Feedback – a major element that democracy and the markets have in common. A ceasefire, why it could prove the most likely outcome of the war-without-end in Ukraine. A reaction economy leaves little time for reflection and ‘rewards’ only reaction. What role does the mind play in our health and healing? How creativity can flow from forgetfulness.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“The great thing that democracy and the market have in common is feedback. You can’t sell your product, you go out of business; you can’t persuade voters, you go.” (Martin Wolf in the article of the week)

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK

Tom Clark, When markets fail, according to Martin Wolf
(Prospect, 25 January 2023)
An interesting take on Martin Wolf’s “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism” which just came out. “The world’s pre-eminent financial journalist” spent his entire career marvelling at the wonder of free markets, but he now worries their excesses could lead to an unravelling of democracy itself. Both democracy and the market have one great thing in common: feedback; but the liberal promise is not just feedback, “it’s feedback without death… For most of history, a change of regime meant mass murder. So this is an incredibly great achievement”. But it is also a fragile one, as this review explains in quite some depth. A most pertinent read (metered paywall – reads in 8-10 min).
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Sergey Radchenko, This War May Be Heading for a Cease-Fire 
(The New York Times, 25 February 2023)
No two wars are alike, but one stands out for its relevance to the current blood bath in Ukraine: the Korean war (1950-53) and how it ended. In Ukraine, an end to the war seems a long way off: neither side is interested in negotiations, so how could a peace settlement come about? Like in Korea 70 years ago: neither North nor South Koreans, nor their sponsors, were in a hurry to end the war, but the conflict gradually fizzled out, leading to a cease-fire and a temporary division of the Korean Peninsula. In the end, a stalemated war proved preferable to the alternatives. A cease-fire was signed, but there was no peace treaty, no negotiated settlement. Technically, the war is still frozen, not finished. Could this happen in Ukraine? Radchenko argues that if neither side makes significant gains in coming months, the conflict could well be heading for a cease-fire (gifted article – reads in 6-8 min).
Click here to read the full article

William Davies, The Reaction Economy
(London Review of Books, 2 March 2023)
A long (15 min+) but rich and rewarding read about what the sociologist calls the “reaction economy”. What is it? A system in which “each of us (celebrities included) becomes a junction box in a vast, complex network, receiving, processing and emitting information in a semi-automatic fashion, and in real time. (…) In this model, each individual reaction is one more item of information thrown back into the network, in search of counter-reactions.” And what does it mean? Taking the time to think has been replaced by a dopamine-laced drive to react immediately (metered paywall).
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Diana Kwon, Your brain could be controlling how sick you get — and how you recover
(Nature, 22 March 2023)
Another field in neuroscience that is exploding: mapping out the brain’s control over the body’s immune responses. More and more, neuroscientists want to provide an explanation for a phenomenon that many clinicians and researchers recognise: mental states can have a profound impact on how ill we get and how well we recover. Working out how this happens could enable physicians to tap into the power of the mind over the body, and could help to boost the placebo effect, destroy cancers, enhance responses to vaccination and even re-evaluate illnesses that, for centuries, have been dismissed as being psychologically driven (metered paywall – reads in about 10 min).
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Gavin Francis, The Dream of Forgetfulness
(The New York Review of Books, 9 March 2023)
Reassuring! A review of two recent books that build on an insight of Borges: that to live, it is necessary to forget. In Forgetting – The Benefits of Not Remembering, the neurologist Scott Small likens the loss of memory to a chisel that hammers away at the marble of our lives, sculpting order and beauty from the block of raw experience. In A Primer for Forgetting – Getting Past the Past, Lewis Hyde reminds us that the Greek goddess of memory (Mnemosyne) was the mother of all the muses, and the songs she inspired had a twinned purpose: commemorating past glories while allowing listeners to forget themselves (requires a $1 payment to be read in full, but can be enjoyed without).
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