Today’s photos began their existence on the roof of a building in the Bronx where Margot spent most of her summer. One of the requirements of her architecture program involves second year students designing a project and then building it themselves. Their project was a rooftop pavilion and garden for Louis Nine House, which is sort of a halfway house for young adults too old for foster care. You can read more about the project here (pdf).

I have been a busy man. With this semester in full gear, I feel that I have now properly adjusted to existence qua graduate student. This mainly means that I have learned to read more and faster, and that I no longer think of twelve hours of work in a day as unusual.

I am waiting to hear back about the SSHRC application I sent off last semester, and so far all the news has been good. I’ve been short-listed with a first round score of 24.1, which, according to my message board-snooping, warrants optimism. Someone forgot to tell SSHRC about the invention of email, so I’ll have to wait an extra couple of weeks at the end of April before a letter arrives by trans-national post telling me whether I’ll be dumpster diving for fun or out of necessity during the next three years.

I have gotten myself mixed up in a couple of conferences next month. Here at CUNY, I’ll be commenting on a very interesting paper about truth-relativism and future contingency (basically, some technical applications of the idea that statements about the future are neither true nor false) at the annual CUNY graduate student conference during my spring break. The next week, I’ll be heading up to visit Rob in London, where I’ll be presenting “A Logic For Talking About Things That Don’t Exist” at the UWO Logic, Mathematics, and Physics Graduate Philosophy Conference. Judging from the conference lineup, my head will be spinning with physics and math by the end of the conference’s second day, and mine will be the lightweight semantics paper.

This next photo is of a section of the roof that Margot was partly responsible for designing.

Here’s an interesting Vanity Fair article I have been reading about Iceland’s recent economic decline and fall. Of particular interest, I thought, was a section on how Iceland got to be an economically prosperous country in the first place:

Iceland’s big change began in the early 1970s, after a couple of years when the fish catch was terrible. The best fishermen returned for a second year in a row without their usual haul of cod and haddock, so the Icelandic government took radical action: they privatized the fish. Each fisherman was assigned a quota, based roughly on his historical catches. If you were a big-time Icelandic fisherman you got this piece of paper that entitled you to, say, 1 percent of the total catch allowed to be pulled from Iceland’s waters that season. Before each season the scientists at the Marine Research Institute would determine the total number of cod or haddock that could be caught without damaging the long-term health of the fish population; from year to year, the numbers of fish you could catch changed. But your percentage of the annual haul was fixed, and this piece of paper entitled you to it in perpetuity.

Even better, if you didn’t want to fish you could sell your quota to someone who did. The quotas thus drifted into the hands of the people to whom they were of the greatest value, the best fishermen, who could extract the fish from the sea with maximum efficiency. You could also take your quota to the bank and borrow against it, and the bank had no trouble assigning a dollar value to your share of the cod pulled, without competition, from the richest cod-fishing grounds on earth. The fish had not only been privatized, they had been securitized.

It was horribly unfair: a public resource—all the fish in the Icelandic sea—was simply turned over to a handful of lucky Icelanders. Overnight, Iceland had its first billionaires, and they were all fishermen. But as social policy it was ingenious: in a single stroke the fish became a source of real, sustainable wealth rather than shaky sustenance. Fewer people were spending less effort catching more or less precisely the right number of fish to maximize the long-term value of Iceland’s fishing grounds. The new wealth transformed Iceland—and turned it from the backwater it had been for 1,100 years to the place that spawned Björk. If Iceland has become famous for its musicians it’s because Icelanders now have time to play music, and much else. Iceland’s youth are paid to study abroad, for instance, and encouraged to cultivate themselves in all sorts of interesting ways. Since its fishing policy transformed Iceland, the place has become, in effect, a machine for turning cod into Ph.D.’s.

The article goes on to argue that the recent economic crisis in Iceland, which has been very much worse than its cousins elsewhere, has resulted in part from a glut of these Ph.D.’s: people who felt they were too smart to go fishing anymore, and who decided to try and turn Iceland into Wall Street instead, with disastrous results. But what stuck out at me from this passage in particular was the fact that, prior to the 1970’s, Iceland resembled Newfoundland. A big, isolated North Atlantic island populated by impoverished funny-talking fishermen, and surrounded by boat-stayingly dense cod. But instead of pacing themselves while they still had enough fish to make a killing, Newfoundlanders kept at it until there were no fish left at all and the federal government had to step in and impose quotas. While Icelanders got rich and overeducated, Newfoundlanders worked thrice as hard while squandering their natural resources and got even poorer in the process. This is (a) a good case study in how clairvoyant government regulations can stop a capitalist society from destroying itself with greed, (b) a decent allegory for a variety of situations we currently find ourselves in vis-à-vis resources like oil, water, air, our own health, plants and animals, etc., and (c) a story that makes me feel very sorry for Newfoundlanders.

Anyway, here’s one last photo, of Margot demonstrating a water basin she cooked up.