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A Gentleman in Moscow won all kinds of awards. The entire novel takes place within Moscow’s Metropol hotel, which I recently visited. The actual hotel is nothing like the one portrayed in the book, making the work questionable as a source of history. However, there are still some excerpts that interested me (below). The book concerns an aristocrat who is purportedly kept under moderately comfortable house arrest in this fancy hotel after the Russian Revolution.

For eventually, we come to hold our dearest possessions more closely than we hold our friends. We carry them from place to place, often at considerable expense and inconvenience; we dust and polish their surfaces and reprimand children for playing too roughly in their vicinity—all the while, allowing memories to invest them with greater and greater importance. This armoire, we are prone to recall, is the very one in which we hid as a boy; and it was these silver candelabra that lined our table on Christmas Eve; and it was with this handkerchief that she once dried her tears, et cetera, et cetera. Until we imagine that these carefully preserved possessions might give us genuine solace in the face of a lost companion.

And when the Count’s parents succumbed to cholera within hours of each other in 1900, it was the Grand Duke who took the young Count aside and explained that he must be strong for his sister’s sake; that adversity presents itself in many forms; and that if a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.

“It is a sad but unavoidable fact of life,” he began, “that as we age our social circles grow smaller. Whether from increased habit or diminished vigor, we suddenly find ourselves in the company of just a few familiar faces. So I view it as an incredible stroke of good fortune at this stage in my life to have found such a fine new friend.”

Picking up his chopper, Emile pointed at the rest of the rack and cautioned the Count: “Tell your boys that my lamb is served rare. If someone wants it medium, they can go to a canteen.”

“The Bolsheviks are not Visigoths, Alexander. We are not the barbarian hordes descending upon Rome and destroying all that is fine out of ignorance and envy. It is the opposite. In 1916, Russia was a barbarian state. It was the most illiterate nation in Europe, with the majority of its population living in modified serfdom: tilling the fields with wooden plows, beating their wives by candlelight, collapsing on their benches drunk with vodka, and then waking at dawn to humble themselves before their icons. That is, living exactly as their forefathers had lived five hundred years before. Is it not possible that our reverence for all the statues and cathedrals and ancient institutions was precisely what was holding us back?” Osip paused, taking a moment to refill their glasses with wine. “But where do we stand now? How far have we come? By marrying American tempo with Soviet aims, we are on the verge of universal literacy. Russia’s long-suffering women, our second serfdom, have been elevated to the status of equals. We have built whole new cities and our industrial production outpaces that of most of Europe.” “But at what cost?” Osip slapped the table. “At the greatest cost! But do you think the achievements of the Americans—envied the world over—came without a cost? Just ask their African brothers. And do you think the engineers who designed their illustrious skyscrapers or built their highways hesitated for one moment to level the lovely little neighborhoods that stood in their way? I guarantee you, Alexander, they laid the dynamite and pushed the plungers themselves. As I’ve said to you before, we and the Americans will lead the rest of this century because we are the only nations who have learned to brush the past aside instead of bowing before it. But where they have done so in service of their beloved individualism, we are attempting to do so in service of the common good.”

Some might wonder that the two men should consider themselves to be old friends having only known each other for four years; but the tenure of friendships has never been governed by the passage of time. These two would have felt like old friends had they met just hours before. To some degree, this was because they were kindred spirits—finding ample evidence of common ground and cause for laughter in the midst of effortless conversation; but it was also almost certainly a matter of upbringing. Raised in grand homes in cosmopolitan cities, educated in the liberal arts, graced with idle hours, and exposed to the finest things, though the Count and the American had been born ten years and four thousand miles apart, they had more in common with each other than they had with the majority of their own countrymen. This, of course, is why the grand hotels of the world’s capitals all look alike. The Plaza in New York, the Ritz in Paris, Claridge’s in London, the Metropol in Moscow—built within fifteen years of each other, they too were kindred spirits, the first hotels in their cities with central heating, with hot water and telephones in the rooms, with international newspapers in the lobbies, international cuisine in the restaurants, and American bars off the lobby. These hotels were built for the likes of Richard Vanderwhile and Alexander Rostov, so that when they traveled to a foreign city, they would find themselves very much at home and in the company of kin.

“Everyone dreams of living in America.” “That’s ridiculous.” “Ridiculous? Half of the inhabitants of Europe would move there tomorrow just for the conveniences.” “Conveniences! What conveniences?”

“I’ll tell you what is convenient,” he said after a moment. “To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”

This posting is mostly a placeholder for me, but if you like the above, read A Gentleman in Moscow!

The book is somewhat topical given today’s panic over “inequality.” It portrays a world in which the lives of rich people are completely separate from those of the masses. Despite the vast cost difference between Hillary Clinton’s Gulfstream G450 and a middle class family’s Honda Accord, I’m not sure that the difference in day-to-day lifestyle is as vast as what is described in the novel between a European or Russian aristrocrat of the day and a peasant. Hillary and the rabble use the same air conditioners, refrigerators, smartphones, washing machines, etc. Maybe Hillary never has to personally touch any of these appliances, but pressing the “start” button isn’t all that onerous.

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A Facebook friend who is passionate about Hillary, Trump-hatred, and demanding that Everyone Pay Attention, linked to this interview with a Harvard Law School lecturer:

it could justify a further investigation into obstruction of justice on the part of the president. The matter certainly warrants an investigation.

It was at a meeting in which he asked everyone else to leave, which is an enormously suspicious thing.

The difference between this and President Nixon in Watergate is that in Watergate there was a tape. [Trump = Nixon without a tape recorder]

The action of [Comey] releasing this information was incredibly self-protective. [Why would he need to protect himself? He is at home collecting taxpayer-funded pension checks? Or he is working as a lobbyist or for a government contractor getting paid $1+ million? Or maybe he will write a book for $10 million?]

The article was published by Harvard itself. The Facebooker described it as the “clearest explanation.”

Here’s a piece by a Harvard Law School professor (not published by Harvard, certainly!):

President Trump also had the constitutional authority to order Comey to end the investigation of former national security adviser Mike Flynn. He could have pardoned Flynn, as Bush pardoned Weinberger, thus ending the Flynn investigation, as Bush ended the Iran-Contra investigation. What Trump could not do is what Nixon did: direct his aides to lie to the FBI, or commit other independent crimes. There is no evidence that Trump did that. [Why didn’t Trump do this, actually? Just pardon both Hillary Clinton and this Flynn guy and move on?]

Throughout United States history — from Presidents Adams to Jefferson to Lincoln to Roosevelt to Kennedy to Obama — presidents have directed (not merely requested) the Justice Department to investigate, prosecute (or not prosecute) specific individuals or categories of individuals.

It is only recently that the tradition of an independent Justice Department and FBI has emerged. But traditions, even salutary ones, cannot form the basis of a criminal charge. It would be far better if our constitution provided for prosecutors who were not part of the executive branch, which is under the direction of the president.

The president can, as a matter of constitutional law, direct the attorney general, and his subordinate, the director of the FBI, tell them what to do, whom to prosecute and whom not to prosecute. Indeed, the president has the constitutional authority to stop the investigation of any person by simply pardoning that person.

In a world where people think that the legal system should be deterministic, at least to some extent (and you’d hope, on the definition of what conduct is criminal), how can we explain the discrepancy between these points of view?

It seems that the first opinions are those of a legal expert who was appointed by a Clinton family member (Bill) to a federal judgeship. The second opinions are those of a legal expert who was not similarly favored by Bill or Hillary.

[The other fun recent Facebook item was from a student at a liberal arts college. Citing a video of Senator Claire McCaskill talking about our government-directed health insurance schemes, she said “It is always women who fight against injustice and power.” There was a huge quantity of feedback on this observation, all of it positive, mostly from folks most of their way through $500,000 of U.S. K-12 and liberal arts education. I wonder how it would work for a student who cited Jesus, Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mandela, and MLK and concluded “It is always men who fight against injustice and power.”]

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The boring actuarial types of the car insurance industry publish data at http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/driver-death-rates on “the number of driver deaths per million registered vehicle years.”

Set the form to “Very Large” and “SUV” and you’ll see that the 2WD Chevrolet Suburban has a death rate of 0-38 (confidence interval) whereas the 4WD version of the same car is at 11-67. (They also give you the actual number, but I think the confidence intervals are a fairer basis of comparison.)

The “large” SUV world also shows that the 2WD versions are safer.

For minivans they break out the Toyota Sienna 2WD (2-16) and the Toyota Sienna 4WD (1-37). [Note that the Honda Odyssey seems to be the safest minivan, with a confidence interval of 1-15, which is an upper limit lower than anything I found other than a couple of Lexus SUVs (0-12 and 0-14, which does raise the question of how meaningful the lower limit is; if it is 0 does that mean it is impossible to kill yourself, sort of like in Groundhog Day?)]

In the midsize SUV world I couldn’t find any pattern.

Readers: Want to look at this? How about the hypothesis that 4WD encourages people to venture out in bad weather? Is that supported by these data?

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Our 10-year-old Infiniti has 80,000 miles on it. It recently went from “running perfectly” to “dead in the middle lane” on the Mass Pike (I-90). The transition occurred in about two seconds. The culprit turned out to be a bad “cam sensor” (Wikipedia article on a similar crankshaft sensor) that feeds the ignition timing system. The old-school distributor wasn’t perfect, but timing problems would result in a rough-running engine rather than an instantly dead engine, no?

Based on my experience with a 1998 Toyota Sienna that simply refused to break, I thought that we were on track for service-free and incident-free vehicles. But now I’m wondering if Peak Reliability wasn’t 10 or more years ago. Cars today have a lot of complexity and, apparently, potential for hard and sudden failures. At 8,000 miles and one year old, this particular Infiniti had an all-systems meltdown caused by some brake system controls. The latest cars have auto-braking, lane-keeping, and various other collision-avoidance systems that would seem to have the potential to disable the vehicle.

Readers; What do you think? Will cars actually be getting less reliable from now on? Except maybe electric cars that have a lot fewer moving parts (but Teslas aren’t good for reliability, are they?).

[Separately, I’m wondering why this Infiniti could be shut down by the failure of a single sensor. The camshaft is plenty long. Amazon sells camshaft sensors for as little as $13 as replacement parts ($172 at the dealer, plus $388 for installation). From this I infer that the factory cost of a sensor must be less than $1. Why wouldn’t Infiniti put in 2 or 3 of these and have the ignition computer pick the cleanest signal?]

Finally, if you’re in the market for a new car, don’t neglect politics. A wealthy Hillary-supporter on Facebook regarding the replacement of a beloved Volvo: “Trump anxiety is a factor in any spending even though the market has been kind to me.” (i.e., Trump has made him $1 million richer, but he is so anxious about the future that he is keeping his money in the market rather than cashing out $50,000 of gains to buy a fancy new car).

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Four friends and I went to see Wonder Woman the other night. Like any real American, most of my education comes from watching TV and the rest from Wikipedia. Now these two sources are in conflict.

Wikipedia: “Amazons were the daughters of Ares and Harmonia (a nymph of the Akmonian Wood). They were brutal and aggressive, and their main concern in life was war.”

movie: the Amazons are opponents of Ares and their main concern in life is peace.

If memory serves, the Amazons would have sex once/year and then, 9 or 10 months later, kill any male babies. Thus did they have a society of mortal females that could continue indefinitely. (Historians don’t say what happened in the case of transgender Amazons who identified as male starting at a later age.)

In the movie, by contrast, the Amazons seem to be immortal (they’ve been alive for thousands of years anyway) and they don’t have any children, except for one. (On the third hand, they can be killed by bullets so maybe they aren’t immortal?)

The interesting question for me is why the filmmakers decided for commercial reasons that it was better to have the Amazons be fighting against Ares and war rather than children of Ares and pro-war. Why did all of the Amazons have to be peace-loving? If the goal was to feature a peace-loving star, why couldn’t the star be a rebel who disagreed with the war-loving Amazon majority?

Obviously it is just a movie so they don’t need to stick to the Greek sources, but it is more trouble to make up new stuff. Why did the screenwriters go to the trouble? And if they had the energy to make up this alternative history of the Amazons, why were they too lazy to explain why an Amazon who leaves the community to fight with men can never return. Is it Cooties or what?

Verdict on the movie overall? One friend expressed boredom and complained that Ares was cut and pasted from the emperor in Star Wars. Personally I enjoyed seeing the imagined world of the Amazons the most and also liked the part where the Amazon discovers and tries to blend into the ugly urban world of mortal humans.

[Separately, the guy who took our tickets had a serious disability that had stunted his growth and left him confined to wheelchair. Plainly he could have qualified for SSDI and enough taxpayer-funded OxyContin to brighten his days. Yet he was working as cheerfully as anyone else. A good reminder for those times when we feel that walking into work is oppressive!]

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I predicted Obamas victory back in 2007 and Hillary’s popular vote majority (but not her loss; did not budget for Democrats clustering themselves into group hugs in a few cities). As with famous Wall Street prophets, I will now predict a market phenomenon but not the date on which it will occur…. Kara McCullough will be elected President of the United States.

I became aware of Ms. McCullough, the current Miss USA, because Facebook friends kept posting derisively about her while linking, e.g., to “New Miss USA Kara McCullough Sounds an Awful Lot Like Donald Trump” (Glamour). Apparently it is okay for older white women who self-identify as “feminists”, “liberals”, and “friends of African-Americans”, to heap scorn on a young black woman if the young black woman has committed thoughtcrimes. McCullough’s worst crime seems to be refusal to adopt “feminism”:

When asked if she identifies as a feminist during an earlier question, McCullough replied that the term feminism is too polarizing and she prefers to describe herself through a lens of “equalism.”

The Glamour journalist, Maggie Mallon, tries to make McCullough look stupid by citing an obsolete dictionary definition of feminism: “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes”.

[Why obsolete? For example, women’s organizations that self-identify as “feminist” currently lobby against equal treatment for men and women in many situations. We wrote about one category in the Rationale chapter:

Legislators and attorneys told us that women’s groups and people identifying themselves as “feminists” were proponents of laws favoring the award of sole custody of children to mothers and more profitable child support guidelines. Is that a recognizably feminist goal? For a woman to be at home with children living off a man’s income? Here’s how one attorney summarized 50 years of feminist progress: “In the 1960s a father might tell a daughter ‘Get pregnant with a rich guy and then marry him’ while in the 2010s a mother might tell a daughter ‘Get pregnant with a rich guy and then collect child support.'” Why is that superior from the perspective of feminism? A professor of English at Harvard said “Because the woman collecting child support is not subject to the power and control of the man.”

We interviewed Janice Fiamengo, a literature professor at the University of Ottawa and a scholar of modern feminism, about the apparent contradiction of feminists promoting stay-at-home motherhood. “It is a contradiction if you define feminism as being about equality and women’s autonomy,” she responded. “But feminism today can be instead about women having power and getting state support.”]

As a proponent of “equalism” (her own coinage?), Ms. McCullough has the potential to appeal to a broad category of voters on a broad range of issues. The Glamour journalist laughs at McCullough for responding to a question about health care being a “privilege or right” with “for one to have health care, you need to have jobs. So therefore we need to continue to cultivate this environment that we’re given the opportunity to have health care, as well as jobs, to all the American citizens worldwide.” I think that’s a good answer for a 25-year-old. Zimbabwe can declare that Swiss-grade health care is a “right” but if they don’t have the economy and jobs to support it, the term “right” will be meaningless because they won’t be able to deliver on it. By contrast, anyone with a good job can, if necessary, fly to France, Israel, or Switzerland and get some decent health care at a price that is bearable.

Our centrally planned economy produces some stark inequalities (e.g., a free house worth $100,000 per year pre-tax or $0 and a position on a waiting list). There are a lot more losers than winners in this unequal government-created world. So a politician claiming adherence to “equalism” should get votes from the unfortunates (not to say Deplorables) on the waiting list, thus prevailing over a status quo politician who gets votes from the fortunates who are actually occupying free housing.

Other advantages: McCullough is tall and Americans like to vote for tall Presidents.

Readers: What do you think? Is this gal on track to be a future President?

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For walking around shop-lined pedestrian streets and enjoying the feeling of the city, my favorite Moscow hotel turned out to be the Marriott Royal Aurora. Ask for comments, a local said “Yeah this is very close to center, and I think it’s about as high as you can go in Moscow without the hotel having a dedicated elevator for disposing of overdosed escorts….”

The location is fine for seeing the tourist high points. You’re almost next to the Bolshoi Theater and about a 10-minute walk from Red Square. More importantly, a lot of the city’s better restaurants and shops are immediately adjacent. It is convenient to Metro (trains run every minute during core weekday hours!) and bus services.

Breakfast was included in my $200/night (including tax) price for a “superior” room (as big as a “junior suite” in most hotels). This is served in a pleasant atrium (photos) and service is attentive and friendly. They’ll come by every 5 minutes or so to see if you want more coffee, some of the Russian sparkling wine, fresh juice, etc. There is an omelette station, meats and potatoes, fresh fruit, cold cuts, smoked fish, and a vegetable and pickle section. You could eat about four complete meals at the breakfast buffet and wouldn’t be hungry for the rest of the day (or week?).

If you do eat four meals per day during your one hour at the buffet, the gym is nice and pleasantly staffed 24/7. The pool is kind of small but was always empty during my stay so you could actually swim for exercise. There is also a hot tub, steam room, and sauna.

Front desk and concierge services are excellent.

The hotel laundry is an expensive piece-by-piece service (supposedly hotels don’t actually get rich off this and yet the price of washing a shirt is about the same as buying a shirt at Costco or Walmart; this would be a great subject for young economists to investigate!). Moscow doesn’t have laundromats or wash-and-fold services (everyone has a machine at home), so try to bring enough clothes for your entire stay or budget an extra $100 per-person for laundry.

Internet is free and throttled to about 4 Mbit/second. It works reliably with no annoying reauthorization process. You won’t be streaming Netflix, Amazon Prime, or YouTube into Russia, so this will be mostly for work.

Some alternatives that I considered…

• Four Seasons: right next to Red Square, but unless you just love seeing Chinese tour groups, this is less convenient for everything other than touring the Kremlin. The lobby is not all that nice or big.
• Ritz-Carlton. Russians seem to like this place.
• Park Hyatt. Russians also like this one. Very close to the Marriott.
• Metropol. A Gentleman in Moscow makes it sound fantastic, but in reality the lobby and restaurants are small and not that interesting. The atrium at the Marriott is actually nicer.

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For those Americans who have an EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) card, e.g., the roughly 44 million on food stamps (SNAP), Amazon has cut the price of unlimited Prime video streaming to $5.99/month.

At a minimum, the folks at CATO will have to update their 2013 work versus welfare tradeoff analysis (summary: for tens of millions of Americans, it is not economically rational to work; this is on top of the tens of millions of Americans for whom it is more lucrative to collect child support than to work).

Readers: Do you expect to see more price discrimination based on whether or not a consumer holds an EBT card?

Related:

• Book Review: The Redistribution Recession

 

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A reader was kind enough to take me to the Bolshaya Bronnaya Synagogue, in a fashionable neighborhood of central Moscow, for Friday night services. They are welcoming to strangers, even a blonde Russian and her French boyfriend who showed up out of curiosity. Everything is in Hebrew and the books are in Hebrew/Russian so if you’re casual about your Jewish observance you’ll be kind of bored during the service per se (etiquette hint: don’t pull out your smartphone and start reading on the Kindle app during Shabbat!). The Lubavitch Hasidim run this temple under the Chabad banner and they serve a community Friday night dinner after the service. There we talked to a guy who appeared to be in his 30s who’d grown up in a Russian military family in Vladivostok. His family had abandoned Judaism in the 20th century, but he was seeking to rediscover the religion of his great-grandparents. To Jews from the West who can adjust their level of observance every week if they want, it was touching to see how precious Judaism was to this man. (Contrast to “Jewish Americans, who will go to any length, short of practicing Judaism, to instill a sense of Jewish identity in their children.” (from Here I Am by Jonathan Foer))

If you’re curious about the revival of religion in Russia, or you happen to be Jewish, I would recommend spending a Friday evening at this synagogue. Dress code: most people wore suits, but I was in a T-shirt and blue jeans (if this upset anyone, I couldn’t understand enough Russian to learn about it).

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Scanning the New York Times right now…

Comey Accuses White House of ‘Lies’

Mr. Comey said that President Trump lied to the American public when he said that the F.B.I. was in disarray.

Is this worth a citizen’s attention? The first headline, about a politician allegedly lying, sounds a lot like gambling in Casablanca. The second headline sounds purely subjective (see “FBI Admits It Missed Opportunities to Stop Tamerlan Tsarnaev” (Boston Magazine, 2014); was that because of “disarray” or due to some other reason?)

Readers: What’s interesting about Mr. Comey and/or what he has said recently?

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