Something Out There
In the New Yorker Money Issue, Nick Paumgarten writes about people who search for cycles and patterns underlying finance. (A subscription is required to view the entire article but the abstract is still fascinating stuff, especially if you’re, say, thinking of writing a conspiracy-minded thriller!!).
Paumgarten, as feature writers often do, uses a prominent example (here, financier Martin Armstrong) as the entry point for a wider discussion. It’s an effective rhetorical strategy, but frustrating; Paumgarten veers into the history of cycle theory just as he gets to Armstrong landing in jail for defrauding Japanese investors of billions of dollars.
Unsurprisingly, this touches on Dan Brown territory, discussing the Fibonacci sequence and Armstrong’s fascination with pi:
[Armstrong] constructed what he called an Economic Confidence Model, which he relied on to predict an upturn in the price of commodities in the early days of 1977. It worked. Later, he realized that 8.6 years was exactly three thousand one hundred and forty-one days: 3,141, the number pi times a thousand. If pi was essential to the physical world, perhaps it somehow governed the markets. Pi suggested some future dates of significance, which Armstrong watched carefully as they approached.
The gallery of cranks and geniuses and the bizarrely coincidental patterns they uncover sends this into the domain of Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace. Pattern searchers take themselves and what they find quite seriously, but what can we make of things like this:
Starting in 1735, the Hudson’s Bay Company kept track of the number of lynx pelts collected in Canada each year. The number rose and fell, precipitously, in a distinct cycle of 9.6 years. As it happened, this cycle was synchronous not only with the variable abundance of other indigenous fauna… but also with the cycles of seemingly unrelated phenomena, such as heart-disease rates in New England and chinch-bug populations in Illinois.
Edward R. Dewey, chief economic analyst of the Commerce Department under Herbert Hoover, reasoned that this had to be either a coincidence or “Something Out There.”
Appropriately enough, I searched fruitlessly through Gravity’s Rainbow for the quote I wanted to end this piece with, something along the lines of “with all this, what have you said?” But there’s also the story of Bryon the immortal light bulb, who, plugged into the post-World War II electrical grid, will (Pynchon slips into the future tense) find himself all-knowing:
Someday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as before. His youthful dreams of organizing all the bulbs in the world seem impossible now—the Grid is wide open, all messages can be overheard… But Byron has been visited an even better fate. He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything… His anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it…
