About me
My name is Andreas Kluth and I am three things in life: husband/dad, correspondent for The Economist, and aspiring book author.
On this blog, I’ll be writing mostly about the book (out later this year) and the process of writing it, as well as writing and language in general. For the next few months, I probably won’t give away too much from the plot itself, but nearer to publication, you can expect me to open up a lot more.
I’ll also take occasional detours into stuff related to The Economist. Occasionally, I may get just plain wacky.
Hopefully I’ll hear in the comments from anybody who’s interested, in the book or in other things that come up. I’ll be especially grateful for suggestions about good biographies of lives that, in your opinion, fit some of the themes in the book.
If you want to email me, just type into the fields below and push “submit”.
To see how stories of personal achievement are a simplistic parsation of a process which has simple contours on a grand scale but is chaotic on the scale of human lives, look at outliers who died unbelieved, or whose insights, somehow infertile, are mere footnotes to what ends up as the lineage of common knowledge. A few:
Aristarchus, the first heliocentrist – seeing the biggest picture of all, our world a spinning ball within a universe unthinkably huger than the wildest dreams of religion – alone on his Greek island, millennia before the world could hear it;
Matthews, propounding natural selection in passing in a book on Naval Timber;
Semmelweiss – the most tragic case both for himself, dying in an asylum, and for others, since his news had the power to save lives per minute starting any time (strange resonance with Day of the Triffids: soap and water enough to kill these monsters that ravage the world);
Wegener.
Very intriguing life examples, Bruce. Thanks. Semelweiss’s story is especially tragic.
Tesla might be another case.
I’ll have a deeper look, although ideally I’d need to find some kind of reversal in their lives to fit them into one of my chapters.
Are you, by any chance, this Bruce Middleton?
No, since you ask; I have only a tiny and fading Web presence as “the MIT-trained physicist who invented the world’s first super-pogo stick”; it takes a Wayback link to get to the Popular Science article: http://web.archive.org/web/20060623105304/http://www.popsci.com/popsci/bown/2004/recreation/article/0,22221,768216,00.html.
Since you were moved to look, and the public record sheds no light on what lies behind my remarks, I’ll give you the nutshell explanation: which is that I have been living a Semmelweissian nightmare since 1981. Aware of an astonishing disaster which no-one else can see; an urgency of lives per minute again, unbearable pressure for the solitary seer; I even ended up, like Semmelweiss, in a mental hospital for a while – and no more insane than he was. It happens, and there’s nothing like personal experience to give history resonance.
As for your project, a point of sorrow: by the sound of it, you demand reversal within the lifetimes and even careers of your subjects – stories which fit the confines of individual biography. I am afraid that will cut you off from the real meaning of the stories to which you are drawn – a meaning which involves shifts in scale and is melancholy in a way and yet also inspiring, “a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused… the still sad music of humanity… of ample power to chasten and subdue.” Puppets of destiny’s script, striving to read it, driven by forces larger than ourselves which seem to us the voices of our inmost souls.
Your blog and ideas for the book are interesting. I wish you success and hope to read your book someday. I found the comments above from Bruce Middleton very moving and wish that I could read more of what he has to say, as he seems like an interesting person. Would you know if he has a blog of his own somewhere? The link in his post doesn’t work anymore, although I was able to find references in Google to him and his super pogo stick invention – the “Flybar”. Cool invention!
Dear Marain, welcome to The Hannibal Blog! WordPress tells me the email address of anybody who leaves a comment, but of course I never make those public. But if you want Bruce Middleton’s email address, I am happy to email it to you privately.
(Where in Austria do you live? I have spent a large part of my life in Kitzbuehel.)
Yes with a name like Andreas Kluth, I can imagine that this must be the country of your roots! I live in a small town in Niederoesterreich. Have been in Austria since 1982 and it feels like home now. There are so many nice things – coffee, chocolate, skiing in the winter, great museums and music. I would like to communicate that I appreciated Mr. Middleton’s comments to Mr. Middleton, but I don’t want to invade his privacy. Maybe it’s better if you send him my email address. All the best to you!!
Done, Marain. I have emailed Bruce your blog address and email address.
Got it – thanks, Andreas. Which emboldens me to take this plunge:
For anybody wondering, not to be mysterious: during the last global financial disaster (1981/2), I noticed that the whole thing was happening because we use shrinkable debt: debt defined in currency units. When the value of the currency is dropping at 12% per year, this causes mayhem: it bankrupted the savings-and-loan industry, and tripled so-called “interest rates” because lenders add a shrinkage-offsetting charge to real interest – in truth, a senseless premature repayment of real principle.
A point worthy of a high-school algebra lesson. And the remedy is simply to adopt a stable unit of measure: a subscript on the dollar sign in debt contracts, “issue date dollars” – which is known as indexed finance. This was feasible throughout, harms no-one, and would have slashed interest rates instantly from 20% to about 3% (mostly because premature repayment would not be demanded, plus a few more points because the false interest, which is not really lender income, is taxed as income – a charge lenders pass on, which adds a few more points to the interest rate).
After noticing this, I went to a local university to find out why it wasn’t being done. Found three professors on that campus who’d written about it – and others who were amazed when shown the real cause of the global disaster. And: Milton Friedman writing a page in Newsweek: “How to save the housing industry” – published without remark, editors not processing the fact that it must either be nonsense somehow or epochal. And then libarary research: fact recognized by some for more than a century (Simon Newcomb made the point clearly, 1885; Nobelist Modigliani at MIT held a conference to try to get mortgages indexed in the 1970s, in time to have avoided the disaster – while down the hall the other MIT Nobelist Paul Samuelson never grasped it, and always said in his dominant textbook that inflation did no harm and was rather nice). As though some astronomers thought there were five planets: inconceivable, a travesty of science. Tip of the dragon’s tail here: discovery of a cultural disorder far grander than the effect which initially attracts attention. An illusion of scientized culture, while the people involved are not actually communicating: thus a misbirth of science, on a scale of centuries – and the birth of a modern religion, a grave practise of the superstitious but dysfunctional simulation of science.
If you want to look into it Andreas, ask around the Economist: do they realize that use of shrinking debt is a grand blunder, cause of the S&L disaster and the 81/82 calamity, and can they explain why it’s not fixed? Their eyes will glaze: most won’t have grasped the financial point, and if any have they won’t be able to explain the historical anomaly. They, and you, are all hallucinating competence. Misplaced faith in the soundness of the culture of which one is a specimen constantly warping perception. We are not outside the system; we are its substance, and our gut feelings are hallucinations which move us in ways which sustain the bubble. The bubble will burst someday; if you are moved to really understand the event, maybe this post will be the trigger – history truly is chaotic.
(I spent about a year, 1981/2, trying to make people function: I went to banks, to financial newspapers, political parties etc. Recruited economists to back up the dead-simple point – and learned to expect eyes to glaze, and people to shrug and turn away from clear, simple, unanswerable facts, because dissonant with the world they are naive enough to be sure they know: “the herd cannot be this insanely wrong.” Thus what should be shock and epiphany provoking focus and investigation is instead dismissal of what seems somehow unreal. To realize that this is mechanism – the Lemming Psychosis – is a connection I have not been able to catalyze as yet in anyone else’s mind. The discipline required is to hang on to what is proven beyond any doubt, and realize that whatever seems obvious but contradicts it is in some subtle way false. This leads to astonishments: quantum, relativity, plate tectonics – and here we have the spoor of another, as profound and unimaginable, but also consequential in human lives.)
Forgive me, Bruce, but, like Mr Crotchety, I don’t follow. You may be onto something profound or you may not–I cannot tell from this. Have you considered starting a blog? I would be happy to follow your thoughts there; but this is outside the threads that I am weaving here on The Hannibal Blog.
Forgive me, but this is not simple. A subscript on the dollar sign? WTF?
P.S.: No doubt my utter lack of ability to be brief is the reason why my books don’t sell many copies. Thank God I am financially independent by birth.
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