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Currently at Toronto Pearson: 7. High today: 14, which will probably put us below normal for a fifth day in a row, and the forecast has us below normal for the next six days at least.
Laurie Brown just said on the radio that there's a record number of butterflies migrating this year (where? who keeps these records? I dunno), and most of the butterflies are Red Admirals, and some guy in London, Ontario had twenty thousand butterflies in his backyard. Or something.
Took my longest walk ever across Toronto today: 11.7 km as the google maps fly, from Sneaky Dee's to out here on the western edge of Scarborough, beating out my previous high of nearly 10 km from High Park to the western edge of Etobicoke. Still nowhere near our 20-odd kilometre trek across San Francisco and back, though. Along the way today, I noticed that the Music Hall on Danforth has a plaque noting that in its original incarnation as Allen's Danforth movie theatre, it billed itself as "Canada's First Super-Suburban Photoplay Palace".
And now, for some reason, I resume trying to work out economics from imagined first principles. Here's something from an article in Now a couple of weeks ago, arguing against having a casino in Toronto: "Casinos do create jobs, but they don't necessarily create wealth. They merely transfer wealth, since money spent on gambling is money already in circulation that could have been spent on other things." I think it speaks to our general failure to grasp the very basics of economics that I'm not sure that this statement is plainly wrong-headed, although I'm pretty confident that it is, on the basic principle that anything (goods, services, experiences, whatever) for which anyone is willing to exchange anything of value counts as wealth. You could say that money spent on anything is money that could have been spent on other things; this speaks to a different question than the one about whether something creates wealth, namely, whether something creates more wealth than it (directly or indirectly) destroys. That question amounts to, roughly, whether demand for some new thing brings about an equal or greater reduction in demand for other things, or, in other words, whether it results in no increase or a decrease in the circulation of money in an economy. You see this question being asked with regard to the Winnipeg Jets: does the existence of the Jets bring about a reduction in desire for other kinds of entertainment? If so, the existence of the Jets in Winnipeg presumably doesn't add any wealth to the economy of Winnipeg on the whole (although a whole lot of other things have to be equal for this to make any sense at all, which you realize as soon as you start thinking about the fact that a large proportion of Jets revenue goes to paying salaries of people who don't live in Winnipeg; you start thinking about that, and it starts to look like the Jets are, in no small part, a device for transporting wealth out of Winnipeg); bringing the Jets into existence creates wealth, but also indirectly destroys wealth. (Compare this to the destruction of wealth that takes place in wars: wars destroy wealth by destroying valuable things rather than by destroying their value, i.e., demand for them; hence wars destroy wealth in a way that is economically stimulating.) This, of course, is the worrisome thing about many technological innovations; in themselves they constitute new wealth, but by destroying the value of other things (e.g., Amazon's warehouse robots destroy the value of human warehouse labour) they may bring about an overall reduction of wealth in an economy. (Does satisfying demand for gambling, by having casinos, result in no net increase in wealth, or a net destruction of wealth, by resulting in an equal or greater decrease in demand for other things? I have no idea.)
Speaking of nomadism--I've been reading Howards End on a slow drip the last few weeks, prompted by someone who used to live around here. Howards End (I really have to strain not to put an apostrophe in there) I guess is the first High English Novel I've read since I read Jane Eyre as an undergrad or something. (I don't believe I've ever even cracked open a Jane Austen novel. Or maybe really any of those High English Novels, apart from Jane Eyre.) Howards End has more or less completely undermined my suspicion of High English Novels. In fact, today, when I was in a used bookstore, on my long walk, buying a copy of Howards End (which I'd been reading a library copy of) in a volume with A Room with a View, I picked up a few Kundera books, as I do, and kind of felt like, why should I read these when I could read another High English Novel. (Probably it'll pass. Actually, the way things go, it might be a year before I read any other novel at all.) Anyway--nomadism, it turns out, is one of the Themes of Howards End (and thankfully, being relieved of my library copy, I am relieved of the underlining of important passages relevant to important Themes). E.g., today, I read:
Margaret was silent. Marriage had not saved her from the sense of flux. London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!
I see there's a recent doomfile called "Nomadics", which intersects with the repeated observation in Howards End that we--i.e., we English in the first decade of the 20th century--have become bearers of furniture rather than dwellers in places.
Laurie Brown just said on the radio that there's a record number of butterflies migrating this year (where? who keeps these records? I dunno), and most of the butterflies are Red Admirals, and some guy in London, Ontario had twenty thousand butterflies in his backyard. Or something.
Took my longest walk ever across Toronto today: 11.7 km as the google maps fly, from Sneaky Dee's to out here on the western edge of Scarborough, beating out my previous high of nearly 10 km from High Park to the western edge of Etobicoke. Still nowhere near our 20-odd kilometre trek across San Francisco and back, though. Along the way today, I noticed that the Music Hall on Danforth has a plaque noting that in its original incarnation as Allen's Danforth movie theatre, it billed itself as "Canada's First Super-Suburban Photoplay Palace".
And now, for some reason, I resume trying to work out economics from imagined first principles. Here's something from an article in Now a couple of weeks ago, arguing against having a casino in Toronto: "Casinos do create jobs, but they don't necessarily create wealth. They merely transfer wealth, since money spent on gambling is money already in circulation that could have been spent on other things." I think it speaks to our general failure to grasp the very basics of economics that I'm not sure that this statement is plainly wrong-headed, although I'm pretty confident that it is, on the basic principle that anything (goods, services, experiences, whatever) for which anyone is willing to exchange anything of value counts as wealth. You could say that money spent on anything is money that could have been spent on other things; this speaks to a different question than the one about whether something creates wealth, namely, whether something creates more wealth than it (directly or indirectly) destroys. That question amounts to, roughly, whether demand for some new thing brings about an equal or greater reduction in demand for other things, or, in other words, whether it results in no increase or a decrease in the circulation of money in an economy. You see this question being asked with regard to the Winnipeg Jets: does the existence of the Jets bring about a reduction in desire for other kinds of entertainment? If so, the existence of the Jets in Winnipeg presumably doesn't add any wealth to the economy of Winnipeg on the whole (although a whole lot of other things have to be equal for this to make any sense at all, which you realize as soon as you start thinking about the fact that a large proportion of Jets revenue goes to paying salaries of people who don't live in Winnipeg; you start thinking about that, and it starts to look like the Jets are, in no small part, a device for transporting wealth out of Winnipeg); bringing the Jets into existence creates wealth, but also indirectly destroys wealth. (Compare this to the destruction of wealth that takes place in wars: wars destroy wealth by destroying valuable things rather than by destroying their value, i.e., demand for them; hence wars destroy wealth in a way that is economically stimulating.) This, of course, is the worrisome thing about many technological innovations; in themselves they constitute new wealth, but by destroying the value of other things (e.g., Amazon's warehouse robots destroy the value of human warehouse labour) they may bring about an overall reduction of wealth in an economy. (Does satisfying demand for gambling, by having casinos, result in no net increase in wealth, or a net destruction of wealth, by resulting in an equal or greater decrease in demand for other things? I have no idea.)
Speaking of nomadism--I've been reading Howards End on a slow drip the last few weeks, prompted by someone who used to live around here. Howards End (I really have to strain not to put an apostrophe in there) I guess is the first High English Novel I've read since I read Jane Eyre as an undergrad or something. (I don't believe I've ever even cracked open a Jane Austen novel. Or maybe really any of those High English Novels, apart from Jane Eyre.) Howards End has more or less completely undermined my suspicion of High English Novels. In fact, today, when I was in a used bookstore, on my long walk, buying a copy of Howards End (which I'd been reading a library copy of) in a volume with A Room with a View, I picked up a few Kundera books, as I do, and kind of felt like, why should I read these when I could read another High English Novel. (Probably it'll pass. Actually, the way things go, it might be a year before I read any other novel at all.) Anyway--nomadism, it turns out, is one of the Themes of Howards End (and thankfully, being relieved of my library copy, I am relieved of the underlining of important passages relevant to important Themes). E.g., today, I read:
Margaret was silent. Marriage had not saved her from the sense of flux. London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!
I see there's a recent doomfile called "Nomadics", which intersects with the repeated observation in Howards End that we--i.e., we English in the first decade of the 20th century--have become bearers of furniture rather than dwellers in places.
