FT
Joker movie
Iago enthrals us four centuries after his creation because we do not know what induces him to raise hell. The drama of Othello is better, not worse, for the lack of an answer. It showcases what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity”. The Joker, pop culture’s Iago, was a similar blank until last week, when the most discussed film of 2019 came out. Joker settles the question of the villain’s motive. It attributes his evil-doing to ostracism, and that ostracism to mental illness, and that mental illness to assorted traumas. And so Todd Phillips, its director, gives our era what it craves: psychology. He spells out a causal link between a man’s interiority and his outward behaviour. We have two hours with the patient on a taut Chesterfield and emerge with copious notes. How simple. How very now. At any given time, there is a subject that a civilised person must know a little bit about. It used to be the classics. At other points, it was art history or the French language or (when it was still “natural philosophy”) science. Mastery was never expected. But it was hard to survive polite company without at least a smattering. Economics rose to this status in the previous decade — see Malcolm Gladwell’s book sales — but could not survive a crash it had failed to predict. What usurped it was psychology. It remains troublingly ascendant. It is there in the pollution of everyday discourse with half-understood jargon. “Avoidance”, “distancing”, “gaslighting”, “projection”, “alignment”, “displacement” and “borderline” are part of the white noise — and that is before people volunteer their Myers-Briggs type. It is there in the amazing confidence with which the non-qualified diagnose others from afar. I have no idea, for example, if the US president has “narcissistic personality disorder”. What I do know is that lots of uncredentialed people are willing to say so in the open. You need not be very old to recall a time when almost no one would have had the term to hand, much less ventured it of a stranger in a stab at remote diagnostics. That boy don’t act right, an anti-Trump sign near my home last year, would have sufficed. What it lacks in nuance it makes up for in epistemic humility. The problem here is not psychiatry or psychotherapy themselves so much as their casual adoption by the masses on a hobbyist basis. Getting the classics or economics wrong through sheer dilettante sloppiness is one thing. The civilian dalliance with what is a branch of medicine seems much more fraught. It also implies the cheapening of real intimacy. The readiness with which some people delve into the realm of the psychological makes me wonder what they reserve for close friends and lovers. There is a time and place for the excavation of someone’s past to establish cause and effect. A second date is not it. Psychotherapy itself is not the problem so much as its casual adoption by the masses on a hobbyist basis Pop psychology has been around for a long time, no doubt. But its intensification over this decade is unmistakable. The change can be marked out with cinematic portrayals of the Joker alone. In The Dark Knight, which came out in 2008, any attempt to psychoanalyse him is given the shortest of shrift. He offers contradictory explanations for his gruesome scars, once blaming his father and later his own hand, as though to set a prying therapist (the viewer) on a wild-goose chase. He is making sport of our eagerness to “understand”. The film’s central line (“Some men just want to watch the world burn”) is simplified Coleridge. Just over a decade later, and not only does Joker gush with pop-psych, but so does the inexhaustible press coverage. We are all Freudians now. Are we better off for it? If people really do engage with their emotions more than previous generations did, then perhaps. But I suggest that something distinct is going on. People engage with engaging with their emotions. That is, they know their way around psychological concepts better than their forebears. They are steeped in the terminology. Whether this is quite the same thing as truly communing with one’s interior life is doubtful. If anything, it seems like a way of keeping it at some remove. I would call it distancing if I were sure what that meant.
James Kynge china debt
As usual, there was a lot to unpack in Donald Trump’s tweet. The US president claimed that American tariffs were having a “major effect” on the Chinese economy, which this week posted its lowest level of gross domestic product growth for nearly 30 years. “China’s 2nd Quarter growth is the slowest it has been in more than 27 years. The United States Tariffs are having a major effect on companies wanting to leave China for non-tariffed countries. Thousands of companies are leaving,” Mr Trump tweeted. Some of this is perhaps half true. Several companies — including US tech behemoths such as Apple — are indeed considering shifting part of their supply chain out of China. And, yes, this potential shift is driven partly by the US-China trade war. But the overall message of Mr Trump’s tweet — that US tariffs are dragging China down — relies on a simplistic reading of what animates China’s economy. The reality is that China’s dynamism these days comes mostly from within, from investment and consumer spending. Trade has long since ceased to be more than a bit player in China’s growth story. Why China's own economy trumps the US trade war “The Trump tensions have contributed to slower growth in China, but the biggest impact has been on sentiment rather than directly from trade,” said Andy Rothman, investment strategist at Matthews Asia. “Remember that last year, net exports accounted for less than one per cent of China’s GDP.” Thus, Mr Trump’s claim that US tariffs have had a “major effect” is overblown. Equally misleading is the idea that Chinese growth has taken a big hit. Economic expansion of 6.3 per cent in the first half of this year, down from 6.6 per cent over all of 2018, hardly constitutes a rout. When such numbers are expressed in US dollars, the vacuity of Mr Trump’s words becomes clear. Last year, China added $1.45tn to its $13.6tn economy, making it by far the biggest national contributor to global GDP. For context, the extra $1.45tn in economic output that China managed in 2018 is roughly equivalent to the size of the Spanish or Australian economies. Even if China manages only 6.3 per cent growth this year, it will have added another “Spain”. Such comparisons help to put the importance of China’s economy into context. But they do not take account of the country’s manifold frailties, many of which lie intentionally obscured beneath upbeat official narratives. The main structural drags on Chinese growth are homegrown. They are hangovers from blistering stimulus binges launched since the 2008 financial crisis that have sent debts skyrocketing to levels which now limit Beijing’s policy options. Total debt in China stands at over $40tn, or close to 310 per cent of GDP, according to the Institute of International Finance. This represents an explosion from levels of just over 150 per cent in 2008, revealing that much of China’s golden decade was borrowed rather than bought. The frailty has forced Beijing to temper its ambitions. Officials routinely warn over the risks that could erupt from a vast, unregulated shadow finance system. Local governments, meanwhile, are navigating what S&P analysts Gloria Lu and Laura Li call a “debt iceberg with titanic credit risks”. Households are also increasingly maxed out. The upshot of all this is that Beijing no longer enjoys the luxury of being able to buy growth by deploying credit to spur unchecked asset price inflation. Such limitations help explain why Beijing appears set against a return to the go-go policies of 2009 and 2015. Several analysts think that if a stimulus is launched to stem ebbing growth later this year, it will be a limited, piecemeal affair. Staying Beijing’s hand over the liquidity spigot is the knowledge that more credit will inflate housing prices further out of the reach of a swelling middle class. “History has proven that every country relying excessively on real estate for economic prosperity would eventually pay a heavy price,” warned Guo Shuqing, China’s banking regulator, in June. Yet Chinese policymakers also know that when property prices ease, households feel poorer and rein in their spending, having an impact on the broader economy. So a balancing act results. When growth slips too much, tax cuts, rebates and judicious injections of liquidity are deployed. If things overheat, some goodies are withdrawn. The only escape for China comes from boosting productivity. And it is this that gives Mr Trump his leverage. Although US trade tariffs have little power to injure China, the prospect of a full-blown economic rivalry with the US that restricts Chinese companies’ access to US tech looms as a potent threat. Thus, says Mr Rothman, China is likely to favour a resolution with the US to the trade war. Without one, Beijing will struggle over time to ascend the technology ladder, making productivity gains harder to attain.
Iago enthrals us four centuries after his creation because we do not know what induces him to raise hell. The drama of Othello is better, not worse, for the lack of an answer. It showcases what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity”. The Joker, pop culture’s Iago, was a similar blank until last week, when the most discussed film of 2019 came out. Joker settles the question of the villain’s motive. It attributes his evil-doing to ostracism, and that ostracism to mental illness, and that mental illness to assorted traumas. And so Todd Phillips, its director, gives our era what it craves: psychology. He spells out a causal link between a man’s interiority and his outward behaviour. We have two hours with the patient on a taut Chesterfield and emerge with copious notes. How simple. How very now. At any given time, there is a subject that a civilised person must know a little bit about. It used to be the classics. At other points, it was art history or the French language or (when it was still “natural philosophy”) science. Mastery was never expected. But it was hard to survive polite company without at least a smattering. Economics rose to this status in the previous decade — see Malcolm Gladwell’s book sales — but could not survive a crash it had failed to predict. What usurped it was psychology. It remains troublingly ascendant. It is there in the pollution of everyday discourse with half-understood jargon. “Avoidance”, “distancing”, “gaslighting”, “projection”, “alignment”, “displacement” and “borderline” are part of the white noise — and that is before people volunteer their Myers-Briggs type. It is there in the amazing confidence with which the non-qualified diagnose others from afar. I have no idea, for example, if the US president has “narcissistic personality disorder”. What I do know is that lots of uncredentialed people are willing to say so in the open. You need not be very old to recall a time when almost no one would have had the term to hand, much less ventured it of a stranger in a stab at remote diagnostics. That boy don’t act right, an anti-Trump sign near my home last year, would have sufficed. What it lacks in nuance it makes up for in epistemic humility. The problem here is not psychiatry or psychotherapy themselves so much as their casual adoption by the masses on a hobbyist basis. Getting the classics or economics wrong through sheer dilettante sloppiness is one thing. The civilian dalliance with what is a branch of medicine seems much more fraught. It also implies the cheapening of real intimacy. The readiness with which some people delve into the realm of the psychological makes me wonder what they reserve for close friends and lovers. There is a time and place for the excavation of someone’s past to establish cause and effect. A second date is not it. Psychotherapy itself is not the problem so much as its casual adoption by the masses on a hobbyist basis Pop psychology has been around for a long time, no doubt. But its intensification over this decade is unmistakable. The change can be marked out with cinematic portrayals of the Joker alone. In The Dark Knight, which came out in 2008, any attempt to psychoanalyse him is given the shortest of shrift. He offers contradictory explanations for his gruesome scars, once blaming his father and later his own hand, as though to set a prying therapist (the viewer) on a wild-goose chase. He is making sport of our eagerness to “understand”. The film’s central line (“Some men just want to watch the world burn”) is simplified Coleridge. Just over a decade later, and not only does Joker gush with pop-psych, but so does the inexhaustible press coverage. We are all Freudians now. Are we better off for it? If people really do engage with their emotions more than previous generations did, then perhaps. But I suggest that something distinct is going on. People engage with engaging with their emotions. That is, they know their way around psychological concepts better than their forebears. They are steeped in the terminology. Whether this is quite the same thing as truly communing with one’s interior life is doubtful. If anything, it seems like a way of keeping it at some remove. I would call it distancing if I were sure what that meant.
James Kynge china debt
As usual, there was a lot to unpack in Donald Trump’s tweet. The US president claimed that American tariffs were having a “major effect” on the Chinese economy, which this week posted its lowest level of gross domestic product growth for nearly 30 years. “China’s 2nd Quarter growth is the slowest it has been in more than 27 years. The United States Tariffs are having a major effect on companies wanting to leave China for non-tariffed countries. Thousands of companies are leaving,” Mr Trump tweeted. Some of this is perhaps half true. Several companies — including US tech behemoths such as Apple — are indeed considering shifting part of their supply chain out of China. And, yes, this potential shift is driven partly by the US-China trade war. But the overall message of Mr Trump’s tweet — that US tariffs are dragging China down — relies on a simplistic reading of what animates China’s economy. The reality is that China’s dynamism these days comes mostly from within, from investment and consumer spending. Trade has long since ceased to be more than a bit player in China’s growth story. Why China's own economy trumps the US trade war “The Trump tensions have contributed to slower growth in China, but the biggest impact has been on sentiment rather than directly from trade,” said Andy Rothman, investment strategist at Matthews Asia. “Remember that last year, net exports accounted for less than one per cent of China’s GDP.” Thus, Mr Trump’s claim that US tariffs have had a “major effect” is overblown. Equally misleading is the idea that Chinese growth has taken a big hit. Economic expansion of 6.3 per cent in the first half of this year, down from 6.6 per cent over all of 2018, hardly constitutes a rout. When such numbers are expressed in US dollars, the vacuity of Mr Trump’s words becomes clear. Last year, China added $1.45tn to its $13.6tn economy, making it by far the biggest national contributor to global GDP. For context, the extra $1.45tn in economic output that China managed in 2018 is roughly equivalent to the size of the Spanish or Australian economies. Even if China manages only 6.3 per cent growth this year, it will have added another “Spain”. Such comparisons help to put the importance of China’s economy into context. But they do not take account of the country’s manifold frailties, many of which lie intentionally obscured beneath upbeat official narratives. The main structural drags on Chinese growth are homegrown. They are hangovers from blistering stimulus binges launched since the 2008 financial crisis that have sent debts skyrocketing to levels which now limit Beijing’s policy options. Total debt in China stands at over $40tn, or close to 310 per cent of GDP, according to the Institute of International Finance. This represents an explosion from levels of just over 150 per cent in 2008, revealing that much of China’s golden decade was borrowed rather than bought. The frailty has forced Beijing to temper its ambitions. Officials routinely warn over the risks that could erupt from a vast, unregulated shadow finance system. Local governments, meanwhile, are navigating what S&P analysts Gloria Lu and Laura Li call a “debt iceberg with titanic credit risks”. Households are also increasingly maxed out. The upshot of all this is that Beijing no longer enjoys the luxury of being able to buy growth by deploying credit to spur unchecked asset price inflation. Such limitations help explain why Beijing appears set against a return to the go-go policies of 2009 and 2015. Several analysts think that if a stimulus is launched to stem ebbing growth later this year, it will be a limited, piecemeal affair. Staying Beijing’s hand over the liquidity spigot is the knowledge that more credit will inflate housing prices further out of the reach of a swelling middle class. “History has proven that every country relying excessively on real estate for economic prosperity would eventually pay a heavy price,” warned Guo Shuqing, China’s banking regulator, in June. Yet Chinese policymakers also know that when property prices ease, households feel poorer and rein in their spending, having an impact on the broader economy. So a balancing act results. When growth slips too much, tax cuts, rebates and judicious injections of liquidity are deployed. If things overheat, some goodies are withdrawn. The only escape for China comes from boosting productivity. And it is this that gives Mr Trump his leverage. Although US trade tariffs have little power to injure China, the prospect of a full-blown economic rivalry with the US that restricts Chinese companies’ access to US tech looms as a potent threat. Thus, says Mr Rothman, China is likely to favour a resolution with the US to the trade war. Without one, Beijing will struggle over time to ascend the technology ladder, making productivity gains harder to attain.
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