People From Los Angeles

"Twiddling is one of my autistic things. I do it to calm me down. I twiddle frantically for a while, and I fantasize about all kinds of things while I twiddle."

"I don't have a visual imagination. Please, that trivializes my suffering. She [Temple Grandin] blows her own horn all the time."

"But [not accomplishing] that does not stop me from wishing for a cure for future generations of children so they will not have to live like I have."

"On my blog I attempt to dispute these notions by pointing out their failure to consider the long-term effects of autism on high-functioning autistics such as myself—let alone what should be done for the low-functioning autistics who cannot speak, or the “headbangers.”"

"Usually, I was aware that other kids were bullying me, except occasionally when some girls in junior high… pretended to flirt with me and for a while. I did not understand they were making fun of me."

"Hopefully on my tombstone they will write, "We don't need no stinkin’ neurodiversity"."

"Worst of all, it [speculation of notable figures] provides fodder for the special educators, special education attorneys, ABA therapists etc. to legitimize their profits and to encourage the false hope and tears for toasted snow that so many parents of these children have."

"Most persons with an autism-spectrum disorder have never expressed their opinions on someone’s blog and never will. The neurodiverse often reach a vulnerable audience, as many persons on the spectrum have low self-esteem. Neurodiversity provides a tempting escape valve."

"It's [Autism has] prevented me from making a living or ever having a girlfriend. It's given me bad fine motor coordination problems where I can hardly write. I have an impaired ability to relate to people. I can't concentrate or get things done."

"But then I got fired from so many jobs, I ended up retiring and being supported by my parents."

"Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when nothing is happening. It is the void between events."

"Kubler was the foremost scholar of Pre-Columbian and Post-Columbian art of his generation and brought the area into consideration of the discipline of art history (Willey). The Shape of Time remains fundamental for the concept of art history as "material culture." Kubler argued in it that art "can be expanded to embrace the whole range of [hu]man-made things." But Kubler also controversially asserted in Shape of Time that "art stands outside culture" and warned about a linear-historical perspective that would interpret objects through historical precedent. History, Kubler contended, is a process that continually transforms human sensorial capacities and knowledge through ongoing discovery."

"Instead of an idea of style, which embraces too many associations, [I] have outlined the idea of a linked succession of prime works with replications, all being distributed in time as recognizably early and late versions of the same kind of action."

"The universe has a finite velocity which limits not only the spread of its events, but also the speed of our perceptions. The moment of actuality slips too fast by the slow, coarse net of our senses."

"Although inanimate things remain our most tangible evidence that the old human past really existed, the conventional metaphors used to describe this visible past are mainly biological."

"The history of art... resembles a broken but much-repaired chain made of string and wire to connect the occasional jeweled links surviving as physical evidences of the invisible original sequence of prime objects."

"We always may be sure that every man-made thing arises from a problem as a purposeful solution."

"The historian's special contribution is the discovery of the manifold shapes of time. The aim of the historian, regardless of his specialty in erudition, is to portray time. He is committed to the detection and description of the shape of time."

"Unless he is an annalist or a chronicler, the historian communicates a pattern which was invisible to his subjects when they lived it, and unknown to his contemporaries before he detected it."

"However useful it is for pedagogical purposes, the biological metaphor of style as a sequence of life-stages was historically misleading, for it bestowed upon the flux of events the shapes and behavior of organisms."

"Let us suppose that the idea of art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things, including all tools and writing in addition to the useless, beautiful, and poetic things of the world. By this view the universe of man-made things simply coincides with the history of art. It then becomes urgent to devise better ways to devise better ways of considering everything men have made. This we may achieve sooner by proceeding from art rather than from use, for if we depart from use alone, all useless things are overlooked, but if we take the desirableness of things as our point of departure, then useful objects are properly seen as things we value more or less dearly."

"The cultural clock runs mainly upon ruined fragments of matter. No matter to what hazardous lengths we let out our line they still withdraw again, and further, into the depths. ... however, runs mainly upon ruined fragments of matter recovered from refuse heaps and graveyards, from abandoned cities and buried villages. Only the arts of material nature have survived; of music and dance, of talk and ritual, of all the arts of temporal expression practically nothing is known elsewhere than in the Mediterranean world, save through traditional survivals among remote groups."

"Purpose has no place in biology, but history has no meaning without it."

"The seventeenth-century academic separation between fine and useful arts first fell out of fashion nearly a century ago."

"I was surprised, while preparing this lecture, to notice how, among my friends who had read the book, a division into two groups appeared. Both groups are equally discerning and educated, and as far as I can tell, equal in numbers. One group is eager to say that they don't understand a word of it, and there are artists and historians among them. Those of the other group claim that they understood it all on first reading, without difficulty. Of course I believe them both, without understanding the combination that separates them so sharply. Perhaps distinctive and contrasting features in the comprehension of works of art are responsible. What I say speaks to some, but not to others. Some are ready, and others are not. But when both someday find that they agree in understanding it, that day may be its last as a book alive in the dissension over its intelligibility."

"The notion of style has long been the art historian's principal mode of classifying works of art. By style he selects and shapes the history of art."

"Beck is finishing Bratton’s legacy of transforming the department. It’s Beck who will bring it over the line and say, yes, LAPD is a new police force with a new culture, a new outlook, a new way of treating the public — especially the minority public — and we will never go back to the days of Rodney King because we have changed the culture of the Los Angeles Police Department."

"The LAPD is still haunted by one of the most notorious police beatings ever caught on camera, the assault on Rodney King, which resulted in ferocious riots more than 20 years ago. It’s a big reason why LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, who wears his body camera on his chest, is eager for his department to embrace this technology."

"Activists laud Beck for establishing cooperative relationships with a number of communities, particularly Latinos and blacks, and for his sophisticated approach to gang crime, which has been cut in half during his tenure."

"We don't turn people away because things are out of statute. You come to us, especially with a sexual allegation, we will work with you. We address these things seriously, and it's not just because it's Mr. Cosby."

"This is a national issue, one that is important when we talk about police legitimacy. This is an important national conversation we need to have. When something happens in Missouri or the streets of New York City, it has an impact here. We are all tied together."

"I judge him by the results I see in Watts at our public housing developments where the Community Safety Partnership has positively changed the culture of relations between the community and the police department. Over the last few years, Watts and the LAPD have each undergone a remarkable transformation for which I credit Chief Beck."

"In a couple of decades ... every public safety employee, police officers, firefighters, paramedics, everybody will have them. I think it improves behavior on both sides of the camera, which is our goal."

"I am immensely proud to lead the men and women of the LAPD who work tirelessly every day to earn the trust of our communities and who risk their lives to protect those that live, work and visit the City of Angels."

"I think this is a department that reflects the city and reflects it not only in the makeup of the personnel — which is the most diverse department in the city by far — but also in the diversity of our thought and the recognition that policing is a very complicated social contract with the people that live in this city, and that social contract requires action on both parts."

"What policymakers (and econometricians) should recognize, then, is that societies face a meaningful set of choices about alternative economic policy regimes."

"These ideas have implications not only for theoretical and econometric practices but also for the ways in which policymakers and their advisers think about the choices confronting them. In particular, the rational expectations approach directs attention away from particular isolated actions and toward choices among feasible rules of the game, or repeated strategies for choosing policy variables. While Keynesian and monetarists macroeconomic models have been used to try to analyze what the effects of isolated actions would be, it is now clear that the answers they have given have necessarily been bad, if only because such questions are ill-posed."

"Cagan’s adaptive mechanism for explaining expectations of inflation has sometimes been criticized as an ad hoc formulation that is inconsistent with the hypothesis that expectations are rational. In this paper, we have showed that conditions exist under which adaptive expectations are fully rational."

"Tom Sargent is a bit out of touch with the real world up there in his office in Minneapolis. A lot of the disagreement is ideologically based, though certainly not on Tom's part. I see this by talking to people. Certain people have a capacity for ignoring facts which are patently obvious, but are counter to their view of the world; so they just ignore them."

"I remember how happy I felt when I graduated from Berkeley many years ago. But I thought the graduation speeches were long. I will economize on words. Economics is organized common sense. Here is a short list of valuable lessons that our beautiful subject teaches.1. Many things that are desirable are not feasible. 2. Individuals and communities face trade-offs. 3. Other people have more information about their abilities, their efforts, and their preferences than you do. 4. Everyone responds to incentives, including people you want to help. That is why social safety nets don’t always end up working as intended. 5. There are tradeoffs between equality and efficiency. 6. In an equilibrium of a game or an economy, people are satisfied with their choices. That is why it is difficult for well-meaning outsiders to change things for better or worse. 7. In the future, you too will respond to incentives. That is why there are some promises that you’d like to make but can’t. No one will believe those promises because they know that later it will not be in your interest to deliver. The lesson here is this: before you make a promise, think about whether you will want to keep it if and when your circumstances change. This is how you earn a reputation. 8. Governments and voters respond to incentives too. That is why governments sometimes default on loans and other promises that they have made. 9. It is feasible for one generation to shift costs to subsequent ones. That is what national government debts and the U.S. social security system do (but not the social security system of Singapore). 10. When a government spends, its citizens eventually pay, either today or tomorrow, either through explicit taxes or implicit ones like inflation. 11. Most people want other people to pay for public goods and government transfers (especially transfers to themselves). 12. Because market prices aggregate traders’ information, it is difficult to forecast stock prices and interest rates and exchange rates."

"Q: “Professor Sargent, can you tell me what CD rates will be in two years?” Sargent: “No.”"

"My recollection is that Bob Lucas and Ed Prescott were initially very enthusiastic about rational expectations econometrics. After all, it simply involved imposing on ourselves the same high standards we had criticized the Keynesians for failing to live up to. But after about five years of doing likelihood ratio tests on rational expectations models, I recall Bob Lucas and Ed Prescott both telling me that those tests were rejecting too many good models."

"An alternative “rational expectations” view denies that there is any inherent momentum in the present process of inflation. This view maintains that firms and workers have now come to expect high rates of inflation in the future and that they strike inflationary bargains in light of these expectations."

"It is paradoxical that an administration that came to office rejecting the whole apparatus of Keynesian economics finds itself presiding over a stream of what threaten to be permanent deficits."

"For policy, the central fact is that Keynesian policy recommendations have no sounder basis, in a scientific sense, than recommendations of non-Keynesian economists or, for that matter, non-economists."

"I remember a seminar here while Tom was visiting in Chicago. Every body was talking; it was a very chaotic seminar. In the middle of the seminar. Tom made some point and the speaker didn't seem to understand it. Tom dropped it and didn't say anything for the rest of the seminar. At the end, he just handed the speaker a piece of paper with a bunch of equations on it and said, "Here's what I was trying to say." I thought it was a very friendly, constructive thing to do, but the speaker said, "this is Sargent's idea of a conversation" and laughed. I think it's just that Tom thinks he can get things settled on a more technical level. Tom and I talk quite a bit. I think that we influence each other a lot."

"My published work is just a record of my learning. I'm sharing it with people so they won't make the same mistakes that I did. It's been a painful and slow process. My work is like a journey, a journey of discovery."

"Sargent said in a talk here last year that it is simply a methodological mistake to regard any macroeconomic policy action as an isolated episode. The only legitimate way to think of economic policy is as if the government adopts a policy rule (which may have a random element). What he meant was that he can't apply his methods to isolated policy episodes. My reaction is that the man in the street or even the man in the corporation boardroom, looking at the US Congress making macroeconomic policy, regards it as a possibly unstable episode. He not only doesn't know how it is going to come out, he doesn't imagine it to be the application of a policy rule plus a random error."

"Suppose someone sits down where you are sitting right now and announces to me that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. The last thing I want to do with him is to get involved in a technical discussion of cavalry tactics at the Battle of Austerlitz. If I do that, I'm getting tacitly drawn into the game that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. Now, Bob Lucas and Tom Sargent like nothing better than to get drawn into technical discussions, because then you have tacitly gone along with their fundamental assumptions; your attention is attracted away from the basic weakness of the whole story. Since I find that fundamental framework ludicrous, I respond by treating it as ludicrous – that is, by laughing at it – so as not to fall into the trap of taking it seriously and passing on to matters of technique."

"Using the popular macroeconomic models of the time, Lucas and Sargent showed how replacing traditional assumptions about expectations formation by the assumption of rational expectations could fundamentally alter the results. … Most macroeconomists today use rational expectations as a working assumption in their models and analyses of policy. This is not because they believe that people always have rational expectations. Surely there are times when people, firms, or financial market participants lose sight of reality and become too optimistic or too pessimistic. … But these are more the exception than the rule, and it is not clear that economists can say much about those times anyway. When thinking about the likely effects of a particular economic policy, the best assumption to make seems to be that financial markets, people, and firms will do the best they can to work out the implications of that policy. Designing a policy on the assumption that people will make systematic mistakes in responding to it is unwise."