Illusions Perdues (“Lost Illusions”) is a new adaptation of a typically prolix Balzac work. Balzac was a literary giant. If you want to know what France was like in the second quarter of the 19th century, he is your go-to source. But he was not known for being succinct or for sticking to the point. In the course of a relatively short life (he died at 50 or so), he wrote approximately a bazillion words. His works make the efforts of Turgenev and Herman Melville seem as sparse and economical as a Hemingway short story. The book is filled with digressions, and is interrupted by the separate literary efforts of one of the characters, a poet. None of those poems were written by Balzac, but by several of his literary colleagues. In other words, as an emperor is supposed to have said to his court composer, “Too many notes, mister Mozart.”
I guess there are two sides to that coin.
Here’s how an Amazon reviewer describes the book (or books – it can be published in one volume or three):
“Lost Illusions is a long and sometimes tedious novel about a young poet from the provinces.”
Here’s how Goodreads describes the same work:
“Balzac’s Lost Illusions is a massive literary undertaking, and an attempt to delve deep into the world of humanity with all its great deeds and basest desires.”
So its massive scope is either a reflection of great depth or excess verbosity, and Balzac was either an encyclopedic chronicler of his times or a guy who just couldn’t shut the fuck up.
Probably both.
Gustave Flaubert probably summed up Balzac’s strengths and weaknesses as well as anyone. He was filled with effusive praise for Balzac’s unsparing portrayal of society, while at the same time deploring his tedious prose. Flaubert once wrote of Balzac: “What a man he would have been had he known how to write!” (Quoted by Graham Robb in “Balzac: A Biography.”)
Anyway, the filmmakers managed to condense this sweeping story into a good movie of normal length, and it included some nice nudity by Salome Dewaels.
Speaking of Ball-Sack, that’s where this year’s Econ Nobel is kicking our beloved Uncle Scoopy. I acknowledge that the Nobel Prize is an appeal to authority & proves nothing. That granted, the Econ Nobel does tend to go to influential & widely recognized seminal work. In this case, the counterintuitive findings about the conditions under which a modest minimum wage hike does not necessarily cause job losses in even a fairly small job market, were heresy at the time, but are now buttressed by myriad similar data studies of macro markets.
My nutshell upshot is this: Behavioral Econ was a wakeup call. But it turned out the “rational actor” assumption of micro theory could largely be corrected for by a handful of ad-hoc “externalities” such as “sticky” wages & prices. Nonetheless, the micro-foundations for macro project is essentially a failure anyway. The problem is that the machinery becomes too complex to be predictive. There are always way more knobs than inputs. You can get any answer you want out of it. Innocent-seeming tweaks create devastatingly huge deflections.
Meanwhile, real-world data science has advanced by leaps & bounds thanks both to high tech, to big data & of course a hat tip to the quant folks. Micro-econ does work pretty well at the small scale of a single player in a well-defined market. Once there are a few players, big & little, micro theory can lose its traction on macro pretty damned fast. The appealing anecdotal case analysis stories of econ theory are just-so stories, leading only to division, strongly correlated to political affiliation. Data is ascendent because, hey, it works. And doctrinal theory, simply, does not.
Honorable mention to a newcomer heretical theory, though. MMT, while it may seem nuts, turns out to reach some of the same conclusions as some “mainstream” macro theories, just from a different angle. In particular, because of its radical simplicity, MMT underscores that there is one & only one problem with government deficit spending, namely inflation. Many economists used to think we learned the lessons of the past & understood inflation pretty well. After 2008 & the wild years since, it’s now clear to many that it’s in nobody’s hand. The problem of macro remains in disarray, but economics is on the march once again, thanks to data science.
Finally, a couple of cites, for your reading pleasure.
Economic sciences laureates 2021.
nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences
Card, Angrist & Imbens have made econ a more scientific field.
noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-econ-nobel-we-were-all-waiting
I never disputed that point. My argument was that minimum wage increases drive small companies out of business if the proposed increase in wages is a larger number than current operating profit. That point has nothing to do with economic theory. It’s just math.
This mostly affects owners of a small number of franchises, and I assume the jobs would simply be absorbed elsewhere in a healthy economy, based on what you are saying. The people who used to work for a 7-Eleven franchisee in that scenario go to work for Wal-Mart or Amazon, or other companies that can more easily absorb the increases. I suppose this is especially true in today’s economy, where there are more jobs than workers in many sectors, thus allowing any laid-off employees to be absorbed elsewhere, in the hungry maws of desperate employers.
On the other hand, if minimum wage increases are gradual enough, I would guess that the combination of economic growth and price inflation would probably allow the small businesses to survive.
Frankly, I hold the (presumed) minority opinion that there is little harm and some benefits from the process of driving small businesses out of the market. It’s just a form of economic Darwinism that can ultimately strengthen the economy, as Wal-Mart did when it crushed all the small-town retailers, and as Amazon is doing by crushing the rip-off boutique retailers.
So, I gather people here are not big fans of Andy Warhol’s early movies, like “Sleep” and “Empire State”?
I can’t even fathom someone being so bored that they would want to waste any more than a few minutes of life energy on his work. Better to take the time catching up on much needed sleep that or do some volunteer work!
Maybe his stories would be good in Classics Illustrated comic books. It worked for Moby Dick and Last of the Mohicans, great stories buried under tedious prose. They made good comic books. As a child, I loved those two stories. Then I grew up and had to read Melville and Cooper. Growing up was not the smart play in that case.
To my knowledge, Classics Illustrated never attempted a Balzac adaptation, so maybe he was too much of a bore even for them.
There are french comic adaptations of Balzac works. I don’t think any have been adapted into English.
All I know about Gustave Flaubert is that he was a pig (puppet) that had a contempt for the bourgeoisie. But I haven’t heard much about him since James Corden took over the Late Late Show.
Somewhere, Miss Piggy is moist.
I really miss Craig Ferguson. He really had a unique, refreshing take on the late night talk show.
Of course James Corden is also unique, so I guess it’s just that Ferguson was to my taste, while Corden is not.
(Note to self: watch a couple of episodes of The Hustler game show to see if it’s any good.)
There used to be two late night talk shows I recorded every night, the Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson and Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld. I miss Craig too. I like James Corden, but I haven’t watched him in years. Red Eye generally had a relatively diverse panel with a light hearted take on the news. I kept watching when Gutfeld left, but then it was cancelled. I don’t bother with Gutfeld’s other shows. I really don’t watch any of the late night shows except occasionally with YouTube clips.