It is hard to say what angered people more: that one of the analysts behind Standard & Poor’s downgrading of U.S. debt was Canadian, or that another, John Chambers, who appeared on talk shows on Friday as the public face of the decision, had a graduate degree from Columbia not in economics but in English literature. (Chambers is reported to have studied literature and philosophy as an undergraduate at Grinnell College.) The Post was especially upset, noting in a headline that Chambers, whom it dubbed a “downgrader-in-chief,” was “no biz whiz.” Unfortunately, the paper missed a gimme: “Oh the Humanities!” Oh well.
The S. & P. announcement may have contributed to yesterday’s big stock drop—though James Surowiecki writes that the explanation mostly lies elsewhere. One sure victim of all of this, however, is the major-equals-vocation concept of college, which holds that rocket scientists build rockets, econ majors and M.B.A.s meddle with money, and lit majors boast defensively of the value of art over commerce, or else go around grumbling about their useless degrees.
It would make for a good story—a kind of revenge of the culture nerds—if Chambers were really some Adorno-spouting egghead who stepped in from the lit-theory classroom to bend the world markets to his devious will. This, of course, is not so. The Post reports that Chambers, who is the deputy head of sovereign ratings for S. & P., has long worked in the financial industry, beginning at the European-American Bank and rising to a position as vice-president. Today the Times describes a typical workday in S. & P.’s sovereign-ratings group as “filled with number-crunching, conversations with investors and foreign budget officials and debate about the conclusions of their reports.”
We may think of Wall Street and literary life as having few things in common, though talented financial analysts and cultural critics would presumably share the ability to read texts closely, draw together common ideas from many sources, and use information to make judgments and further arguments. And we shouldn’t forget that the central player in all of this, Standard & Poor’s, got its start with a book. In 1860, Henry Varnum Poor published “History of the Railroads and Canals of the United States,” a compilation of statistics and other financial information about the country’s transportation systems. That book became the bigger-selling “Manual of the Railroads of the United States,” which was updated annually. It was a guide to investors rather than an academic treatise, but the title has the kind of venerable blandness you’d expect from a history-department dissertation.
Yesterday, as the market tumbled, and my hunching over a keyboard constantly hitting refresh on a Web page tracking the declining Dow revealed itself as pathological and absurd, it seemed sensible to turn instead to something more durable than the changing red figures on the screen. When the financial markets undergo their seemingly annual spate of volatility, I turn to a three-page section in the middle of Thomas Wolfe’s “You Can’t Go Home Again,” which perhaps fails to cohere as a novel, but succeeds as a reference book to consult in a moment of crisis, whether the seeming catastrophe is narrow and personal or wide and global. This particular section addresses the stock-market crash of 1929, and though it was published just five years later, in the early lows of the Depression, it nonetheless contains a kind of anarchic optimism, at once scornful of the powerful and perhaps even giddy at the chaos, but proud and patriotic about a certain ideal of the country. Wolfe writes:
Conditions weren’t sound then. They may or may not be now. Uncertainty is often marked with feelings of helplessness and stasis. And yet Wolfe’s incantation offers reassurance and the hope of renewal, and of the benevolence implicit in the forward propulsion of time. Earlier in the section, he writes of a new, emerging national spirit:
