Not that I was, though God knows I spend enough of my time reading about it on the net, trying to understand whether we are truly in a situation where assets are temporarily undervalued or, by contrast, where assets are absolutely correctly valued at their new low prices, having for some considerable number of years been getting themselves highly overvalued. As an English major and a philosophically inclined sort, I’m partial to some kind of Platonic view of value, which is to say that I like the idea that things have absolute value. The economist, including the one I live with, is inclined more to the idea that the value of something is what someone is willing to pay for it. Thus, a house might well have been worth $100K last year but now be worth only $65K this year, even though nothing about the house has changed.
So I am puzzled by the idea that economists talk about the housing bubble, and about how people were paying more for a house “than it is worth,” since I have been schooled by the economists to say that whatever someone pays is what its worth.
And, Huzzah! As I puzzle over these matters, the CBC brings to my attention last year’s Massey Lecture, a series of five hour-long lectures on the topic of debt. It is written and presented by that famous economist (irony alert), Margaret Atwood. I have listened to three hours so far and, though I am not a very big Atwood novel fan, these lectures are a delight. She is reading them and she is not the best reader of lectures that I have ever heard, but it is easy enough to look/hear/think past that because the material she is presenting is so extremely interesting. She ranges all over the place: etymology, mythology, religion, literary criticism, economics, history, psychological theory, here there and everywhere she goes, showing how debt and its concept-cluster siblings play a central role in the meaning of western culture.
For example: Debt is likely to be understood differently depending upon whether the culture is in a phase in which having things is seen as a mark of God's favor, as opposed to a more ascetic phase in which having things is an embarrassment. Another example: Jesus, the redeemer. I’m obviously used to the phrase from my own religious background, but I never thought about why that is the word that is used to describe his role. The most common meaning of redemption, for me, is in the context of pawn shops. You redeem things you’ve pawned with a redemption ticket. I’ve never actually pawned anything, but it’s a common enough phenomenon in novels. But what does Jesus have in common with pawn shop redemption? Ah, you’ll have to listen to the lectures to learn. (The link function of Blogger isn't working today, so you'll have to cut and paste: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/massey/massey2008.html)
The Massey Lectures are one of the things that keep me in mind of Canada’s place in the public intellectual pantheon (as compared to the U.S., say), and especially in the public broadcasting world. Five nights a week, the CBC puts forward a one-hour program, a documentary in essence, about some important issue. The program is called Ideas and that’s what it is. The U.S. public radio system copied the Canadian’s CBC’s news program (“As It Happens”) to give U.S. public radio ‘All Things Considered.’ Unfortunately, it never took up a similar effort with regard to Ideas, although “This American Life” rises to the challenge many weeks. But it’s not a five-hour a week program!
In addition, each year, Ideas’ producers select someone to give a five-part Massey Lecture, and then they broadcast it, one hour each night for a week. I’ve heard most of them over the past 16 years and never been disappointed, though some have stayed with me longer than others. They’re all available on their website. Just in case you’ve got five hours available. They deserve special credit for doing Atwood’s Debt series last year. Just-in-time supply, indeed.
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