Peter Levin’s Rethinking Markets

May 23, 2008

brand timeline

Filed under: Uncategorized — Peter @ 10:34 am

I sometimes imagine doing an exercise where students would write down in a journal all the advertisements they see in a 24hr time-span. Every single one, including logos, brands, commercials, street signs. Anything bigger than an identifying mark for a store or object, anything that aims towards informing you about the company behind the object rather than the object itself. Of course fuzziness would have to be worked out (which itself would be part of the exercise).

In my mind, it is not as cool or clever as this. But more complete.

Yes. 18 Minutes of “Close the Edge.”

Filed under: Culture — Peter @ 8:25 am

Let’s just take a moment to point to Jon Anderson, lead singer of Yes, singing lead for the Paul Green School of Rock Omega All-Stars. Read, watch, love.

(h/t Making Light)

Museums as value-chargers

Filed under: Art, Culture, Markets, Uncategorized — Peter @ 8:01 am

I have not worked out the distinctions between value and values, or the separate spheres arguments of Zelizer as it fits more generally into economic sociology - efforts to bend her work to my frameworks don’t generally work, and it’s a failure of my frameworking. Still, this excerpt from Kopytoff seems incredibly insightful to me:

When things participate simultaneously in cognitively distinct yet effectively intermeshed exchange spheres, one is constantly confronted with seeming paradoxes of value. A Picasso, though possessing a monetary vale, is priceless in another, higher scheme. Hence, we feel uneasy, even offended, when a newspaper declares the Picasso to be worth $690,000, for one should not be pricing the priceless. But in a pluralistic society, the “objective” pricelessness of the Picasso can only be unambiguously confirmed to us by its immense market price. Yet, the pricelessness still makes the Picasso in some sense more valuable than the pile of dollars it can fetch - as will be duly pointed out by the newspapers if the Picasso is stolen. Singularity, in brief, is confirmed not by the object’s structural position in an exchange system, but by intermittent forays into the commodity sphere, quickly followed by reentries into the closed sphere of singular “art.”
- Igor Kopytoff. 1986. “The cultural biography of things”, pp. 82-83 in Appadurai, ed. The Social Life of Things

The idea here is radical in its insight that objects float into and out of commodity states. We have an old paperback copy of Anna Karenina that is clearly a mass market paperback. But it was given to my partner by her dad, who passed away a couple years back. The book, with its missing cover and folded pages, is no longer a commodity but is now an object imbued with memory. It’s specific to her though, and it would revert back to commodity if she were to give it away to Goodwill. Currently though, it has no price as we think about it.

But some things lose their value for being brought in and out of this commodity state. It can only be commoditized for the first time once. This is why social ties, once monetized, are difficult (but not impossible) to revert back. And if art is to remain valuable by virtue of its cultural value, art world participants have to be careful about how and when they manage the culture/market spheres.

This reference to Charles Saatchi’s joining the efforts of the Art Trading Fund sings to me about how the monetary sphere/cultural sphere dance works.

Damien Hirst is commissioned by Saatchi to produce “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” in 1992 for £50,000 (about $100,000). It is displayed in his gallery until 2005, when it is sold to Steve Cohen of SAC Capital for $8M. Then, just as suddenly as it was moved into the sphere of commodity, it is snatched back into the realm of culture, placed on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for three years, from 2007-2010.

I like the fact that everyone knows that the Met is recharging the cultural batteries of the shark, depleted by its run-in with the marketplace. And of course, as Roberta Smith’s article points out, the Met does not represent some culture-only venue, but a marketplace in its own right. All sides are both totally cynical and totally authentic - art needs to be displayed, and art is a commodity. After another 10 years off the market (probably less), we’ll hear of another sale, another moment of commodification. And then it will be off for another traveling show at Bilbao or somesuch. Just you wait and see.

May 21, 2008

Education = success

Filed under: Markets — Peter @ 9:33 am

Via Ezra Klein, a discussion of the stagnation of wages for college students. It turns out that the 2000s thus far have been mediocre to lousy for college graduates, with inflation-adjusted average hourly wages for young college graduates barely rising from last year, and having fallen by $.60 for women and $1.60 for men since 2002 (the hourly wages are currently $21.09 for men and $18.17 for women in 2007). The good news is that men still make $3 more per hour than women. Yay men (cue interjections about comparability of jobs, human capital differences, brain research, the bold physiological power of the penis).

I always wonder at what we’ve settled on here in the US, w/r/t education as an answer to inequality - give more people access to college! True, but when your economy looks increasingly like an hourglass (actually this is wrong - it’s more of an hourglass with a tiny bulb at the top and a larger one at bottom, pardon my graphical skills), there’s really not much place to put college graduates into good jobs.

I think there’s a ‘new deal’ type discussion that would benefit out country, and of course I’m not the only one to think so. Give a read to the original, it’s worth it. FDR makes the point that in an era when we needed/wanted to industrially develop the US, we were willing to offer things like giant economic disparities between rich and poor, monopolies over infrastructure, etc. The closing of the American West and overproduction in the early part of the 20th c. made that a lousy deal - we needed a new one.

Fast forward to now, what is the rationale for allowing the economy to develop in the ways it does? It is almost purely a self-interested one from the ‘haves’ combined with a rigorous macro-economic defense of trade and capitalism. It is a defense of the status quo, and it is so much less durable than it appears when it is in front of us.

May 20, 2008

Chagall v Cezanne

Filed under: Art, Markets — Peter @ 7:16 am

I was a panelist yesterday discussing art markets, at the Christie’s education center. Great group of people, and really lovely of Marisa Kayyem to invite me. One of the more interesting moments was in our discussion of the primacy of market prices as a measure of value for a work. I had put up a slide noting that ‘centrality’ was the commensurative measure for fine art: that pieces that were closer to the ‘center’ of categories would be considered more important, and hence would command higher values. Someone rightly asked me about the fact that sometimes ‘centrality’ for experts (i.e., art historians) differed from ‘centrality’ for the public; and shouldn’t I clarify the distinction between market value and cultural value.

This led to a surprisingly common discussion - the distinction between Marc Chagall and Paul Cézanne. Chagall is well-liked by the public, and when his pictures comes to auction, they sell well. All the time. Cézanne is considered ‘challenging’, and his art tends to command less high prices. Of course there are large numbers of variables here: the quality of pieces that come to auction, private sales, number of works produced. And yet, Cézanne is considered much, much more central by experts. Chagall is more highly valued by the market.

I am not very articulate about it yet, but there is a funny way that art world participants both completely believe and completely reject ‘the market’ as a measure of value. Following art sales is like tracking baseball scores for many (most?) people; seeing Mark Rothko’s paintings sell for records after such a lull in sales in the 80s, or the rise of Lucien Freud are tracked carefully by participants in the high-end art world. Still, Chagall v. Cézanne - the market sometimes rewards popularity more than important artists. Those former market markers are to be tracked, the latter to be dismissed.

So I (snarkily) suggested that if you believe the market, then, well, really believe it - if prices for Chagall are higher than Cézanne, maybe art historians are simply wrong. Uproar (well, art historians don’t really uproar - more like polite murmur). But what’s interesting is this selective use of the market as an indicator of value when it confirms expert valuations, a sort-of belief in it when it changes somewhat expert valuations (let’s reconsider Klimt!), and a disbelief in it when it contradicts expert valuations. I don’t yet have a complete grasp on why this is, the circumstances under which it operates, or how it really works.

May 16, 2008

Commensuration across commodities

Filed under: Markets, Organizations, Prices — Peter @ 11:10 am

Commensuration, the making comparable of qualitative differences via a common third metric, is valuable for its theoretical contributions to cultural economic sociology. It is a process that makes some things visible and hides others, resulting in an extremely impressive if underrated shaping of the social world. Qualitative distinctions across individual student applicants to college, for instance, are wiped out, replaced by test scores, GPA’s, and comparable lists of extracurricular activities. These social realities can be re-made visible (ie a system whereby individuals are judged as individuals with a whole portfolio), but then easy comparisons are made more difficult.

It is also central to the making of commodities, as I’ve argued before. But if you are deciding how to make real-world investments, it is worth understanding the criteria by which the commodities you are interested in are judged. This is not a direct ‘buy company x’, ’sell company y’ kind of argument, just a way to help understand where experts are coming from. It is also where experts are most likely to be wrong in their misapplication of measures to the values they are measuring. That’s the Moneyball argument, that the ways that players were being commensurated were at best inaccurate.

In any case, I thought I’d post a table of what I have in mind, and see if it leads anyplace interesting. This is what blogs are for, right?

In these cases, the idea is that a simple quantified measure is not sufficient; you need to know enough content to understand the criteria used to make the transformative assessments of qualities through quantities. And though VaR has beautiful problems, it is in fact the ways that assessments across different kinds of financial instruments are made; likewise centrality, price per square foot, etc.

Incidentally, this conception I think bridges some of the more highfalutin discussions of performativity and social studies of finance to the more mundane world of organizations and work. But that’s not my point right here and now.

May 14, 2008

Giving good presentations, addition one

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 5:00 pm

There’s been some more discussion around giving a good presentation. I find myself disagree with some points. First, of course, there are a series of guidelines that make presentations better: more practice, more confidence, attentiveness to one’s audience, etc. But second, individual mileage will vary considerably. For some people, 5-7 words per slide works great. For others, disaster. Likewise having fun, being ‘into’ your presentation, and things like that. I think some folks have been hooked by Tufte’s elegance, Atkinson’s storyboarding, and Hans Rosling’s enthusiasm. It’s the 2.0 aesthetic, to be sure.

But I kind of like literature reviews. Not in the sense that I like a litany of work that’s gone before. But to situate what you are going to talk about. For example, in a recent talk, I used the following slide:

This slide is meant to capture two different approaches in economic sociology. I can talk about this slide for 20 minutes, or for 5, giving specific examples and research to add meat if I have the time or at least flavor if not. But there are more than 6 words, and I still find it useful. Especially when followed by a slide that uses the same form, but adds substance from the current talk:

So now, you have the same slide, but progressively (there were interim discussion and slides) more content built onto the generic form. I guess I don’t see what the problem is here, or why I need to dumb down my slides to make my work more bite-sized. The audience was cultural sociologists, not economic sociologists, so it’s not as if this was a crowd who benefited greatly from shorthand. And yet.

A sociological analysis of the current market crisis

Filed under: Markets, Technology — Peter @ 2:54 pm

For my talk at the UCSD Culture conference, I spoke about market crises, commensuration, and market linkages. The slides are a .pdf of my keynote presentation, available here (the keynote presentation for those who can manage it, is a zip file available here). And this post goes along generally though not perfectly with the slides: (more…)

May 11, 2008

UCSD culture conference

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 9:57 am

Back from a lovely weekend in San Diego, where I was a participant in their 4th annual Culture Conference: Crisis, Emergency, Global Processes. Aside from being a sort of former Northwestern love-fest (Amy Binder and David Pellow are from there, Ann was visiting there when I met her), it was a good mix of synthetic thinking about emergency and humanitarianism (Calhoun), genocide and institutional processes (Hironaka), market crisis (me), social movements and environmental justice responses (Pellow), and a kicker about how some solutions become viable while others fall off the table (Swidler).

The department itself, and its environs, I would highly recommend. The department hits kind of the sweet spot of being central/high-productivity enough that people are within the main circles of sociology without being too caught up in the ‘never-ending quest for becoming elite’ as to sacrifice comity for status. Being dependent on the state of California kind of stinks, per budgets and other craziness; but I think people underestimate how frickin’ wonderful that SD weather is.

I plan to post some thoughts on my own presentation, with maybe some slides, soon. In the meantime, Ann Swidler and her colleagues make a lot of sense.

May 7, 2008

Dits and Dashes

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 7:31 am

Reading Maureen Dowd’s column today, which I do sometimes but not terribly frequently nowadays (NYT opinion page = yawn), I don’t even get it. There are so many mixed metaphors - Blanche DuBois, Tara, hippies, matter/anti-matter, butterflies, scorpions, prom queen. It’s like she’s somehow channeling the aliens from Mars Attacks!: ack! ack ack! ack! Nonsensical rambling, I would be embarrassed if I wrote that way - leaving aside the point of the column even.

Wow.