House of Eratosthenes

Becky was noticing that the economy is starting to suck, as womens’ hemlines are dropping down toward the ground. Recalling that this is part of a longstanding pattern, unexplained as it may be, she had a recommendation that meets with our full approval over here: Women should make full use of the Bull Markets and Bare Knees rule to help pump the economy back up: “Ladies—be cool and do your daisy duke duty.”

Historically speaking, fashion trends and tastes often serve as early harbingers of economic change. In the booming, pre-Crash 1920s, flapper hemlines bounced giddily to the knee before falling down to the ankles in the depressed 1930s. The 1960s’ youthquake, complete with postage-stamp-size miniskirts, heralded a similar stylistic ebullience before the oil crisis of the 1970s plunged fashion back into an earnest, hippie frame of mind.

Becky is a lesbian, as am I. You’ve heard that Adam Carolla routine, I’m sure…lesbian trapped in a man’s body. Mike Adams took this to the next absurd extreme…

While I was doing my research something strange happened. I guess you could say I had an epiphany. After all these years of thinking I was just a white male heterosexual Protestant Republican, I realized I was wrong. I’m really a lesbian trapped inside a man’s body.

Naturally, I was concerned that when I revealed this to my girlfriend (now my wife), she would be alarmed. I even thought it might end our relationship. But that wasn’t so. When I told her about my condition, she came back with this stunning revelation: She’s really a gay man trapped inside a woman’s body. It seems we really were meant for each other! Shortly thereafter I proposed.

But I digress. The point is Becky and I share an ulterior motive. But ulterior motives can be tolerable.

Shorter Skirt And while it’s obvious she’s just kidding around, and my money says if the hemlines went up and good lookin’ women started flashing their pins again there would be little or no effect on the Dow — nevertheless, oddly, I wouldn’t want to bet a lot. If it worked, I daresay, I wouldn’t be that surprised. Who knows, maybe it would.

There certainly is a link. The economy was doing very well in the Roaring Twenties and of course it flatlined during the Great Depression; written and eyewitness testaments seem to agree that the hemline did its duty to represent this vertical movement as one would expect. Miniskirts became fashionable during the sixties. In my own recollection, the pattern begins to diminish during the seventies. Nobody has anything good to say about the economy during that time, but if you asked the fashion-conscious hippie whether she was going to wear long or short, the answer would come back as whatever was most assured to piss off Mom and Dad…length wasn’t part of the plan one way or t’other.

It’s an imperfect record, but records by their nature aren’t perfect. This one is certainly passible. The link exists.

I see three possibilities: Fashion is the cause, the market is the effect; the higher or lower market figures represent the cause, the rising and sinking hemline is the effect; or, there is a hidden cause, and the fashion dictate and the market trends are both symptomatic of whatever this is. For Becky’s plan to work, the first possibility must be the applicable one.

Nobody’s bothered to figure this out, to the best of my recollection. And yet, we must. We need to know if it’s worthwhile to activate Becky’s plan, if that will do anything to jump-start the economy.

I have an idea. Becky’s comments gave me cause to think back to something I read back in ’04, when supposedly women were going to start covering up their bellies again and what kind of psychology is involved in this. It has to do with a graceful melding of economics and anthropology:

An economics explanation suggests itself:

When women begin to wear less, they start a competition for male attention. In this matter, men are not the most subtle creatures. Advantage goes to women wearing less. What is attention-getting at T+0 (time right now) is merely ordinary at T+1. So women wear still less — and so it goes. Eventually, women are looking “trashy,” in the words of Jane Rinzler Buckingham of Youth Intelligence. At this moment, the competition is, in a sense, “maxed out.” There is no competitive place to go.

There is presumably a “stall” moment. Women know they have a problem, but they do not have a solution.

Then there is a “reset” moment. Women move back to modesty. In a sense, they have to do this merely to start the game again. But what about those outliers, women who continue to wear less and reap the benefits of doing so? “More clothing” women now suffer a competitive disadvantage.

An anthropology-economics suggests itself:

In order for women to move back to “more,” the community of women (and the marketplace) must respond more or less collectively but without the benefit of explicit decision making or communication. They must move together and at roughly the same moment. How does a consensus like this emerge without the benefit of a presidential commission? This is a problem for complexity theory, the place that economics and anthropology meet, in my opinion…

Furthermore, women must find a way to bring in the outliers, those women who refuse the new terms and reap considerable benefits from doing so. There must be some kind of moral suasion going on here, as women police the behavior of other women. Chances this are this happens through the distribution of scorn and accusations of ‘trashiness.

Okay if I’m reading this right, fashion, like economics, moves in a cycle — except there is something to link the two of them together. The fashion cycle is that women start to wear less in order to attract the attention of men, and in so doing start this competition…which eventually must meet with a cul de sac, because you can only whittle down the ensemble to just so much. At this point, as the ladies are deprived of coverage beyond the few square inches that are critical, they are similarly deprived of opportunities to introduce variety into the wardrobe — and you know they aren’t going to stand for that.

And so this anthropological event has to be triggered in response to the stalemate. It must be. But it’s a little bit like the massive population of fish trying to figure out which one’s going to jump into the fisherman’s rowboat first, so that the totality of them can start sinking it by following suit. Whoever starts the plan by wearing more, benefits the community at the expense of her individual interests.

And so according to the article linked above, this is done by introducing new taboos. Whoever persists in minimizing the coverage, from this day henceforth, is a trashy slut. Word has to get out.

What happens, here, is that women have to sacrifice their cooperative spirit with the objects of their affection, for a cooperative spirit with — other women. Women who want them to wear more for the benefit of a sort of a community. Other women they’ve never actually met, and won’t meet. Strangers.

I think this is the link. An economy moves when we cooperate with each other; when we recognize our common interests. This isn’t what women are doing when they bully and cudgel each other into wearing longer dresses. They’re saying to one another, not “do this thing for our mutual advantage,” but rather “do this thing for the benefit of ME.” It is the timeless request that the individual sacrifice her well-being for the benefit of the collective…which, if unheeded, doesn’t remain a request very long. It is commune-based economics. It is the opposite of the kind of spirit that moves an economy forward. It is a group-force motivated, not by ambition, but by raw jealousy.

And so I’m thinking the larger community — that would be America, or perhaps the entire western civilization — is gripped by a spirit of “let’s work together” or “let’s not.” This is bound to have an effect on both the market and fashion.

Therefore, the answer is: The third one. There is a hidden cause, and fashion and the market are both symptomatic it. It’s a spirit of cooperation — or lack thereof. Cooperation for mutual, individual, advantage.

And so no, I’m afraid Becky’s plan probably won’t work.

But you know, it couldn’t hurt to give it a try.

Meh!

Nothing grabs my attention the way title with a word like “hemline” in a title 😉

Probably because I’m a big fan of women in clothing with a feature commonly referred to as a “hemline”. 😉
- philmon | 04/06/2008 @ 21:59
So…if I take this one step further: There is a direct relationship between the amount of nakedness of women in public and economic prosperity. Can we graph this somehow? Would total female public nudity give us Hong Kong like growth? How do we encourage the right people to get naked for prosperity?
- Duffy | 04/08/2008 @ 09:36
Can we graph this somehow?

I think if you go to Becky’s original article, there’s a link to a book that has the graph on the page after the one that comes up under her link. It’s got “copyright, do not reproduce” all over it so I didn’t bring it in here. Pity. I can’t find it now.

How do we encourage the right people to get naked for prosperity?

You know, therein lies the big challenge. Historically, during the summer months a “casual day at work” will be consistently observed by the wrong people.

We’ll need to appoint a “leg dictator” or some such, who would hand out licenses to flash. Not sure if I’d want that job or not.
- mkfreeberg | 04/08/2008 @ 11:11

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Hemline EconomicsSunday, April 6th, 2008

Hemline Economics
Sunday, April 6th, 2008