Category: Uncategorized

Q: What’s wrong with cyberpunk?

A: A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.

Q: What was that dissident influence? What were you trying to do?

A: I didn’t have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism. I was tired of America-as-the-future, the world as a white monoculture, the protagonist as a good guy from the middle class or above. I wanted there to be more elbow room. I wanted to make room for antiheroes.

I also wanted science fiction to be more naturalistic. There had been a poverty of description in much of it. The technology depicted was so slick and clean that it was practically invisible. What would any given SF favorite look like if we could crank up the resolution? As it was then, much of it was like video games before the invention of fractal dirt. I wanted to see dirt in the corners.

From a fascinating Paris Review interview with William Gibson, author of the hugely influential and award-winning 1985 novel Neuromancer, and the man who coined the term “cyberspace.”

Here is an excellent study guide for Neuromancer. Gibson’s Twitter feed is also one of the most interesting out there.

As with Mexican migrants today, not everyone welcomed [the influx of French Canadians to New England in the early 20th century.] One Massachusetts official called French Canadians “the Chinese of the eastern states” in an 1881 report that described them as “indefatigable workers” who had no interest in assimilating and drove American wages down. …

Besides helping to fuel New England’s manufacturing boom, thousands served in the world wars. Rene Gagnon, whose Quebec-born mother worked at a shoe factory in Manchester, NH, was one of the Marines photographed raising the American flag over Iwo Jima in 1945. The author Jack Kerouac was born of French Canadian parents in Lowell, Mass.

Far from causing the collapse of the republic, these largely unregulated border crossers helped build the United States we know today.

What the French Canadian experience shows is that our current obsession with border security is inconsistent with our history, undermines our economic vitality and is likely to fail.

From an op-ed in the New York Times last week by Stephen R. Kelly.

Imagine for a second what it would feel like if the New York Times were to mention your work in an article discussing your area of specialization.

For a Canadian, the equivalent feeling is when the Globe and Mail does so.

Barrie McKenna discussed my recent working paper with Nick Carnes in Monday’s edition of the Globe and Mail, in an article that primarily discussed the ideological inconsistencies of the Canadian conservatives when it comes to farm subsidies:

[E]conomist Marc Bellemare and political scientist Nicholas Carnes investigated agriculture-related votes from 1999 to 2009 to determine what factors drive the behaviour of politicians.

“The one explanation that almost always explains support for agricultural protection is the electoral pressure a legislator faces, i.e., the proportion of her constituents who are farm owners or farm managers,” the authors concluded.

In the end, the study determined that pressure at the polls is more important than lobbying and other influences. The result is that farmers wield out-sized influence, even in relatively small numbers.

…

Prof. Bellemare and Prof. Carnes point out that farmers are politically powerful because the vast majority of other voters are oblivious to what protecting farmers actually costs them.

Barrie’s article also discusses a poster presentation by Tolhurst et al., in which the authors look at the composition of the Parliament and the extent of agricultural protection in Canada.

The poster will be presented at the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association meetings, which will be held in August in Washington, DC, which I suspect several readers of this blog will be attending.