn him, but his death has really made us see what a wonderful person he was, and how lucky we were to have known him, so in a way his death is a good thing! Maurycy did not feel reassured by that sort of reassuring remark. I tried to explain on their behalf that it had just come out nastily but actually what they meant was simply that you never appreciate something as a work of art if it doesn’t have an ending, and Ignacy’s life had received one in the prime of his youth, which makes it even more admirable, since its many branchings had been cut off at their buds.

Still, the noteworthy, remarkable things are not the ones I should nor like to put into writing. I prefer to write of lonely red laser beams in abandoned malls than to recount a dear friend’s struggles with his loss. I suppose in that way writing is where I escape morality, but with a clean conscience.

Posted via web from En tous lieux je te suis

Here are some of the things Amartya Sen said today at Sciences Po, in a conference he entitled “Capitalism and Confusion”. You can download a PDF version here. Although I believe prof. Sen would recognize all these thoughts as his, please do not quote directly since I may not have transcribed his exact phrasing.

A recent public opinion poll in the US asking “Which would you prefer: socialism or capitalism?” yielded 50/50 responses. Capitalism has been largely discredited due to the food and financial crises of 2008, which are ongoing today. People are thinking: “Maybe socialism is not so bad after all.” In popular opinion, it is more and more widely associated with universal health coverage, pension benefits, poverty relief.

That being said, the Soviet economy can hardly serve as a model for any country today. Market and economic transactions are necessary qualifications of any functioning economic system. Individual empowerment based on private ownership is the archetypal feature of capitalism. So we do have a fairly clear definition.

However, Adam Smith, whom we consider to be the founding father of market economy theory, never used the term “capitalism”. Nor does he put forth a theory of the sufficiency of the market economy. Smith has a reputation of being the champion of the pursuit of self-interest by all human beings. In fact, Smith definitely did not take that view and argued for the importance of the motivation of generosity.

And yet he is continually cited by the proponents of the now outdated, egoistic version of capitalism. See the sarcastic rendering of this paradox in Stephen Leacock’s limerick:

Adam, Adam, Adam Smith
Listen what I charge you with!
Didn’t you say
In a class one day
That selfishness was bound to pay?
Of all doctrines that was the Pith.
Wasn’t it, wasn’t it, wasn’t it, Smith?

The famous phrase from Wealth of Nations (26-7), „ It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages”, has been quoted over and over and the reading of Smith’s entire theory is too often confined to those lines. But even they themselves do not imply a claim of the adequacy of self-interest as the sole driver of economic success.

In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (IV-2), Smith writes: “Humanity, justice, generosity, and public spirit, are the qualities most useful to others.” He acknowledged from the outset the important role of non-profit value. Going beyond the simple tasks of regulation and control, Smith drew attention to the State’s positive actions in support of the well-being and developing the capabilities of the people. The state has supporting functions in safeguarding and promoting human life and freedom. Smith was deeply concerned about poverty, illiteracy and deprivation which might remain despite a very well functioning market economy. He was a defender of the role of the State in doing things that the market failed to do such as universal education and poverty relief.

Smith was profoundly uninterested in nomenclature and deeply interested in content. He was uninvolved in worrying about insignia. The question should not be: how are we going to call it? But: what do we want to achieve? Let us follow his example and not concern ourselves with preconceived nomenclature. Today, our system has shown its vulnerability, especially in cases of mistrust arising in the credit system. We today should not seek a „new capitalism”. It does not matter much what we call it. We need to deal with the current vulnerability and instability. The instabilities can be tackled not by faith but by choice, open-minded pragmatic choice!

In the long term, we must acknowledge the need of the State to promote healthcare as a part of its diverse obligations. Particularly in the US, which is the only rich country in the world without universal healthcare organized by the State. Kenneth Arrow shows that there are problems of asymmetry of information in the market of health care and health insurance. A patient often has very little knowledge of the medical characteristics of his illness and therefore it is difficult for him to choose the best treatment.

In this logic, the private insurer has good profit-based incentives to deny health insurance to anyone who has a probability of getting sick. So what’s the point?

A wrong belief, once established, is very difficult to dethrone. See the threat of „socialized medicine” in the US. Misperceptions abound in the US about the workings of universal healthcare in European countries like for instance: “you cannot choose your doctor”.

Let us bear in mind the opening words of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments:

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

We don’t want to kill the market economy but simply recognize the role of the State in ensuring its success. Let us recognize that the standard of living has increased not only because of GDP growth but also because of universal healthcare and public education. The role of market economy does not contradict the role of the State.

In Smith’s case, the whole point of his Theory of Moral Sentiments published in 1759 was to make it possible for us to work for each other instead of against each other. Even today, this approach requires pragmatically rethinking everything we have done wrong.

Robert Hefner, South-East Asia specialist @ Boston University, delivered a talk at Sciences Po about recent findings in ties between democratization and the percentage of Muslim population in Arab and non-Arab countries. The conclusion was simple and irrefutable: in non-Arab states, democratization progresses much faster, though “democracy” there is not exactly what we in the West tend to imagine, it is a specifically Islam-flavored and Islam-compatible democracy based on higher participation and state responsibility. In Arab states, on the other hand, there is a significant democracy deficit, even when by “democracy” we mean simply a competitive electoral system where the elected government has actual enforcable power.

Download notes in English or French.