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Economics

Reminder

If you happen to get hectic around holiday preparations, desperately scrambling for gifts, trying to figure out how to maneuver family gatherings safely (physically re: Covid and emotionally re: we all know what…) let me remind you of something. There are existential woes out there that require attention, terrors that put our minuscule worries in context, but also simple joys that suffice, and plain determinations that move us forward rather than in circles driven by habit. Or by threat.

Shelter (The Refugees’ Dreams – 2016)

Aideed Medina, a poet from Fresno, CA and a member of Mothers Helping Mothers, an organization that helps people affected by political and environmental disasters, put it into words that guide me through this season of consumerism on steroids. Her phrases model courage, making me want to join these strong women’s dance in the face of inescapable truth. The poem is set in one of the (real-life)shelters for asylum seeking women in Tijuana, perhaps La Casa de Paso.

Repatriation (The Refugees’ Dreams – 2016)

Stone

By Aideed Medina

De piedra, sangre.

I make my own heaven. I drag it out of the streets, and inhospitable terrains.    I mixed “tabique”, brick, mortar with my hands, kneading,

I need, to make my own heaven.


It is clandestine, in broad daylight.
 

It’s microwave popcorn, from Costco, because Costco can cross the border as many times as it wants and it has never been asked to go back to where it came from. Not in this kitchen, scrubbed so clean, with bleach, that the roaches have to ask permission to scatter out onto the floor.

Sulema and I, don’t flinch. She has figured me out. We know we have lived some shit and now, it takes more than a cockroach to keep us from moving, forward.

Fuck the roaches, the military, the long nights and even longer days. There is popcorn to be made,

a courtyard of children waiting for it.

Baby girl walks in to check on our progress. She is waiting impatiently for popcorn, the smell of butter making its way around the shelter, La Casa.

The house is built on a solid foundation of Goodyear tires, and unpacked, repacked, suitcases, unpacked, repacked plans.

Today, there is popcorn.

All that matters is today.

For my sake, not Sulema’s


The flowerbeds, and the upside-down Christmas trees, drying out in the sun are beautiful.

I will remember them, when I am warm by a campfire, watching my children for signs of a chill.

I will remember them,

determined,

uneven steps, protruding out of a hillside, going wherever they need to go.

Wherever they need to go.

There is no going back.

Sulema and I both know this, standing in the hot kitchen of the TJ shelter, it is obvious.

It is a beautiful truth, it takes hesitation and beats it down, into the floor.


We danced on it.

Seeking Shelter (The Refugees’ Dreams – 2016)

No need to explain the message. But one of the secondary reasons I picked this poem has to do with the fact that the punctuation is even crazier than mine, although in her case probably intended while mine is simple ignorance…

Another reason for my choice was the name of the speaker’s partner, Sulema. It is a variant on Solomon, derived from the biblical Hebrew male name Shlomo, meaning “man of peace.” Just a reminder, that the season is theoretically centered around the birth of another bringer of peace. Not presents.

And lastly, the poem reminded me of the just opened exhibition at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, To Bear Witness – Extraordinary Lives, which describes the fates of people who had to leave their countries and found safety here. Refugees from Austria, Bosnia, Myanmar, Cambodia, Germany, Hungary, Rwanda, Sudan, Syria, and Tibet witnessed the atrocities of war, genocide, and the Holocaust. The museum, working together with The Immigrant Story, in collaboration with Jim Lommasson and NW Documentary, tells their individual stories in a multimedia show. I am unable to review it due to renewed instructions by my oncologist to avoid public spaces, but I have previously reviewed and praised the work of the Immigrant Story folks. Check it out if you’re in town.

Integration (The Refugees’ Dreams – 2016)

Music today speaks its own language(s) on the topic.

In any event, if you still can’t get away from the gift giving or receiving scramble, here is a suggestion: Explore your local Buy Nothing network. Founded 7 years ago by two women in Seattle, the idea, based on longing for community, has spread across the country. It works with hyperlocal sites that allows people to give or receive things that are (no longer) needed, providing a direct line of help to your neighbors, friends, and other people you care for. Everything is freely given, “no money, no barter, no strings.”

On Buy Nothing, you can post three things:

  • GIFTS of items or services that others can use
  • ASKS for things you could use
  • GRATITUDES to show appreciation and thanks

If you type “buy nothing” into your Facebook Search function, it will immediately come up with local options. For us here in PDX there are multiple choices, divided by neighborhoods, or for the region as a whole. All you have to do is click “join the group” and you will see what is on offer or can offer something yourselves. All year long.

And then there is always popcorn…..

Flares at Lampedusa (The Refugees’ Dreams – 2016)

Montages are from my 2016 series The Refugees’ Dreams .

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Consider the Lilies of the Field.

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: Matthew 6:28 (King James Version (KJV) of the New Testament.)

In a week where a bible was used as a prop and a dogwhistle, let us actually open one. You don’t have to be Christian to be familiar with these words from the Sermon on the Temple Mount; nor do you need to be religious to understand the meaning of the entreaty: there is a higher power that provides for you, do not spend your life in fear.

In general, I’m all in favor of being counseled not to fret. I do start to get suspicious, though, when it becomes an admonition for those worried about their existential conditions, asking for help only to be quieted by vague references to a God who will provide, rather than to be allowed to demand a share of the pie.

A God, in the case that I am trying to think through today, that is also known as the free market. Before you judge me blasphemous, I am just using the metaphor as a pointer to the economic concept of all-knowing, invisible forces that regulate our society for the good of all, rising tides carrying little ships, trailing freedom in their wake. Or so they say.

Funny thing is, while we all are told not to worry, there are others who systematically, sometimes clandestinely, work hard on being protected from anything that could make them worried. They do so by shifting risk to those who cannot easily defend themselves. I believe knowing some of the history of our economic system in this regard is essential to understand why we see such concentrated, pent-up rage (beyond the injustices of racism) of large parts of the population in the course of the pandemic.

My (by necessity simplified) summary today is derived, among others, from articles I read by Jacob Hacker, Professor of Political Science at Yale University, and Edward A. Purcell, Joseph Solomon Distinguished Professor at New York Law School, both not exactly hotbeds of anti-capitalist insurgency, last I checked. The worries, in other words, are described by people who are generally in favor of a market economy.

There have, at the ideological extremes, always been two views about capitalism. For some it produced freedom, opportunity, economic growth and ultimately led to prosperity, democracy, and international cooperation. It linked your risk taking to your reward. For others it created massive inequalities, political oppression, and international rivalries and ultimately led to fascism, imperialism, and war. It saw no reward for those who shouldered most of the risk. Yet all agree that our economic system has always bent towards methodical risk calculation. You could make money with it: think Life Insurance. Or bets on the stock exchange. Or risking a fortune to develop a medicine that in turn made you even richer. Yet in addition to calculating risk to create value, e.g. take risk as an entrepreneur or corporation, those who had the means have managed to shift anticipated risk to weaker parties.

“Releases” from workplace or consumer injuries, “independent contractor” agreements, anti-union policies, race- and gender-based wage discriminations, and the use of part-time employees and unpaid interns shifted operational costs onto the weak, uninformed, and vulnerable. On a more sophisticated level investment banks, brokerage firms, and credit agencies used risk analysis to design complicated financial instruments that generated huge fees and profits while shifting the risks of those instruments onto distant, ill-informed, and often misled investors.” (Ref.)

Some general form of risk shifting has forever dominated our system: we historically asked our government (the taxpayer, all off us) to shoulder the greatest risks for the benefit of private profiteers. The government was called to build and maintain massive infra- structure, invest in institutions that secured order, like “courts, postal services, and police and military protection to highways, canals, railroads, and facilities for air travel to the internet, cybernetics, digitalization, and nanotechnologies, government investment and leadership underwrote economic growth, spurred ever more efficient methods of transportation and communication, and generated stunning new technologies that entrepreneurs exploited to create new products and industries. “(Ref.)

Industries also exploit risk by selling you things to “reduce risk,” (AK-15s , anyone?) or lie about the danger of products to continue selling them (cigarettes, anyone?) Risk assessments are used to discriminate against certain groups of customers (higher interest rates or premiums) etc.

Importantly, businesses avoid risks of liability for the wrongs they cause by adopting legal devices that make it impossible to sue them. We are seeing a clear case of that now in what is discussed around Covid-19 related infections, industry liability laws and Trump’s Executive Order. If your unemployment benefits run out and you HAVE to go to work to put food on the table, into an environment that does not protect you from infection, you have no recourse if you get sick. Which also means employers will have ever less incentive to make the work place safe. We are worse off than before the 1920s, after which ultimately workers’ compensation programs were passed to help with death and disability. Even though these programs are still around, they only compensate for documented injuries incurred on the job – virus transmission on the job cannot be easily verified. It looks like organizations are succeeding in pushing us back into early industrial America, before (socialized) safety-nets were established.

In other words the original link between risk and reward, the historical justification for the way our economic system works, is broken. The increasing demand for ever less interference in “free market” regulations, calls for less taxation and fewer social welfare programs add to the destruction. We see the consequence of this anti-government sentiment clearly: tax-cuts brought huge deficits and reliance on foreign investment. Budget cuts led to decline in services and safety-net measures. Our infrastructure is crumbling. Public education is undermined. And wealth inequality is rising to proportions that were unthinkable during the early, enthusiastic days of capitalism. And now we have 40 million people without a job, and consequently without health insurance, with no end in sight. Economists predict that up to 40% of the lost jobs will never be reinstated and we are facing long-term unemployment worse than that of the Great Depression, all while awaiting the announcement of the first ever trillionaire.

We started with Matthew. Let’s end with Proverbs. 31:9, to be precise (KJV):

“Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.”

Check.

Music today is mix of protest ballads. Here and in Germany.

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Contradictions: Freedom vs Control

We started the week with magic, then miracles. Can witchcraft be far behind? Tired yet of rhetorical questions?

I just learned that Sylvia Federici, professor emerita at Hofstra University, renowned political theorist and feminist activist had a new book out: Witches, Witch-hunting and Women (2018). It expands on topics found in her seminal work from about 15 years ago, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004), which was formative reading. (I have not yet read the new one, except excerpts.)

I’ll try and introduce the main themes of her work, as far as that is possible in this short space. I’ll then link to a short chapter on gossip that is available online and makes for fascinating reading.

Traditional explanations for the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th century across Europe, and later in South America concerned 2 factors: for one, scapegoating was needed to explain the deaths from epidemics, wars and hunger (it was the Little Ice Age after all). Secondly the catholic church felt its grip slip, particularly during the time of reformation and needed to show some power. Witch hunts were born, (and not the kind that certain presidents prone to cry victimhood claim, either) and cost the lives of between 80.000 and over 100.000 mostly older women, the statistics vary. Many myths about witch hunts are still alive and well.

Sylvia Federici explores different territory. She looks at the transition from feudalism to new capitalistic economic systems, leading up to the industrial revolution . Where before men and women shared agrarian work, a commons and open cohabitation, now laborers were needed for piece work, eventually confined to factories. That meant that (unpaid) domestic work fell entirely to the women who were also supposed to produce ever more children to be subjugated to production’s demands. Women who kept contraception, pregnancy and child birth in female hands were declared witches: midwives, herbalists who provided contraception, abortionists. Their ability to help women control their own bodies was dangerous to the system that needed to expand the labor force. Women, who refused to be confined to newly “private” marriages that subjugated them to reproductive servitude and complete dependence since their labor was unpaid, were also declared witches.

In her own words:

This means that with the advent of capitalism a new sexual division of labor came into existence that deepened the differences between women and men, male and female labor, devalued women’s work, subordinated women to men, and condemned women to unpaid labor. It is significant, in this context, that, by the sixteenth century, in some European towns, women were practically forbidden to work for a wage and in the ideology of the witch-hunt a connection was made between women seeking money and making a pact with the devil: it was the devil that gave witches money in times of need. Also prostitutes were seen as witches, as they sold their services for money.

Anything that could keep women in their place and keep them from finding collective power or solidarity or just emotional closeness to others, was pursued. Here is but one example: gossip used to be a positive term applied to women friends who would get together and chat. During the 17th century it was suddenly loaded with negative connotations – talk outside the house (and its possibility to break the isolation that women felt) had to be stopped. The same courts who pursued witches also tortured and punished “gossips” who were seen as a danger to the hierarchical status quo in male-dominated households. They might teach other women about reproductive issues, they might relate historical knowledge of times when women were on more equal footing, they might suggest ways to rebel. You can read an excerpted chapter here.

It’s not over, either. Just look at how accused rapist Stephen Elliott’s lawsuit against Moira Donegan and the Shitty Media Men list wanted to haul “gossips” into court. 

Violence against women, the killing of women has not abated. It might not be done after trials in church courts, but we see it on a daily basis in the world around us, from domestic violence to the killing of political activists to the slaughter of Kurdish politicians by the invading Turkish army. We see it in selective infanticide across cultures, where girls are aborted or killed for being the wrong gender. No witchcraft involved. No devil either. Simple structural demands from a particular economic system, hunger for power, and desire to maintain a hierarchical status quo, with silent acquiescence enforced.

Just give me a magic wand, already.

*

Since witches refused to be photographed and given the associations to the demands of capital and hierarchies within the labor force, photographs are of industrial staircases today. We know who’s up and who’s down….

Music is a witch mix – pick and choose!

Here is a French witch (It is rumored opium-addicted Berlioz wrote this for his infatuation with a Shakespearian actress who wrote him off as crazy and obsessive yet later married him (briefly) when she heard this piece was about her. ) Gossip!

Here is a Czech witch met by Dvorak at noon

and here is a Scottish witch (this was written as a requiem for her, quite recently.)

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Ways of Looking at Data

Today I am cheating. Not with data, mind you, but by essentially paraphrasing a review of data rather than doing my own analysis (not having that expert knowledge.) I chose that particular data set because it is a timely example of trying to sell politics on the basis of claims that turn out not to be true at closer inspection.

What is in front of us was put there by Bill Gates at last week’s Davos World Economic Forum, sent out to his 46 million followers and the rest of the world. The first of the 6 graphs shows that the proportion of people living in poverty has declined from 94% in 1820 to only 10% today. We should all cheer! Or should we?

What’s wrong with this picture? It turns out that scientifically reliable data collection on world-wide poverty numbers only goes as far back as 1981; anything before that is story telling. So to compare back to 1820 makes no sense.

Secondly, historically people had very little money because they lived in subsistence economies with access to an abundant commons: land, water, forests, livestock, and a robust system of sharing and barter. In that sense they were not poor, because they had what they needed – except money. Money was introduced by labor systems and colonization, work in factories, mines and plantations, so they had more than before, but by far not enough to survive, once their resources were taken from them. This might be a decline in poverty if you take money as the baseline (first they had none, then they had some,) but really the change in economic systems with the arrival of a labor market created a proletariat that struggled to survive.

Most importantly, the trend in the graph is based on a poverty line of $1.90 a day which is an absurdly low standard. Really, people need a minimum of about $7.40 per day to achieve basic nutrition and normal human life expectancy. And many scholars insist that the poverty line should be set even higher, at $10 to $15 per day. If we take $7.40 per days as our baseline, then the number of people who have fallen below that line since 1981 is enormous (4. 2 billion people today.) And what few gains were made can be located in China, so make the world average an even unhappier story than the folks in Davos want us to believe.

The number of people in poverty has gone up since 1981, in other words, and only 5% of all new income from global growth trickles down to the poorest 60%. You wouldn’t know that from the graph, would you? No coincidence, then, that that old adage attributed to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli about lies, damn lies and statistics comes to mind.

For the full argument, you can go here: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions authored by Jason Hickel. I got the short version here:https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-gates-davos-global-poverty-infographic-neoliberal?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR3blN0FUrGJdnFnD9lmTnGscWL420tQth3vogVFAQg7fjKpqMNJN4hBoao

Photos today are of the excess of luxury consumption, likely what they’re wearing at the soirees in Davos after a day of cheering the disappearance of poverty…..

And here is your morning music:

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Pink Cheeks. Black Lashes.

Sometimes I wonder if there is a correlation between drab times and the amount of colored cream or powder humanity applies to its faces. I sure found a lot of pink when walking through PDX and approaching these young beauties with requests for photographs. I was also aware last time I visited NYC how many young men were dripping with mascara.

No drab times for the make-up industry though, which has finally figured out a way to make half of the population which was so far unreachable become consumers of beautification products. Check out the short video below and see for yourself how young men are starting to buy and apply make-up.

http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-42869170/male-make-up-korean-men-have-started-a-beauty-revolution?ocid=socialflow_twitter

It would have been amusing were it not for the prejudiced protestations of the protagonist that he was not gay, just into make-up, and for my fear that the peddling of useless goods is just another way of emptying people’s pockets, now young boys’.

For someone whose currency of felt appreciation has changed across the years from being smiled and whistled at to the number of replies to a blog segment, make-up plays no longer any role. But I understand the need of youth to soothe self doubts and insecurity. I have certainly nothing against gender equality, going in both directions.

I just hope that the horrific pressure towards being normatively beautiful that girls have experienced forever, is not going to be there for boys now as well.

One day you worry about pimples, the next day you feel too fat. And body image troubles have now reached young men in frightening numbers as well.

 https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/learn/general-information/research-on-males

 

  • In the United States, 20 million women and 10 million men will suffer from a clinically significant eating disorder at some time in their life, including anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, or EDNOS [EDNOS is now recognized as OSFED, other specified feeding or eating disorder, per the DSM-5] (Wade, Keski-Rahkonen, & Hudson, 2011).

Worries about a focus on external beauty today has been brought to you by the color PINK.

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Me? Irrational?

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I really, really like the coastal town of Astoria, Oregon, home to one of the best photographic galleries on the West Coast, http://lightbox-photographic.com, various engineering feats like columns and bridges, a number of quirky characters and an even larger number of sea lions.

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It is a down to earth, community oriented, working class town filled with the descendants of the Finns who worked in the fisheries and the Chinese who slaved in the canneries until the industries disappeared in the 1980s. It has seen its share of tragedies (burnt to the ground twice) and economic hardship, it breathes history and is home to an ever increasing number artists. My kind of place.

I would NEVER move to Astoria. My decision is heavily influenced by emotions. In this case a disproportional dread of a watery death. However likely or unlikely a mega earthquake with subsequent tsunami might be, the fear it evokes in me is enough to influence my assumptions of likelihood and thus my decision to stay far away. Thus strong affect misleads with regard to judging probabilities.

“Better be safe than sorry” captures a fundamental truth of decision making: we want to avoid regret at all cost. We use gut feelings, so called somatic markers, that appear when thinking about something negative or positive, a slight arousal that we register without necessarily being conscious of it. These markers, often derived from correctly remembered earlier experiences, will drag us away from negative feelings. (This is research done by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio and colleagues, incredibly interesting work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wup_K2WN0I) Those deprived of these gut feelings, due to neurological brain damage, are paralyzed when it comes to making even simple decisions, like choosing a place to eat.

And yet: however accurate we are in remembering our feelings, we turn out to be lousy at predicting them, which further complicates the picture of decision making. In a nutshell, during this “affective forecasting” we overestimate both how much we will regret sup-optimal choices, and how long that regret will last. The same holds for positive emotions as well – we often predict that we feel in the future what we feel now, that it brings us enormous joy and will last for a long time. All, alas, not true. So think hard before you buy that expensive toy that right now seems so overwhelmingly desirable!

 

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 Astoria mural

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Utility? What Utility?

· Framing outcomes, questions and evidence ·

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You’d think people would make their decision based on some rational utility model, deciding what’s best and then sticking with it. Well, at least economists thought so for the longest time. Yesterday we discussed how consistency is blown to the wind when you frame outcomes with focus on gain or loss, respectively. Today I am sorry to report, we’ll learn that the same is true when it comes to how you frame questions. 

Let’s say you have to decide in a messy divorce case to whom to award sole custody of the kids. One parent (A) has average income, health, working hours, good report with the children and a stable social life. The other parent (B) has above average income, very close relationship with the children, extremely active social life, lots of work related travel and minor health problems. People overwhelmingly award custody to parent B. If, however, you instead ask the question who should be denied custody, people overwhelmingly again chose parent B, so A gets the kids. You read that right: the same person is first awarded and then denied custody, depending on how the question was framed.  What’s going on here?

When you try to make a decision you attempt to justify your reasoning. To award custody to someone, they must be deserving. Clearly parent B has stronger bonds with the children and more money, so these positive factors would justify the decision. If someone is denied custody you also need justification – so you go and look for negative factors that might bolster this outcome – and again find them in – relative to A – the factors of work related absence from home, social butterfly, and potential health hazards for parent B. Think of what clever lawyers can do with these findings….

Segnung copy 3

The same holds for how you frame the evidence – would you accept your doctor’s advice to try a treatment that has a 50% success rate, having run out of other options? Would you try the same treatment if s/he tells you it has a 50% failure rate?

The justification process becomes increasingly difficult if we are offered too many options. In fact, here is a scary real life example. Let’s offer a medical doctor two options, surgery or medication, for a particular patient, both having a number of benefits and costs, both being effective. Docs split prettily evenly between the two, half choosing to cut, half choosing to poison…..Offer doctors three options, surgery, medicine 1 and medicine 2, guess what they choose now? Overwhelmingly surgery! Somehow choosing between the medications affords no easy justification for either one, so they don’t chose between them and go for surgery instead.

Clearly people are affected by multiple psychological influences when making decisions, leaving utility theory in the dust. A purely economic model simply cannot account for the data of people making 180 degrees turn in their choices.  Kahneman, by the way, won the nobel prize in economics for this work. One of the more embarrassing moments of my life was when my then 6 or 7  year-old son picked up the phone when Kahneman called (questions about a conference paper). We were out in the yard and my kid leaned out of the open window, phone in hand and yelled, “Guys, the Nobel dude wants to talk to you!”

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Art in Hiding

· Freeportism as a tool of speculation ·

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When I first came across the term Freeportism I wondered what it could possibly mean. Finding out made my heart sink. Did someone say curiosity kills the cat? The word was coined by Stefan Heidenreich, Professor at the Art Academy Düsseldorf, and refers to the practice of storing artworks in locations that are free from customs duties and taxes around the world, so called free ports. Millions of artworks. Geneva alone has a storage site that holds up to one million pieces, all in temperature controlled racks, carefully packed in wooden boxes, ready to be shipped to auction. Or not – depending on the current and future market prices.

IMG_4498There are whole empires of these free ports, from Luxembourg to Singapore, allowing art to be un-seen. Why on earth, you might ask? The answer is of course: money. And I am not just talking about hedge funds, derivatives or futures applied to art collection. Rather, art out of view is the perfect way to launder dirty money since there is no transparency.

Hito Steyerl, one of the first to recognize this threat to artists’ self-legislation, wrote: “conditions of possibility are no longer just the elitist “ivory tower,” but also the dictator’s contemporary art foundation, the oligarch’s or weapons manufacturer’s tax-evasion scheme, the hedge fund’s trophy, the art student’s debt bondage, leaked troves of data, aggregate spam, and the product of huge amounts of unpaid “voluntary” labor—all of which results in art’s accumulation in freeport storage spaces and its physical destruction in zones of war or accelerated privatization.”

We have a luxury goods market of a trillion dollars of which art comprises about 5%. Not many people who collect modern art any longer look at the inherent value of a piece – it has become a commodity of speculation, hidden in wooden crates so the market is regulated against flooding. Maybe the only way to see art in the future is on the street….

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Read about it in more detail here: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/freeportism-as-style-and-ideology-part-i-post-internet-and-speculative-realism/ And weep.

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I am inclined to report that I have a freeport of my own that holds my stacked works in fantasies of future buyers: it is called my closet…..

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Linnaeus’ Desire

· Tulips Galore ·

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A few years back I worked on a montage series called Linnaeus’ Desire. You can see some samples on my other website www.friderikeheuer.com. This series paid hommage to the 18th century Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus. He was the first to frame principles for defining natural genera and species of organisms and to create a uniform system for naming them (binomial nomenclature.)

In particular, it was the botanical section of Systema Naturae that built Linnaeus’s scientific reputation. After reading essays on sexual reproduction in plants by Vaillant and by German botanist Rudolph Jacob Camerarius, Linnaeus had become convinced of the idea that all organisms reproduce sexually. As a result, he expected each plant to possess male and female sexual organs (stamens and pistils), or “husbands and wives,” as he also put it.

This “sexual system,” as Linnaeus called it, became extremely popular, though certainly not only because of its practicality but also because of its erotic connotations and its allusions to contemporary gender relations. You could now talk sex when you pretended to talk about gardens!

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French political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the system for his “Huit lettres élémentaires sur la botanique à Madame Delessert” (1772; “Eight Letters on the Elements of Botany Addressed to Madame Delessert”). English physician Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, used Linnaeus’s sexual system for his poem “The Botanic Garden” (1789), which caused an uproar among contemporaries for its explicit passages. My montages combined photographs of plants with representations of the human body, hoping to recapture some of Linnaeus’ passionate imagination.

Tulips lend themselves to illustrate Linnaeus’ points; in addition, the desire for them – Tulpenwoede or tulip mania – caused something akin to a sexual frenzy, and ruined many a Dutch life in the 1600s due to failed market speculation. High noon in the tulip fields…..(yes, your’s truly.)

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Or so I thought, until I read this, realizing now how capitalism’s mechanisms struck once again…..

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/economic-history

 

Here is Jan Brueghel the Younger delivering a satire on tulip speculation: count the monkeys….1c886c3380a77a03c98870150f22b778

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