Marginal Revolution

*Wilco*, by Wilco

If you aggregating a lot of binary opinions, I vote yes you should buy it.  It's more accessible and less mysterious-sounding than their usual fare, which you may consider either a plus or a minus.  If you're wondering what my underlying stance is, a few days ago I said to Brian Hooks something like: "I'm glad I've never really been a fan, that leaves me free to enjoy them without feeling threatened by what they stand for."

MJ, R.I.P

He's one of the few musicians I've been listening to since I was six years old.  I've long thought I Want You Back is one of the best songs, period.  She's Out of My Life has for a long time been a personal favorite, as is Girlfriend.  Billie Jean survives being overplayed on muzak.  Off the Wall is an underrated album, as is History.  His personal legacy is perhaps a dubious one, but he was one of the great dancers and entertainers of his century and it is a shock to read of his passing.  The J. Randy Taraborelli biography, despite stopping in the early 90s, is very good.

Today was not a good day for the 1980s (Fawcett, McMahon).

The attention economy

He [Moby] promoted his latest, Wait for Me, by booking a spa so that journalists could listen while getting massages.

That is from Hugo Lindgren, here is more.

Ali Akbar Khan passes away at 87

A sarod player, he was one of my favorite musicians.  Here is one obituary, noting his father made him practice for 18 hours a day.  Here is another obituary; he once wrote: "If you practice for ten years, you may begin to please yourself, after 20 years you may become a performer and please the audience, after 30 years you may please even your guru, but you must practice for many more years before you finally become a true artist -- then you may please even God."  Here is evidence that Khan understood the Romer model.  Here is my favorite Khan CD.

Expressive complaints

There are many injustices in the world, so it is good that we have people willing to speak out against them:

Media regulator Ofcom today said it had received nearly 350 complaints about the weekend's Britain's Got Talent shows – but fewer than 20 were about the treatment of runner-up Susan Boyle, who was admitted to a private medical clinic on Sunday suffering from exhaustion.

Ofcom said most of the complaints, 331, were about 10-year-old singer Hollie Steel, who broke down in tears on Friday night's Britain's Got Talent live semi-final.

However, only 50 were concerned for her welfare, while 281 were complaining that she should not have been given a second chance to sing.

The story is here.

Why does the music from Cape Verde sound so sad?

Might one reason be recurring famine?:

Despite its name, Cape Verde is an arid landmass with minimal agricultural potential.  The excess mortality associated with its major famines in unparalleled in relative terms.  A famine in 1773-76 is said to have removed 44 percent of the population; a second in 1830-33 is claimed to have killed 42 percent of the population of seventy thousand or so; and a third in 1854-56 to have killed 25 percent.  In 1860 the population was ninety thousand; 40 percent of Cape Verdeans were reported to have died of famine in 1863-67.  Despite a population loss of thirty thousand, the population was put at eighty thousand in 1870.  Twentieth-century famines in Cape Verde were less deadly, but still extreme relative to most contemporaneous ones elsewhere: 15 percent of the population (or twenty thousand) in 1900-1903; 16 percent (twenty-five thousand) in 1920-22; 15 percent (twenty thousand) in 1940-43; and 18 percent (thirty thousand) in 1946-48...

...such death tolls imply extraordinary noncrisis population growth.  For instance, if the population estimates for 1830 and 1860 are credited, making good the damage inflicted by the famine of 1830-33 would have required an annual population growth rate of about 4 percent between 1833 and 1860 -- despite the loss of a quarter or so of the population in 1854-56.

That is all from the new and noteworthy Famine: A Short History, by Cormac O Grada.  Here is the book's home page.

Here are the author's working papers on famine.

Why Susan Boyle is so popular

From Mark Blankenship, here is one stab at the question:

No matter how much we mock those we consider beneath us, it's much more satisfying to be reminded that everyone has dignity.

That's because when we laugh at someone for being a freak, we're laughing out of fear. We're laughing because we want to prove that we are not like that loser over there. If we can shame the people who don't belong, then we can prove that we do.

When we embrace an outsider, though, we're paving the way for our own acceptance in the future. Eventually, we'll all feel like outcasts, and none of us wants to be laughed at. The Susan Boyle Story suggests we won't be. Instead of fearing for our own eventual shame, we can count on society to hear what's beautiful in us. We can trust that if we just show our true selves, we will be embraced.

Whether or not that moral is true in the real world, it's alluringly true in the Susan Boyle Story. By participating in the narrative that television has constructed for her, by cheering her on and watching her video over and over, we can not only feel good about graciously welcoming an outsider, but also feel relief for helping create a world that will someday welcome us.

I thank Mary Anne Sieghart, at TheBrowser, for the pointer.

Why don't they boo more at the opera?

From Freakonomics blog:

Terry Teachout, meditating on a rare outburst of booing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, wonders if classical music and theater are being diminished by a superabundance of standing ovations and a scarcity of negative feedback. What if theater and orchestra audiences behaved more like blog commenters?

What are the options?  You might argue that older people are less grumpy but I'm not sure that approach will succeed.

"Signaling refined taste" comes to mind but that, taken alone, requires some negative feedback as well.  Try listening to what informed viewers say to each other in art galleries.  There is plenty of negative mixed in with the positive, even if you think the blend is a phony one.

I believe that the opera-going demographic wishes to signal "magnanimity."  When these high-status people are slighted, as they might be by a bad performance, their privately optimal response is to ignore the slight.  Reacting to the slight suggests that they have let it bother them; it is a sign of low status to be bothered by what are ultimately low status entities.

Magnanimity is an underrated concept in signaling theory, in part because it has such quiet manifestations.  It is Holmes's "dog that didn't bark." 

That so many people signal magnanimity in the very public opera house, but less so in the private art gallery, is a telling indication of how you should interpret much of the positive public feedback you receive.

How many of you are into signaling magnanimity?

Questions that are rarely asked, a continuing series

Robin Hanson proceeds with "Who Likes Band Music?"

Smiling politely through yet another performance by my son's school band tonight, I wondered: why do school bands play music so different from what the kids, or even their parents, choose in their free time?  Music at parties, movies, etc. is pretty different.  The novels kids read in English class differ from the novels they or their parents read in their free time, but most people accept that school novels are deeper, subtler, etc., so that kids learn more by studying them.  But do most people really accept a similar claim about band music?  What gives?

Maybe the point of band music is that many of the instruments are relatively easy to play, or at least they are easy to play poorly.  The noise drowns out the children who cannot play much at all.  More children playing recruits more parental support and also more support from administrators, who like to point to participation.  What numbers would you get if the students had to learn Hindemuth's sonatas for solo viola?  Yes, conformity and discipline have some social value but still this does not look like a Pareto optimum to me either.

What's the opening chord in "Hard Day's Night"?

It's sometimes called "the most famous chord in rock n' roll."  I have wondered about this question for thirty-four years (all this time I'd been thinking it is an odd hybrid G7/9/13).  Here is a history of thought on the controversy, including a list of nominated chords.  It now turns out there is an answer.  A mathematician applied Fourier transforms to break the sound into its constituent parts.  Here's the bottom line:

The Beatles producer [George Martin] added a piano chord that included an F note, impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar. The resulting chord was completely different than anything found in songbooks and scores for the song, which is one reason why Dr. Brown’s findings garnered international attention. He laughs that he may be the only mathematician ever to be published in Guitar Player magazine.

Here is a pdf of the researcher's findings.  I thank Eric H. for the pointer.