Well, here I am down the last few (hopefully) days of being pregnant. I could compile a list of all the things I’ll miss about it, but basically it boils down to one thing.
My legs really haven’t needed shaving. The hair on them has become smooth, sparse, light and fine. Even the rather coarse hair on my knees – the result of an accident during a race with a big wheel on a textured driveway – has gotten downright manageable.
A former colleague of mine had a moonlighting job acting as guide-cum-chaperone-cum-cultural interpreter to American high school bands and majorette corps who march in London’s New Year’s Day parade. I’m not sure who goes to see that parade and if it’s shown on tv it’s up in the nosebleed channels on some open access programming. But American high school students pay to march in London – so there’s a parade.
This colleague often had to deal with American parents and chaperones who were a bit shocked by the more open, permissive culture of Britain. For example, one came to her complaining of the unrelenting pornography on the hotel tv and could they please have the channel blocked?
Upon investigation it was discovered it was one of the regular old, free-to-air network channels – good old Channel 4 with a little late night, educational, culturally enlightening documentary. And no – since it was a “terrestrial” channel – it could not be blocked. This stuff was being broadcast into every home in the land.
I had to admit I had some sympathy with the American parent. After all, on what other channel can you find a man talking openly about his love for his pony (as I have watched – rapt)? And I don’t mean like a little girl’s love for her pony. Not at all.
Of course Channel 4 doesn’t always have stuff like that on, but sometimes it does and tonight it did. It was all about the Virgin School – where a group of middle aged women (often twice the age of their clientele) help men become – well, not virgins. They’ve all got certificates in something called “sexual grounding”, so I’m sure it’s all totally legit. Did I mention that this school was located, rather conveniently, in Amsterdam?
This particular programme was focusing on James, 26, from Kent who was their first English client and who had gone over to Holland to learn how not to be a virgin. It was cringe, after cringe after cringe as young James shopped with his grandmother for new underwear for his course (he told her it was a confidence building course). The Vol-in-Law was working on the laptop and said “I’m averting my eyes.”
I did not turn away when a woman over twice his age ( and certified in sexual grounding) was encouraging him to touch her wherever he might. I said “I can’t, it’s like a watching a trainwreck.” But indeed even I had to turn away when the role play turned to a school reunion and James was confessing his undying love to the intimacy therapist (playing some old crush of his) within moments of asking her onto the dance floor.
Channel changed. Even the hardiest of us have to turn away when the carnage gets too bloody.
Being at home, I’ve got BBC Radio 4 on all day. It’s talk radio for the chattering classes. So I get to hear all kinds of interesting things. Like yesterday, I heard a piece on the Soulful Science.
What do you think the soulful science is? Is it the study of saxophony? Is it the discipline of understanding the lurve connection between lustful adults? Is it economics? Yes, you guessed right. It’s economics.
Economics is perhaps best known as the dismal science, but Diane Coyle wants to rebrand the study as The Soulful Science. She says that economists are misunderstood. Yesterday she enumerated those misunderstandings:
…and so on. I’ve been told all these things to my face, mostly when I was a graduate student in economics. And that might have hurt me, had the screwed up little dark spot in my chest not already been dried to dust by the too much microeconomics.
Just kidding.
I kept saying “No, you don’t understand…” or “Money’s only a points system, it’s not about the money.” But that got me pretty much nowhere. And when one of the econ professors in our department said all economists share two traits – a fondness for high school geometry and a cynical view of human nature we couldn’t find any student amongst our number who bucked his theory. And frankly, cynical geometry buffs don’t sound very soulful.
Dr Coyle says that everything has changed about economics though…
Coyle shows how better data, increased computing power, and techniques such as game theory have transformed economic theory and practice in recent years, enabling economists to make huge strides in understanding real human behavior. Using insights from psychology, evolution, and complexity, economists are revolutionizing efforts to solve the world’s most serious problems by giving policymakers a new and vastly more accurate picture of human society than ever before.
I’m not so sure that economics has changed. I always thought that the power of economics was its ability to predict human behaviour and inform policy and decision making. Economics, like any academic discipline, is pretty diverse. And while I didn’t think much of Freakonomics, I did appreciate that it helped bring a more “human” face to economics. And I guess, it’s easier to sell books on an argument of revolution rather than evolution.
The Vol Abroad 