Month: May 2016

Sleep Walk analysis

 

“Sleep Walk” is pretty famous for its I – vi – iv – V verses, but there’s more interesting stuff going on, especially for 1959 top 40 radio.

  • The end of the bridge is a G7#9 (AKA the “Purple Haze” chord). The slide emphasizes this by sliding [D, G] up to [F, Bb] and back, and you can really hear the [B, F, Bb] in the rhythm guitar. I can’t think of any other top 40 song that used it so prominently; even “Purple Haze” mostly omits the major 3rd so it’s not as dissonant.
  • The ending is a G chord with the slide using a falling sixth interval: [G, E] – [Gb, Eb] – [F, D]. This is a common blues trick that turns a 6th chord (6 on top) into a 7th (7 on bottom).
  • The final cadence is pure jazz:
    • C6 [8-x-7-9-8-x]
    • G7b9+ [x-8-9-8-9-x] (root played only by bass)
    • C6add9 [x-10-10-9-10-10]

Take the medicine

 

I saw an image floating around Facebook that said the human body is “programmed” to be a “self-healing machine” and “pills only mask the symptoms” of illnesses. This kind of thinking leads to kids dying and suffering needlessly.

Symptoms are what kill you. You don’t get a gold star for “roughing out” a fever or a painful injury, and the stress endured doesn’t make your body stronger. Stress is bad for you and damages relationships.

Bodies aren’t programmed. Evolution is a sloppy mechanism that produces systems just barely sufficient to survive threats from the immediate environment. Unfortunately, our “immediate environment” is now global, so with respect to the evolutionary time scale our potential sources of illness has exploded. Our systems are not prepared, and even young, talented musicians can succumb to viruses like H1N1.

Why wouldn’t a Basic Income be consumed by inflation?

 

Interest in the Basic Income is definitely picking up. This recent piece from Andrew Flowers, like most, doesn’t at all mention the possibility that the BI amount could be somewhat or completely eaten away via increased prices.

The BI will give rent collectors—landlords, near-monopolies like AT&T/Comcast, state/local governments, on and on—large incentives to increase rents, prices, and fees. Of course it will have some level of inflation.

If the inflation effect turns out to be large, BI would be a waste of time and scary to roll back, but there’s also a danger it could be regressively redistributive. I think it’s likely Congress would pass the BI only if it also reduced more direct help to the poor. If Congress took away that help, inflation—if occurred—would effectively force the poor to turn over what’s left to the rent collectors higher up the wealth distribution.

BI is still an interesting thought experiment to me, and it’s cool that studies are underway, but those studies need to be large and long enough to detect for inflationary effects, and articles discussing BI should mention that risk.

There are plenty more feasible ways to help the poor: increase wage subsidies like the EITC, target wage subsidies toward those having particular trouble finding work, or even some WPA jobs.