Among the basic tenets of economic
theory is that both producers and consumers maximize economic benefits. For
consumers this means maximizing satisfaction (getting the most bang for the
buck) and for producers (including labor) this means maximizing profit. Yet,
we’ve long known (perhaps always have known) this isn’t true. It is a close
enough approximation of how people generally behave in large numbers to still
offer predictive power, but fine-tuning economic theory requires recognizing
the ways we deviate. For example, when contemplating making an investment a
coldly calculating maximizer should weight a 25% chance of a $25,000 loss
exactly the same as a 25% chance of a $25,000 gain. We don’t. It is a quirk of
human nature that the large majority of us are deterred by a potential loss
more than we are lured by an equally probable potential gain of the same amount. Hence we fail to maximize
our investment returns. The potential upside must be significantly larger than
the potential downside before most of us are tempted. (A minority – gamblers –
have the opposite problem.) A small business owner might opt to close on Sunday
rather than a (normally less busy) Monday even at the expense of profits. A
consumer might buy a product due to brand loyalty even if there are
alternatives that are better bargains. You get the idea.
All this strays heavily into
psychology, and in the past couple of decades there have been numerous studies
on how consumers in particular actually behave. It turns out that some people
are in fact broadly maximizers while others are satisficers, a term coined 70
years ago by psychologist Herbert Simon from satisfaction and suffice. A
maximizer doesn’t rush into buying a car or TV. He will research the brands and
features. He’ll read reviews and consumer feedback while comparing prices from
different suppliers before making a choice. A satisficer operates by the “good
enough” standard. (Voltaire: “Best is the enemy of good enough.”) He’ll walk
into the car dealership or electronics store and pick something on the spot
that is more or less what he wants at more or less the price he wants to pay.
The two personality types do not confine their strategies to consumer goods:
they pick jobs, friends, and romantic partners similarly.
Which group makes better decisions?
That depends on how you look at it. Objectively, the maximizers do. They really
do get better products at better prices. A 2006 study showed that maximizers
straight out of college also had starting salaries 20% higher than satisficers
who presumably settled for the first offer they figured was good enough.
Subjectively, however, the matter looks different. Never mind that maximizers
have difficulty making up their minds at all. They are far more likely to
second guess themselves afterwards and suffer buyers’ remorse. They also regret
their choice of their jobs (despite the higher pay) more than satisficers.
Satisficers don’t expect their choices to be perfect and so are satisfied with
them most of the time. They are happier in life generally. (See Psychology Today article "How
Settling Can Be Good for You" by Dr. Janina Steinmetz.) Furthermore,
according to a study published just last year (The Maximizing Penalty: Maximizers are Perceived as Less Warm and
Receive Less Social Support by Yuqi Chen, Yuhan Yang, and Jingyi Lu) on an
“important but largely ignored downside,” there is a “penalty in social
cognition wherein maximizers (vs. satisficers) are viewed as less warm and
consequently receive less social support.” In short maximizers make objectively
better decisions, but nobody likes a smart ass. I’m not sure if maximizers and
satisficers can change their stripes. I suspect we tend one way or the other by
nature, but that we can change if we try – that the tendency impels rather than
compels. That is simply a suspicion however and I could be wrong. I’m very much a satisficer. Has that
worked out well for me? Not always. But on the whole it’s been good enough.
Spring has settled in long enough in
these parts for my favorite weed to have made an appearance. No, not that one.
I mean the dandelion. (What lawn monoculture enthusiast first declared it a
weed anyway?) Not only are they pretty, but – more importantly – they are
tasty. All parts of the plant can be eaten, most commonly raw in mixed salads,
though I’m told the roots are better boiled. I’ve never collected enough roots
at one time to bother boiling them, so I’ll pass that opinion along without
personally confirming it. Beware of chemical contamination of course. I never use fertilizers, pesticides or weed killers on my lawn, so this is not an issue in my yard.
Both sets of my grandparents made
dandelion wine, but by the 1970s when I was old enough to drink it they had
retired from recreational fermentation. I have all of their winemaking
equipment stored in my barn, but I’ve never tried to make wine of any kind
myself. Fortunately, up through the 1990s I had friends and coworkers whose
families did have an old vintner in the mix, so I was gifted with a bottle of
dandelion wine every few years until the current century. I guess the old relatives
died off by 2000. Plenty of people still made (and make) it of course, but they
were not among the gifting/regifting circle of my friends and coworkers by
then, so my free supplies dried up. What does it taste like?
Unsurprisingly, the bottles I’ve sampled varied a lot, but at bottom each was
more similar to mead (which is fermented from honey) than to other white wines,
though not as sweet as that comparison makes it sound. All tasted more
alcoholic than they possibly could have been. Alcohol kills yeast and thereby
shuts down fermentation at about 13% ABV. (You need to use distillation to
increase alcohol content over this.) So, the apparent extra kick has to come
from other aspects of the dandelion. Most online recipes for dandelion
wine are pretty similar. The biggest differences are in the amount of straining
and aging. One site urges re-filtering, rebottling, and then aging for two
years. I don’t think any of the home winemakers who ever supplied me directly
or indirectly did that. Most sites suggest letting it age in the bottle for two
months, which sounds more probable, though it is possible I received some bottles
on the very day they were corked. These recipe ingredients are pretty
typical: 3 liters dandelion flowers – just
the petals; any green bits will add bitterness 500 grams of raisins – preferably
golden, but any will do 4.5 liters of water Yeast – either bread or wine yeast;
these packets are readily available 1.2 kg of sugar Zest of orange Some recipes add a bit of this or
that – or fiddle with the fermentation with yeast nutrient and acid blend – but
doing that or not is up to you. Put the petals in a nonreactive fermenting container
(e.g. glass or ceramic rather than aluminum or iron), pour in boiling sugar
water, add the other ingredients, and lid the fermenter. You can buy
specialized fermenting equipment and valves or just use glass bottles or jugs capped
with balloons – pinpricking the balloons will allow excess gases to escape while
still preventing outside air from entering the bottle. I suggest consulting one
of the many online recipe sites for the precise steps and probable fermentation
times. Since I mentioned distillation, can
that be done to dandelion wine to make moonshine? Yes. I’ve heard of it but
never have tried it. But if you prefer hard spirits, there is nothing
preventing this step, though the result should taste more like brandy than
whiskey. I’ll leave all this fermenting and
distilling to others more ambitious than I. For now, I’ll just snatch some
flowers and mix them into my Caesar salad. I’m not averse to uncorking a bottle
this summer, however, if one is sent my way.
I don’t read much new-ish (i.e. from
the past couple decades or so) poetry anymore though I occasionally revisit some
classics. My sister, not I, was the poet of the family as both reader and
writer. (I posted a collection of hers on another blogsite.)
Nonetheless, a discount at Hamilton Books prompted me to pick up 100 Poems That Matter, a collection from
Poets.org with an intro by Richard Blanco (poet at Obama’s second inaugural).
More than half the contents are new or new or new-ish, with the remainder by
Yeats, Plath, Cummings, and other familiar names. I probably never would have
encountered, much less read, any of the new-ish ones in any context other than
a collection such as this.
Poetry simply isn’t as prominent in
the culture as it once was. To be sure, there is a vast quantity being written,
but it is mostly read in isolated (often academic) niches. Once upon a time, poets
were rock stars. Tennyson, Eliot, Kipling, Coleridge, Browning, Whitman, and
their like were famous in their own lifetimes, and not just in Academia. Common
folk knew who they were. W.B. Yeats was so lionized by the Irish in the 1920s
that they made him a Senator despite that little pagan quirk. (Could an openly
pagan candidate be elected Senator in the US today? Maybe, but I doubt it.) All
this has changed. The last time contemporary poetry has had a broad cultural
(or countercultural) impact was the oft-parodied Beat era. Who was the last
U.S. Poet Laureate selected by the Library of Congress whose name a majority of
Americans would recognize? Or even a largish minority? I’d venture it was
Robert Frost, and that was more than 60 years ago. The current Poet Laureate,
by the way, is Ada Limón. That poetry isn’t as commonly read
anymore, however, doesn’t mean some isn’t worth reading. This collection has
100 that purportedly matter. Not all matter a lot. Actually, some (IMO)
are pretentious tripe. (Moralistic and social posturings aren’t any more appealing
in verse than in prose.) The large majority, though, do have at least something less facile to say. What
do they say? Well, your mileage may vary. Blanco in the intro makes the point
that "we needn't read poetry with the apprehension that we're only
supposed to get what we think the poet wants us to get" but rather that
"poetry, like music, relates to subjective experiences, and we should feel
free to respond to them subjectively." So, too. I’m glad he said “like music,” since lyrics,
though clearly closely related to poetry and fuzzy at the boundary, are not quite the same thing. The
simple distinction, of course, is that lyrics are sung (or are meant to be) and are (usually)
accompanied by instruments while poetry (usually) is not. Carol King’s verses are
something different from those of Edgar Allan Poe. This is why Bob Dylan when
he won a Nobel Prize in Literature told the committee that it had made a
mistake, though he took the prize money: “But songs are unlike literature.
They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant
to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not
read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics
the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however
people are listening to songs these days.” Bob writes some pretty good lyrics. However, if,
like myself, you’ve let much time pass since experiencing verse that was meant to be “read on a page” (or
perhaps recited), there are worse places to restart than this collection.
A classic
Steve Allen bit: reading lyrics as poetry
Gene
Vincent & The Blue Caps - Be Bop A
Lula (1956)
Most of us have only scattershot memories
of events before age 5 and none at all from before age 3. I don’t differ in
this, but I do remember watching the movie Moby
Dick (1956) at the drive-in from the back seat of my parents’ Pontiac. In
the summer of ‘56 I was 3. OK, I remember only a snippet, but I do remember. I
must have liked the movie since I drew a lot of whales in sketch pads in the
next couple of years. One of my first comic books was the Classics Illustrated version of Melville’s novel. Naturally, I had
no sophistication about any of this. I regarded the story as just a monster
tale, akin to the many monster movies popular in the 1950s. (My sympathies were
usually with the monster.) I don’t remember when I first read the actual full-length
novel, but it was sometime before high school. It was the first time I gave
Ahab any serious consideration instead of simply accepting that he was after
the whale. I asked myself (along with “Why is there a whole chapter on chowder?”)
“What is this man’s problem?”
I stumbled on the answer soon afterward
in, of all places, a preface to Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. The preface was written by Ray
Bradbury who, as it happens, also wrote the script for the Moby Dick movie. In it he compares and contrasts Ahab and Nemo.
Ahab, he says, rages against mortality itself. He lashes out against a universe
that is not cruel (since cruelty requires caring, albeit of a malevolent kind)
but, worse, totally indifferent to human suffering. He seeks revenge against
the white whale as an embodied symbol of that universe. Melville was assigned to
my class in high school a few years later and my English teacher, a lapsed
monk, rounded out the religious metaphors with Ahab as Antichrist. I at last
understood Ahab’s funk, but still didn’t quite get the relentlessness of his obsession.
“Yeah, life is tragic. Get over it,” I thought. It is, of course, the nature of
obsession that people don’t just get over it. That is what makes it a type of
illness. What brings this to mind is another book entirely that I’ve been
perusing the past couple of days. True crime writer Ann Rule sometimes devotes
an entire book to a single case and sometimes publishes collections of short
accounts. Without Pity is one of the
latter containing accounts of a dozen murders and their aftermaths. In about
half the cases the motive is obsession – not being able to let go. At least
Ahab’s existential angst was about grand cosmic questions (and his target wasn’t
human), but to commit murder because your girl dumps you is not only horrific
but lame. Anyone who hasn’t been shattered at some point by the ending of a
romance either has led a very sheltered existence or has no heart, but refusing
to let go despite those feelings never ends well. Obsessive romantic attachments are
surprising common and are not limited to exes –sometimes they are a total
surprise to the object of affection. A classic case of erotomania (also called de
Clérambault Syndrome) was the Polish princess Catherine Radziwill who stalked
Cecil Rhodes in the 19th century and frequently told people they
were engaged. He wasn’t interested. (Given the lifelong bachelor’s predilection
for the company of good-looking young men, she may have been seriously barking
up the wrong tree for more than one reason.) Nearly all modern celebrities
acquire stalkers of greater or lesser persistence. Most are harmless. They just
want to imagine a relationship that doesn’t exist, but a few are dangerous
enough eventually to end up in an Ann Rule collection. This most often happens
when the stalkers start to view themselves as the victims – victims of
unrequited love – and so lash out. “Get over it” are never pleasant words
to hear. But there are times when we all can benefit from hearing them.
