Author: admin

Posted on

Still remembered today

The grave of the writer of the Jazz Age (in Rockville, Maryland) has never been without fresh flowers. There used to be whisky bottles too – tributes from his devoted admirers. Scott Fitzgerald did not only write about the Jazz Age. He (and his wife Zelda) lived it – all the flamboyance and excess. When Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, he was not “lost” yet. The young, “easy-going, occasionally sarcastic, and somewhat optimistic” Nick Carraway was the sober side of the writer, who reminded the self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby that he was not the same as Daisies and Toms.

Posted on

Pierre du Pont’s Longwood

On the coldest day of the year, it feels warm strolling in the garden. Then you’d come to understand what previlaged truly means.

You have to imagine the other half of the Main Garden, the chimes from a 62-bell carillon in a 61-foot-tall stone Chimes Tower, the Open Air Theatre, the Italian Water Garden, the Flower Garden, Treehouses, and even a giant Chinese Dawn Redwood, a tree thought to be extinct until 1940s. And of course, the numerous hydraulic feats, perhaps the most extravagant defining feature in Longwood. The water fountain in front of the Conservatory boasts “10,000 gallons a minute shot as high as 130 feet and illuminated in every imaginable color.” Pierre was inspired by his traveling across the world, particularly in Italy and France, but he brought the designs up to larger scales.
The Conservatory is extravagant too. Today Longwood also serves a purpose in public horticulture education. A couple of arrangements in the Conservatory do strike a sense of wonder.
I like the meadow (added by the Foundation in 2014). It makes you want to run.
Posted on

The stock market and arts: a make-believe game

Probably everyone had cried, being touched by a novel, a movie, or a painting. You know it’s not real but somehow it makes you feel real. This is also how the stock market feels like. Read more

After experimenting with the stock market a bit last year, I had imagined an agent-based computer simulation to show (i) how the stock market, as a place where people make money with money, can be decoupled from the economy, (ii) stock surges are the way to make big money; and a surge can be created as long as there is a big enough number of bets on a stock. I only ran the simulation in my head – I am no longer in Academia and had no need to implement it.

This week the “unrest” leading to the surge of GameStop and other stocks exactly illustrated the above mechanisms that move the stock market. The only difference is that this time it was online “smarties,” not the Wall Street professionals, that started the make-believe game. It is much better than a computer model – it is real, and experiments like this are hard to do by scientific design.

What happened was actually simple – the online smarties just copied the Wall Street’s playbook. Without huge accounts, they used the internet as a coordination tool to achieve sufficiently large number of bets. That’s why Jon Stewart tweeted, “Don’t shut them down…maybe sue them for copyright infringement instead!!”

Still many questions follow. Could such targeted “democratic” moves rescue pandemic-affected businesses? How has the pandemic made a perfect occasion for the stock unrest just as for the social and political unrests? What are these unrests together telling us about the American society? Is there some sort of revolution going on? Against what?

I only want to focus on the role of the stock market here. Theoretically, the stock market is to help the economic machine run by moving capital to where economic activities need. In general, investors choose firms according to their preferences and obtain a return from their capital investments in them. Raising capital through the stock market is particularly helpful for entrepreneurs at the beginning of their ventures.

But with so much capital in the market, big money cannot be made from real investments. To be sure, there are a lot of brains, and lots of gimmicks invented. The stock market has lost its true purpose to “smooth” the economic machine but becomes a money-making machine on its own. The pandemic has only made it more obvious that the stock market constitutes a separate economy – it is an economy for some. It is in the stock market, not from any professional jobs, that tremendous wealth is made and accumulated. This second economy is the most important source for the country’s extreme wealth concentration and economic inequality, which damages the fabric of society.

A final thought. As things are moving online and going virtual, all aspects of our lives – social, political, and economic – have become more a matter of make-believe. In other words, our social, political, and economic lives have become an art. Perhaps we should congratulate ourselves for having finally created a high culture with the advancement of technology, considering that arts have always been appreciated as high cultural forms.

According to the latest Fed data, the wealthiest 10% of Americans hold more than 88% of all available equity in corporations and mutual fund shares (Forbes).

6 facts about economic inequality in the U.S. (Pew Research).