Alleged Wisdom

Lego Friends Controversy

2012-01-11T10:47:00.001-05:00

Over the holidays, my friend, an anthropologist, showed me a copy of Businessweek with an article on a new Lego product line for little girls called Lego Friends:

Over the years, Lego has had five strategic initiatives aimed at girls. Some failed because they misapprehended gender differences in how kids play. Others, while modestly profitable, didn't integrate properly with Lego's core products. Now, after four years of research, design, and exhaustive testing, Lego believes it has a breakthrough. On ... Jan. 1 in the U.S., Lego will roll out Lego Friends, aimed at girls 5 and up.

I'd recommend reading the whole thing, because it has good observations about culture and child development, but if you don't have time, I will summarize and simplify the key points:
The Lego company almost went bankrupt last decade. To survive, they followed the time-honored business strategy of focusing on their core market. While Legos were traditionally meant to appeal equally to boys and girls, it was mainly boys who played with them. The company started deliberately designing Lego sets to appeal to boys, and marketing them to boys. This strategy helped make the company profitable, and now they want to start selling to girls again.
I was curious to learn more about this, so I started reading more about it to see what the reaction was. Many people in the core group of Lego fans do not like these sets, for various reasons that I will cover later. But it is clear that the new toys are not meant to appeal to people who already buy Legos. They are meant to expand the market, to get more people buying them, and the strategy seems to be working, as evidence by comments like these from the Lego message boards:

Just Bought my daughter the new LEGO Friends. ... I never even thought of buying my daugter LEGO's untill after this past Christmas when my daughter recieved lots of barbie items from "santa" but after the 2nd day, she was back to playing with her brother's Legos. She is thrilled with the "girl" LEGO's, so I asked her why she liked the Friend LEGO's and she said she liked the pretty colored bricks, but she mostly liked the fact that the Treehouse (3065) that she bought, has a kitty with it. ... She told me that for her birthday, which is not until October, all she wants is the new FRIENDS LEGO's. She loves the fact that she can build just like her brother, and her brother is thrilled because she won't be taking his LEGO's all the time, and I KNOW he won't be taking these.
I think LEGO has a real Hit with these new FRIENDS LEGO's, and I know that she will be getting these for Christmas and birthday's this year instead of BARBIE !!!
THANKS LEGO !!!!

I had thought that this was the end of the issue. It looked like the free market had pushed a profit-maximizing company to deliver a product that people like, making everyone better off. Maybe the 'girl Legos' are not quite as good as the 'boy Legos', but they are certainly better than Barbie dolls in every possible way and the Legos are successfully winning market share from them. The issue would perhaps be worthy of a link and a quick comment, but not a full blog post.
But yesterday, change.org sent me an email asking me to sign a petition protesting these new Legos. It seems that people are making a culture-war political issue about the new Legos, and this requires a response.
The short version of the rest of my blog post is that the feminists are making the perfect the enemy of the good. I agree that, in a perfect world, all Lego sets would be gender-neutral, marketed to both boys and girls, and feature an even mix of male and female figures. But this is not the world we live in, Lego does not have the power to create that world, and it makes no sense to attack them for an honest and well-researched effort to get more girls playing with their building toys.
One issue is that the new sets have a different style of person. The new girl 'Lego Friends' figures look more like dolls than bricks, and that upsets some people. It is true that they are more sexualized than the traditional minifigs, but it would be almost impossible to create a representation of the human form that is less sexualized than the traditional Lego person.
Here is some background from the Businessweek article:

To develop Lego Friends, Knudstorp relaunched the same extensive field research—more cultural anthropology than focus groups—that the company conducted in 2005 and 2006 to restore its brand. It recruited top product designers and sales strategists from within the company, had them join forces with outside consultants, and dispatched them in small teams to shadow girls and interview their families over a period of months in Germany, Korea, the U.K., and the U.S.
The research techniques and findings have been controversial at Lego from the moment it became clear that if the company were serious about appealing to girls, it would have to do something about its boxy minifigure, its 4-centimeter plastic man with swiveling legs, a yellow jug-head, and a painted-on face. "Let's be honest: Girls hate him," says Mads Nipper, the executive vice-president for products and markets.

One side note about that last quote. The people launching the petition complained about the executive using the word 'him' to refer to the minifig, citing that quote as proof of Lego's sexism. But in Germanic languages like Danish, 'him' is often used as a gender-neutral pronoun, and is even used to refer to things that are clearly female, like milk cows. This is just another example of cultural misunderstandings causing communication problems and bad feeling.

The petition writers, and some disgruntled Lego fans, say that Lego should just go back to selling the simple gender-neutral tubs of bricks that they used to. Lego never actually stopped selling these open-ended imagination-focused toys. You can still go to stores or to lego.com and buy a basic collection of bricks. They have always been an option, and they are getting better over time. For example, this safari building set is amazingly good from almost any perspective. For only $10, you get two Lego people, a man and a woman, and the bricks to build a wide variety of vehicles and animals. That is a lot of play and education for the money, a perfect gift for any girl or boy. It is everything that the petition-writers say Lego should be.

But selling these things exclusively is not a sustainable corporate strategy. $100 worth of sets like these is fuel for limitless building, and Legos are durable enough to be family heirlooms. While it may be ideal from a social, educational, and personal finance perspective for every family to spend no more on toys than $100 of Lego every three or four generations, it would mean that Lego would either go bankrupt or have to lay off a lot of people.

Lego has to keep selling new sets if they are to survive in their current form. They have to keep producing new things that people want to buy. Fortunately for them, people are natural novelty seekers. They can keep generating a new thing almost indefinitely, especially if they sell toys based on the latest movie or TV show.

The toy aisles are full of junky plastic vehicles, playsets, and action figures that are clearly marketed toward boys. Many of them are building block toys make by Lego's direct competition. If Lego failed to compete for this market segment, they would lose a lot of money.

By steering boys away from junk like this and toward their high quality building toys, Lego does a good thing. But an unfortunate side effect is that all of the 'boy Legos' seem to make the gender-neutral Legos less attractive for girls and their parents, as the Lego brand becomes associated with boy-centered stuff.

It would be a good thing both for society and the Lego company if 'Lego' was gender neutral, and people understood that some individual Lego sets were meant for boys, while other individual sets were meant for girls. Lego would be able to steal market share from Barbie and also from Transformers, improving the world in both cases.

To restore the gender neutral image of their overall brand, Lego must either stop making boy Legos or start making girl Legos. Making more gender neutral Legos is not enough for balance, and as this controversy shows, their existing gender neutral Legos are being ignored. They clearly cannot afford to abandon the boy market, so they make Lego Friends, a deliberately feminine product, to balance it out.

Lego critics say that selling masculine Lego sets is harmful to girls, and also that selling feminine Lego sets is harmful to girls. It is hard to see how both of these beliefs can be true at the same time. It actually does make sense that the proliferation of masculine Legos has harmed girls by making a good educational toy less attractive to them. Lego Friends is, in my view, a very good way to reverse this trend while making more money rather than less.

But there are people who think that nothing should have a stereotyped gender identity, and that it is wrong to sell anything that is meant for just one gender. I think that this is the belief driving the complaint about the new Legos. I actually do have some sympathy for this belief. Constraining the options and choices of individuals is typically a bad thing, and social norms can be powerful constraints.

But they are clearly choosing the wrong target for their activism. I have never seen a change.org petition complaining about the existence of Barbie dolls and asking Mattel to stop selling them. As long as there are heavily gendered toys that sell well, Lego will be improving the world by successfully competing with them.

Child Development and Work

2012-01-04T12:30:00.001-05:00

Last weekend, while I was visiting my parents for the holidays, my cousin and his wife and three boys came to visit us. The oldest is six. Like me, and his father, he is smart, and likes playing with Legos and reading books, but is not extraordinarily brilliant.

Over the holidays, I had restored two old cast iron machines, a food chopper and a meat grinder, from my grandmother's basement. I cleaned off some rust, disassembled them, cleaned off more rust, and then coated them in canola oil, until they could easily be assembled and disassembled by hand.

Somehow this came up in conversation, and my dad asked me to bring the machines out to show them. While they were out, I realized that they might be a fun thing for the six-year-old, my first cousin once removed, to play with.

I asked the boy, who was looking through some books, "Hey W__, would you like to put together a real machine?" His eyes lit up with excitement and he jumped up and followed me out to the shed, where we had been talking.

Each machine is six pieces when disassembled, although their construction is slightly different. I assembled the meat grinder while he watched, and then pointed him to the pieces of the food chopper. It was the case, feed screw, crank, chopper, and two assembly screws. He had it assembled in less then two minutes.

Then, of course, he wanted to chop something. I found a patch of green weeds for him to feed into it. Then he started turning the crank, and the chopper worked well, producing something like coleslaw.

Then he started grabbing handfuls of grass and weeds to chop. I told him how to use the thing safely, never putting his hand near the feeder while the crank was turning, and let him keep going while I talked with family nearby.

When I went inside to get the camera to take pictures, and tell everyone what was going on, my mom commented "Maybe we should have set him up near the compost pile." He was still going when I went outside, so we picked up and moved the table the chopper was attached to. Then we tossed the chopped weeds into the compost pile and I used the pitchfork to go through the pile for fruits and vegetables to chop.

Pretty soon I had a pile of banana peels, apple cores, avocado husks, pomegranate pith, lettuce and cabbage stalks, pepper cores, a corn cob, and a few rotting tomatoes on the table. He started to chop this pile up, industriously and methodically. He just kept going and going. He never got bored or tired or frustrated with the task.

It was hard work at times. Sometimes he had to use his whole body to move the handle. He would lean over it and use his weight to press it down, and then use his legs to lift it up, like a weightlifter doing squats. When even that did not work, because he had fed in too much at once, he reversed the handle, cleared some of the stuff out, and kept going. He had the attitude that he could handle this job, and that he would do whatever it took to do it right.

It was an incredible display of what I would call 'work ethic' if he was not having so much fun. He was clearly in a flow state. He did not stop until he had turned every fruit and vegetable in the compost pile into chunky salsa, and he was clearly disappointed when there was no more work to do.

He had done quite a bit of useful work. The compost pile will be much better as a result of the chopping. The task was physically strenuous and mentally challenging. Under minimal supervision and with relatively minor positive feedback, he had assembled a machine and dedicated himself to using it to do challenging and productive work. And when he was done, he disassembled the machine and helped me clean it.

The human brain is clearly wired for children to do things like this. If he lived in a primitive society, he would already be an economically productive member of the family or tribe. Much of his life would resemble this fun vacation. He would be surrounded by relatives, learning useful skills from them, and making them proud by applying those skills. He would have a measure of independence, and the pride that comes from doing useful things to the world.

Under the rules and structure of our modern society, he will have to sit through 12 years of schooling before he is considered capable of doing any kind of useful work. In order to live a decent life, he will require six more years of schooling. Even if he is a good student like I and his father were, he will hate much of this, or be bored by it. He will be constrained and powerless and isolated from his family for much of his childhood. In order to keep him happy, his parents will have to spend money on things that replicate the experience of learning in this fashion.

I am not nostalgic for any time in history. Life before rule of law, democracy, and property rights, and the technology and infrastructure that came from them, was nasty, brutish, and short. But that life, and not modern life, is what our brains are wired to function in. The more I learn about how the human brain functions, the more I realize just how bizarre and alien our modern world is, and what it costs us to live in it.

There have to be better ways of educating our children and organizing society, ones that maintain the benefits of our modern world while being more suited to the natural functioning of our brains. I do not know what they are, but I do know that, if things go well, our descendants will see our current society as twisted and perverse.

I suspect that, in this society, people will start working at a much younger age, and life will be a combination of work and education. "Child labor" had a horrible connotation nowadays, because of its history in the industrial age*, but I can guarantee that my little cousin enjoyed doing that labor far more than he will enjoy most of his time in school. If our work lives were structured the right way, and if people had the right attitude about things, then children of as young as eight could spend a couple hours a day working, doing useful things for real money. This would most likely be better for their development as human beings than the contrived and artificial development environment that they currently experience.

*I suspect that time working in a textile factory is no worse than time spent in some of our public schools, but that is a different topic.

Trip Notes

2011-12-22T10:30:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I joined the club of people who have flown halfway across the country and back on a single day, for the purpose of a business meeting*, on someone else's expense account, carrying nothing but a wallet and phone and wearing a suit. Here are some random notes from that trip.

People often get annoyed at crying babies. But think about it from the baby's point of view. They are in a bizarre alien atmosphere, completely separated from their familiar environment. They are constantly assaulted with a barrage of strange sights, smells and sounds. Unfamiliar and alien people are everywhere. In the natural habitat of the human baby, that kind of thing would only happen if they were lost, or being abducted. Human instinct says that babies should always be in a familiar place, surrounded by familiar people. This is one of many ways our instincts are not meant for the modern world.

I wonder if anthropologists have done studies comparing how often babies cry in hunter-gatherer tribes in a natural environment, compared to how often they cry in our odd artificial environment of civilization.

Speaking of artificial, my new dress shoes are horrible. They scraped a hole in my dress socks, and then started chafing my heel. The rotten things actually drew blood. There is dried blood on the inside top heel of my right shoe. And the soles are starting to visibly wear, after just a little bit of walking around.

When I got my Vibram Fivefingers shoes, I loved them. Now I wear them all the time, but I do not love them so much. I have gotten used to the benefits, and the minor annoyances loom larger. But today, after suffering through wearing and walking around in 'normal' shoes, an interesting thing happened. I did not fall in love with the Fivefingers again. Rather, I decided that I loathe and despise anything that is not a Fivefingers. This is a perfect example of hedonic adaptation.

It is easy to forget the wonders of civilization. I wonder if anyone else stopped to think how awesome it was that we were soaring above the clouds inside a giant fire-breathing metal beast. Looking down on clouds in the late afternoon or early morning is amazing. But until I stopped to reflect on this, my main thought were annoyance over a 90-minute delay.

*Technically it was a job interview, in my case.

Online Schools

2011-12-16T14:05:00.001-05:00

Online K-12 schools are much more common than I thought they were. A lot of students are leaving public schools and signing up with online charter schools. This article starts with a big list of complaints about these online schools, but then gets to this:

By fall, 1,800 students had enrolled in the Tennessee Virtual Academy.
About 75 of them came from the struggling Memphis city school system, including the children of Denita Alhammadi.
In a neighborhood teetering on the edge of middle class, Ms. Alhammadi has converted her living room into a classroom. Two desks are for her children, Romeo, 13, and Yasmine, 8. Another is for Ms. Alhammadi, a former Army supply officer who is also studying online, through Kaplan University.
Within weeks of attending a K12 information session, Ms. Alhammadi had become parent and teacher, wrapped into one. She spends as much as six hours a day as the official "learning coach" for her children.
Like many parents who move their children to online schools, she had worried about violence. But no single reason leads families to make the switch. The students are a broadly diverse group, ranging from entertainers and athletes in training to children with cancer, seizure disorders, peanut allergies or behavioral problems. Some have been expelled from regular schools. In many cases their parents are simply dissatisfied.
Kathryn Ubiarco, whose son and daughter are also enrolled in Tennessee, said that her daughter's school in Memphis had not been teaching her to read. "There's no way to come up with the B that she got in reading last year," Ms. Ubiarco said. "The child can't read." She believes the virtual school curriculum is more rigorous.

It is probably true that, right now, the average charter school is worse than the average public school. But individuals making decisions about their lives do not care about averages. Charter schools offer them a choice and an option. Even if the charter school is run by a money-grubbing corporate sociopath, being given the option to enroll in it will improve your life, especially if you live in a rotten school district or have difficulties with regular school.

Whenever a new industry develops, quality is very uneven and there are often a lot of frauds trying to make a quick buck. But over time, competition causes the bad ones to fail and the good ones to gain market share. If there is only one online charter school operating in a state, it will probably be pretty bad. If you are the only charter school in the market, then all you have to do is perform a bit better than the worst schools and attract students from those places, and students that really hate normal school. This lack of competition allows you to deliver a low-quality product to captive consumers and make massive profits.

But if there were five options for online charter schools, and parents knew the test scores and college placement rates for each one, things would look a lot different. Each company would have to deliver a better product, and spend resources to do so, driving profits down to zero.

Even the current crop of experimental and low-quality online schools are a better option for some people. That is what a market economy does: deliver options. Our current public school system forces everyone to do the same thing the same way, and the education is often alarmingly low-quality. This cannot last. Giving people more choices is the only way forward.

Thinko

2011-12-06T15:56:00.001-05:00

I just saw a new word get invented.

We are in the public economics workshop going over a rough draft of a paper. The Czech professor was pointing out a mistake, and said,

"You repeated it twice, so it is not a typo, it is a thinko."

We all liked this new word. It makes sense. A typo is an error in typing, and a thinko is an error in thinking.

Edit: It seems that the word is already used in computer science, and it means the exact same thing.

Squirrel Research

2011-11-30T15:51:00.001-05:00

While walking around campus to get some sunlight, I saw a lady working with a squirrel trap and talking with two of the groundskeepers. I listened for a bit and then joined the conversation.

The squirrel researcher is a PhD student here, and she obviously had a good rapport with the groundskeepers. I would wager that those two guys were very different from her in terms of political beliefs, lifestyle, culture, and IQ, but they still had the camaraderie of people who work outdoors with living things. There were interested in the capturing and tagging process, and they try to schedule their work so they do not interfere with the research. They know that the squirrels are doing a lot of damage; over the summer a dozen trees had to be removed because the squirrels had stripped the bark. I got the impression that they respected her as one of the team.

She was doing a population study, trapping and tagging the squirrels with ear tags. The best current guess is that there are around 500-600 squirrels on campus, but nobody has done recent research. Her long-term research project is investigating the effects of squirrel population control with an oral contraceptive. In addition to population counts, it will involve toxicology studies, including capturing hawks on campus and drawing their blood to see if they are affected.

People have been deliberately interfering with her squirrel traps, either closing them or stealing them, presumably because they think that the squirrels are being killed. This kind of ignorant emotion-driven action is harming the research, and if she cannot prove that her contraceptive program works, then people will continue to manage squirrel populations by culling.

I commented that these were probably the same people who feed the feral cats. She started complaining about the feral cats, the damage they do, and how the university would not approve any plan to control their numbers. She also mentioned an incident in which a cat was tormenting a trapped squirrel, and said, "I am a vegan, but I wanted to kill that feral cat and eat it for dinner."

I got the impression that she was a serious nature-lover; she really believed in keeping a natural balance, controlling invasive species, and never killing anything without eating it. I am much more sympathetic to that viewpoint than the typical animal-lover who falls in love with cute furry things without any thought for the big picture.

Seigniorage and Fractional Reserve Banking

2011-11-29T13:45:00.000-05:00

Edited to fix math:

Seigniorage is the income that the government gets by printing money. It costs the government a few cents to print a $20 bill, and they get to spend it to purchase $20 of goods and services. Of course, printing money causes inflation. If the government tries to get too much income from seigniorage, the result is hyperinflation.

However, if the economy is growing, as modern economies typically do, then you need to keep expanding the money supply or there will be deflation. If the population is growing by 2% an year and real per-capita incomes are growing by 2% a year, then the government must increase the money supply by 4% a year to get an inflation rate of zero. There is 4% more actual stuff being produced each year, so in order for money to be worth the same, we need 4% more money. Increasing the money supply by 6% a year would produce an inflation rate of 2% a year, which is about the right amount.

Fractional Reserve Banking is the banking system used in all countries in the modern world. Put bluntly, it means pretending that loans are money. Most of the money in your checking account and savings account is not backed up with actual cash. Your bank probably has cash reserves that are less than 10% of the value of its depositors' checking and savings accounts. The rest of your money was used to make loans to people. You get to treat your bank accounts like money, but it is not money the government printed. It is money that the bank made up by loaning your money out to people and then telling you that you still have the money.

This system is just as unstable and volatile as it sounds. Many of the economic crises in history have been caused or worsened by the failures of banks using this system. Even when banks do not fail, the economy is harmed by the fluctuations in the money supply that result from changes in the percentage of money kept in reserve by banks.

It would be possible to change the laws so that retail banks that deal with consumers would be forced to keep full reserves. This wound inevitably mean that you would never get any interest on your bank accounts, and would in fact have to pay the bank a fee for storing money and processing transactions. If you wanted to earn interest, you would have to withdraw your money and go to a different company that handled loans.

People have proposed this as a way to escape the economic volatility of our current banking system. This would be a big and difficult change, and I do not know if it would be worth the cost. A big problem for these proposals is that the creation of 'credit money' is not limited to the retail banking system. There is a 'shadow' banking system used by large corporations and financial institutions that also converts loans into assets and trades those assets like money. The recent financial crisis featured a run on this shadow banking system, which caused a fall in the money supply.

Everything I have said so far is basic monetary economics. Now I will combine the facts about Seigniorage and Fractional Reserve Banking and point out something that I have never seen anyone discuss.

Fractional Reserve Banking means that the money supply increases by much more than $1 for every dollar the government prints. If the government increased the supply of currency by 1% a year, then we could have inflation of as much as 10%. Every dollar the government prints is transformed by the banking system into a lot more dollars.

This means that almost all of the seigniorage in modern economies goes directly to financial institutions. The money supply of the USA increases by about 5% a year, which means that somebody is getting seigniorage income equal to 5% of the money supply each year. The government is only getting a fraction of this. All of the rest goes to banks. Given that the money supply (M2) is around 9 billion dollars, that is over $400 billion every year going to the banks

Some of this subsidy will be passed along to consumers in the form of lower prices for banking services, to the extent that banking is a competitive industry. However, the total profits of the financial industry have between around $350 billion on average for the past 10 years. If the industry was competitive, that number would be a lot smaller. A lot of people who study the issue say that banks are making abnormally large profits.

It is probably a coincidence that financial industry profits are close to the annual amount of seigniorage captured by the financial sector, but it seems clear to me that banks are getting vast quantities of free money on a regular basis. It is not technically a subsidy, but the facts of fractional reserve banking and the money multiplier mean that almost all of the 'inflation tax' must be going straight to them.

If fractional reserve banking were eliminated, you could support all of the operations of a modern state with nothing but seigniorage. Most of the budgets of the USA and other developed countries go to transfer payments like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other entitlement spending. Operations costs are typically 5-10% of GDP. The USA could support all of its discretionary and military spending with no federal taxes at all, if it could capture all of the seigniorage from an increase in the money supply of about 15% a year. That is very high, and would distort the economy, but the current system of taxation also causes a lot of distortions.

Cutting our military spending to pre-9/11 levels and trimming some of the obvious fat from government would take the required money supply growth down to about 10%, which would give an inflation rate of about 7%. That is still high, but I would definitely take 7% inflation in exchange for no federal taxes.

Huge changes like this are nothing but fantasy thought experiments, of course. But it is possible to imagine a world where all of the operations of all levels of government can be supported with only seigniorage and taxes on externalities like pollution. With proper economic policy, the taxation of productive activity could be swept into the dustbin of history.

Reputation versus Credentials

2011-11-22T13:55:00.001-05:00

Last Friday I went to the opening of an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) exhibit at the university. It had a sculptor and an engraver showing off their work. I was impressed with the work of the engraver. He was a true craftsman, cultivated an early-1900's feel to his work, and was dressed in vintage clothing. He had set up his studio and tools in the art gallery, so we could learn how he did his work. You could tell that he was good and that he really loved what he was doing.

My grandfather was an engraver. I have one of his engraving tools, although I thought it was a leather-working tool. I now understand more about what he would have been doing. My grandfather never got a college degree. I will ask my family more over Thanksgiving, but as far as I know, he never had any formal training in engraving. I assume that, like most people of that time, he learned his many skills by practicing on his own, doing an apprenticeship, or taking odd jobs.

At the exhibit, I met one of the Tae Kwon Do black belts and started chatting. He had a stainless steel beer stein that he wanted engraved with a coat of arms, and was going to hire the engraver to do it. He was very happy to find someone who could do that kind of work. This is the only time I have ever met an actual paying customer at any of these artist exhibits.

I was also happy to see someone keeping an old craft alive. I hope that the engraver has a good future and that the market rewards him for his work. But it really bothered me that he was getting a Master's degree. He is probably going to end up with a lot of debt as a result of this training, and I do not think that it will really help him. Engraving is not something that you should get a degree in. It is something that you should do, and get paid for, and get better at with practice. There is no theory required, no long period of essential studying and training before you can be trusted, like with science or engineering. In the past, engravers like my grandfather never messed with any of that.

I see the existence of an MFA in engraving as a symptom of something wrong with our society. We have become obsessed with credentials. Everyone seems to accept that the only way to advance in life is to go to college and get a degree in what you want to do. This is silly. If I wanted to hire an engraver, or any kind of artist, I would not care if he or she had an MFA degree. I would want to see samples of the work and talk with other customers. If the engraver had started engraving work right out of high school in a society that supported this career path, he would probably be a successful businessman by now, and would probably be a better engraver as well.

The area my parents live in supports a vibrant industry of potters. They will often go to pottery shows and buy good, hand-made pottery from these local artists. I am fairly sure that most of these potters do not have any kind of degree. They learned by doing, as part of the family business or an apprenticeship. From what I can tell, the quality of their work, in both technical and artistic terms, is much better than the pottery I see displayed at the exhibitions here.

I know why the obsession with credentials developed. Until the great urbanization of the late 1800's, there was no need for credentials in most things. People knew each other, and they knew who did good work. Even in things like law and medicine, there were no credentials. You were a lawyer if people were willing to pay you to do law. Word of how you did got around, so you had to do good work to maintain your reputation.

When people moved to cities, this source of information disappeared. It became much harder to get information about people, and so it became easier for incompetent and fraudulent people to take advantage of ignorant customers. In response to this, there was a demand for some kind of minimal quality control. If you moved to a new city, you would have no way of knowing which doctors were any good because you did not know any previous patients, but with a credential you would have some assurance that the doctor met a set of professional standards.

Unfortunately, over time the credentialing process was captured by professionals who used them to keep their own wages up. By making it much harder for other people to become doctors or lawyers, the existing doctors restricted competition and got richer. They claimed that the restrictions were for the benefit of consumers, but the restrictions were never applied equally to all of the professionals. They were just imposed on the new ones, and they gained the force of law, so it was impossible to opt out of the system and choose an uncredentialed service provider.

Young people choosing careers saw these high wages, and devoted lots of effort to gaining the credential. Over time, the credential started to lose any meaning; it was just an artificial hoop to jump through, as this article on law school demonstrates:

PHILADELPHIA — The lesson today — the ins and outs of closing a deal — seems lifted from Corporate Lawyering 101.
"How do you get a merger done?" asks Scott B. Connolly, an attorney.
There is silence from three well-dressed people in their early 20s, sitting at a conference table in a downtown building here last month.
...
But the three people taking notes are not students. They are associates at a law firm called Drinker Biddle & Reath, hired to handle corporate transactions. And they have each spent three years and as much as $150,000 for a legal degree.
What they did not get, for all that time and money, was much practical training. Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful, with classes that are often overstuffed with antiquated distinctions, like the variety of property law in post-feudal England. Professors are rewarded for chin-stroking scholarship, like law review articles with titles like "A Future Foretold: Neo-Aristotelian Praise of Postmodern Legal Theory."

This credential-seeking is a huge waste of resources. I would guess that 90% of all college degrees, and probably a lot of advanced degrees as well, could be replaced by some combination of an IQ test, personality test, on-the-job training, and a close look at high school performance.

The system of credentialing, of putting vast amounts of effort into a single line on a resume, is not suited for the modern world. We need to understand that it developed as a temporary fix to a temporary set of social conditions. With modern information technology, we can do much better. We can get something that looks more like the reputation-based system of social interaction that allowed people to start productive careers without wasting so many tears of their lives.

By this point in the semester, I know a lot of information about my students that would be very valuable to an employer. I have a good idea of their intelligence, dedication, discipline, attitudes, work habits, and attendance patterns. Any teacher who does more than lecture and give standardized tests can say the same thing.

But all of that information will be crammed into a sausage maker and turned into a single letter grade. Anyone who actually has any hope of graduating will fall into one of only three categories: A, B, or C. The cutoffs are maddeningly unfair and arbitrary. Sometimes the difference between an A and a B is very small, especially compared to the wide variety of aptitude, from genius slacker to dim workaholic to true overachievers, that all gets thrown in the 'A' bucket. Then that grade will be mixed in with a bunch of others and turned into a GPA. The end result is so worthless that employers have almost no idea about people, and so they force them to go through a long and messy screening process.

Compare that to other systems that have been developed to report information about people. Ebay's feedback system is basically a copy of old-fashioned reputation and gossip, and you can learn a lot about a seller in a short time. A more relevant comparison is credit reports, which do a good job of reporting the relevant information about people. Think about how easy it is for reliable people to get a loan, compared to how hard it is for them to get a job. A visitor from another planet, or from our own past, would be amazed at how easy it is to get people to hand you tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars based on a promise to repay, compared to how hard it is to get them to agree to give you a regular check for a promise to work.

It would be easy to make transcripts as useful as credit reports. Teachers could rank the students in their class, from best to worst, on attributes like punctuality and reliability in addition to cognitive skills like critical thinking. We could choose a few attributes from a list to describe each student. With good interface design, the entire process would take less effort than grading a single set of essays or free-response tests.

Students should be able to see all of their reports, which would give them useful feedback and allow them to post a complaint if necessary.

This could be combined with a wide array of standardized tests that allow people to demonstrate competence in everything from accounting to welding. Then various reporting agencies would take the raw data and figure out how to analyze it to produce useful reports for prospective employers.

It is easy to envision a world in which the process of job applications, even interviews, becomes redundant. Employers would tell the job requirements to the reporting agency of their choice, and then get reports that score all high school students on those requirements. As students progressed in their education and accumulated skills and a reputation for a good work ethic, job offers would start to show up the way that credit card offers show up in my mail. Students would quit school whenever they were offered an attractive salary. The employer would then be asked to report information, much like the school did.

It may seem off to skip the interview process, but numerous studies have shown that interviews are much worse at selecting ideal candidates than subject-matter tests. Charismatic narcissists routinely get hired over people with actual skills. Job interviews could someday be seen as a relic of the days when reliable information about people was so scarce that it was seen as necessary to try to guess their character and competence from a five-minute conversation

The concept of such a comprehensive 'digital reputation' might scare people. It should not. This kind of information would allow people to be matched with jobs that are better suited for them, giving a higher salary and quality of life.

Swearing

2011-11-17T12:37:00.001-05:00

This article presents further evidence that, for many people, swearing (cursing) provides readily available and effective relief from pain. However, overuse of swearing in everyday situations lessens its effectiveness as a short-term intervention to reduce pain.

Source

Election Strategy

2011-11-16T11:14:00.001-05:00

Some things do not change:

The September 11th speech by Wallace was his first really adroit one. It was a bid to the discontented liberals wavering behind President Truman. What he said publicly they have been saying privately with increasing bitterness - even those who support the President. Henry Wallace appealed to the atavistic fear of all progressives - the fear of "Wall Street". This fear is not the sole property of the progressives. It belongs traditionally to the Democratic Party. It began with the agrarian Jefferson's battle against Hamilton, it continued with Jackson's fight against Nicholas Biddle's bank, it found its Silver tongue in the crusades of William Jennings Bryan, and it came to full flower under Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. In a very important sense, it is the reason for the Democratic Party -- because the only way to explain the lasting alliance between the South and the West is their mutual fear of domination by the industrial East. Today the South can agree on no issue with the West – except "Wall Street."

from a memo on Truman's 1948 re-election strategy. Note that they are talking about Henry Wallace, not the segregationist governor George Wallace.

Also note that during this time, Southern whites always voted Democratic. As game theory and the median voter theorem would predict, and as the memo describes, this meant that they were basically ignored. Now that they always vote Republican*, they will similarly be ignored.

History buffs will probably want to read the whole thing. The tone of naked political calculation is quite impressive, and there are lots of great bits, like:

The liberals are numerically small. But, similar to manufacturers and financiers of the Republican Party, they are far more influential than mere numbers entitle them to be. The businessman has influence because he contributes his money. The liberal exerts unusual influence because he is articulate. The "right" may have the money, but the "left" has always had the pen. If the "intellectual" can be induced to back the President, he will do so in the press, on the radio, and in the movies. He is the artist of propaganda. He is the "idea man" for the people. Since the rise of the pressure groups, the men of ideas who can appeal to them on their own ground, in their own words, have become an essential ally to the alert candidate in modern American politics.

and:

The leaders of labor must be given the impression that they are once more welcome in the councils of the Administration. Much of this cultivation can be done only by President Truman himself. Immersed in the staggering burden of his work and preoccupied with his day-to-day problems it is easy for the incumbent of the White House to forget the "magic" of his office. The mere extension of an invitation to William Green, Dan Tobin, Philip Murray, Dubinsky or any of the prominent leaders to "came in and talk with me" has a stupendous effect on them and their followers.

One by one they should be asked to '"come by" and the President should ask them for their advice on matters in general. (This is a question of delicate "timing" -- it is dangerous to ask a labor leader for advice on a specific matter and then ignore that advice). No human being -- as every President from Washington on has ruefully learned -- can resist the glamour, the self-important feeling of "advising" a President on anything.

and:

It is said invariably, and always without analysis, that the President is the Chief of State, the Symbol of Government. What the theorists as well as the politicians do not observe is that the public gets its impressions of its President mostly from the actions he takes when performing as Chief of State – as the Head of Government. The masses of the people rarely if ever think of him in his role of Government administrator, or as the responsible policy maker on our national economic problems.

They really form their lasting impressions from watching his incidental gestures – when he appears as the representative of all the American people….

…[A]t home the American people are daily forced to think of their President as a politician for the good reason that the news stories deal only with his activities as a politician – because it is what he is engaged in doing. His calling lists, week in and week out, are filled almost entirely with Government and Congressmen with whom he consults on problems that are important to the nation, but appear to the average reader complicated and dull.

Some things do change, however, The memo discusses Italians as a distinct ethnic group with a distinct political strategy. Nowadays Italians are just 'white people' and nobody thinks of them as a distinct group. Other 'facts' about the political process, like the loyalty of the Presidential cabinet and the public's toleration for the president acting like a politician, have changed.

The economic illiteracy is also astounding. The memo talks at length about the desirability of wage and price controls, like the ones that Nixon passed that caused massive damage to the economy. I shudder to think about what might have happened if these laws were passed. The suburbs might never have been built, and the last half-century would have seen a population crammed in decaying rent-contolled apartments.

* A cynic would say that Southern whites have a long and distinguished history of voting against whichever political party is known as the party of civil rights.

Shakespeare and Kansas

2011-11-14T15:53:00.001-05:00

This article about Shakespeare's criminal connections, combined with my knowledge of how much low-class vulgarity is in his plays, made me imagine a future civilization that considers gangsta rap the epitome of civilized refinement, the way we treat opera and Shakespeare plays. It is also easy to imagine our current inner-city gangsters being romanticized the same way our society romanticizes pirates.

On a happier note, this article about Hispanic immigrants revitalizing dying Midwest towns shows how entrepreneurial people can respond to incentives in such a way that society is improved. One person's dying small town is another person's chance to buy a good, cheap house and start a better life:

Culture Clash

2011-11-09T18:12:00.001-05:00

Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs!

- Sir Charles James Napier, the British Army's Commander-in-Chief in India from 1849–1851, reacting to a Hindu priest's complaint about making Sati illegal.

A similar even was also recounted in a book about his administration:

A man had been condemned for murdering his wife; his chief sued the general for pardon.
[Napier:] "No! I will hang him."
[Chief:] "What! you will hang a man for only killing his wife!"
[Napier:] "Yes! She had done no wrong."
[Chief:] "Wrong! No! but he was angry! why should he not kill her?"
[Napier:] "Well, I am angry, why should not I kill him?"

I have glanced through the book, and it seems to be full of fascinating and disturbing passages like this one:

Sir C. Napier classed under the head of slavery, the dragging young girls from their homes for the harems of the great; and often he rejoiced at being the instrument of Providence to suppress the cruelty exercised towards women, though to do so, he was forced to wield the sword so terribly in battle and give the axe of justice such a sweep; but the feeling respecting the non-right of women and children to their existence and freedom demanded the sternest repression; for the examples of unmitigated cruelty and debauchery given by the numerous ameers, had a wide currency which sharp justice only could counteract.

I get the feeling that I would have liked Napier, but the not guy who wrote the book. I am not sure which is more alien to modern sensibilities, the Indian culture of shameless patriarchal violence or the British culture that created such self-righteous and overblown prose to justify colonialism. But I am certainly glad that the British culture ended up leaving such a large mark on the world, and then turning into the mindset that we have today.

Historical Musings: Byzantine Empire

2011-11-02T18:24:00.001-04:00

Popular imagination is an odd thing. Most people in the USA are familiar with the Roman Empire. Even people who paid no attention in history class will know of its existence from movies, and have a vague idea of its culture, power, and place in history. Political commentators often make reference to ancient Rome, usually in the context of its culture, institutions, and values. They often draw parallels between the USA and Rome. It is a common cultural reference point, like Shakespeare and the Bible.

The Byzantine Empire, however, is not nearly as well-known, despite the fact that it was the major cultural, military, and economic power of the early Middle Ages. For hundreds of years after Rome fell, the Byzantines, who called themselves Romans, were a powerful, stable, advanced civilization. And yet, when people think of this era of history, they think of the Dark Ages of Western Europe, with petty kingdoms and Viking raids. I cannot think of any kind of popular entertainment that features the Byzantine Empire. It is almost totally absent from our cultural consciousness, known only to people with a scholarly interest in history.

Americans like to think that they will always be remembered by history, no matter what might happen. We look around and see that we have dominated the last century. We have been the major cultural, military, and economic power of the world. We hope that, even if something happens and our country falls apart, future generations will know and care about us the way we know and care about the Roman Empire.

It is possible, however, that the prize of historical memory will go to the British Empire. They were the ones who started off as a little island nation and went on to rule a quarter of the globe. They were the ones who spread their language, law, and culture all over the world. They were the ones who started modern capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. They were the ones who fought piracy and slavery on a worldwide scale, in a remarkably successful effort to remake the world according to their cultural values. I can easily imagine the British Empire being embedded in the popular culture of a thousand years in the future the way the Roman Empire is in ours, especially if India becomes a world power in the future and has a big effect on that culture.

Compared to the British historical legacy, the century of American power looks rather less impressive. Our biggest achievements were defensive actions against various forms of tyranny, and the continuation of a scientific and economic system that we mainly inherited from the British. Even if we end up being the last outpost of Anglo-American civilization, the way that Byzantium was the last outpost of Roman civilization, that will not guarantee us a place in history.

The USA might share the historical fate of the Byzantine Empire, barely remembered at all in a thousand years, regarded as a mere adjunct to a grand civilization that remade the world. History might remember us as but a dwindling power, an insignificant offshoot of the grand British Empire, that tried to continue the civilization but fell slowly to pieces in a world that grew increasingly chaotic and fragmented. Our very name could be assigned to us by later historians.

If this is depressing, it should not be. The people of Byzantium lived good lives, and their civilization was worth preserving and fighting for. To our modern eyes, they would seem like impoverished savage primitives, but compared to the rest of the people of their world they were the richest and most civilized nation. History is a rather poor judge of what really matters, as I have noted before. If we accept the fact that history might not know or care about anything we do, then it becomes easier to abandon grand ambition and focus on making the lives of individuals as good as possible.

Sikhs

2011-10-27T13:52:00.001-04:00

Little things like these make me feel better about the future:

Curry Parmesan: Sikhs rescue Italy's famous cheese
ZIBELLO, October 26, 2011 (AFP) - A master in the art of making Parmesan cheese, Manjit Singh is part of a large community of Sikhs in northern Italy who are shoring up an industry under threat of extinction.
Since moving from India seven years ago, the former taxi driver has become the main cheesemaker in a small family-run factory that produces thousands of rounds of the world-famous cheese.

...

Graziano Cacciali, who runs the Parmesan plant in Zibello, took Singh on as help in 2004 after undergoing a heart bypass operation and said he has enjoyed teaching him skills that Italians were no longer prepared to learn.

Full Article, linked from Marginal Revolution

This is an excellent example of how open immigration, and free exchange in general, makes everybody better off.

Economists usually do not pay much attention to 'culture' but it seems that Sikhs have been very successful in a lot of areas. They tend to impress the people they work with or for. The religion and culture has a lot of interesting parallels with Judaism.

Anthropologists have a lot of different ways of describing group identity and its effects, but I think the economic concepts of branding and franchising also apply. I mean no disrespect with this analysis; it shows how good business models and good cultures solve similar problems in similar ways.

Think about how restaurant chains work. Many restaurants are run by people who are owners and entrepreneurs, not employees of an organization. The owner pays for the right to use a brand name, and agrees to adhere to the brand's quality rules. In exchange, the owner gets more customers, people who trust the brand. When the system works well, everyone wins. The biggest potential problem is quality control. Each individual restaurant owner has an incentive to cut quality to make money, taking advantage of the brand's good reputation. The company that owns the brand must control this with constant monitoring, backed up with the threat of taking the franchise license away from bad owners.

'Sikh' is a brand owned and maintained by the community and religious leaders. Each individual Sikh is like a restaurant owner. They pay for the right to use the brand by committing to the religious rituals and beliefs. The turban and beard and kirpan are like a brand logo. The Sikh philosophy and teaching are the quality rules. The combination of a distinctive brand and well-enforced quality rules give the Sikhs an advantage over random people. Just like travelers will often go to a restaurant chain they trust rather than a local establishment of unknown quality, the Imperial British army and civil service preferred to hire Sikhs, and now Italian cheesemakers are also more likely to hire Sihks over random people.

An individual has an incentive to adopt the brand but fail to deliver the quality. This would reduce the value of the brand. The owners of the brand fight this by maintaining the power to excommunicate people who harm the brand. Therefore, it makes sense to put more trust a Sikh who sends credible and costly signals that his religion is very important to him. The more arbitrary and distinctive the religious commitment, the better.

This system can fail in one of two ways. The first way is for the brand to become meaningless through a gradual decline in standards. This would happen if the brand owners did not punish people who broke the standards. The second failure mode is paying more attention to the signals than the actual quality control. Imagine what would happen if the owners of a restaurant brand only cared about what the sign looked like but did not inspect the kitchen. A religion can fail in this way, when the leaders focus exclusively on the branding and logo aspects rather than the underlying quality of the human being. For a religious brand to be successful, there must be external signals to show that people are committed to the quality rules, but everyone must understand that the quality rules are more important than the signals.

And if the brand can avoid these two problems, success can bring its own risks. It is common for successful brands to be attacked by jealous competitors who cannot compete honestly. Jews suffer from this a lot, much like Wal-Mart and Starbucks, and there are isolated reports of similar things happening to Sikh children.

No-Default Loan Option

2011-10-24T13:44:00.001-04:00

One of my fellow grad students just sent me the following email:

[We] were discussing whether the ability to option into a loan where you legally cannot default (like student loans) on all loan types (car, home, etc.) would be a good thing or bad thing. We both decided that we didn't know, but that there would be potentially really bad sorting mechanisms put into place. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Once I started typing my answer, I realized it would make a good blog post, because it illustrates a lot of important topics. This is a question where different assumptions will give us very different answers. Economic theory can tell us what will happen under different assumptions, but only empirical data from the real world can tell us which assumptions are true.

One set of assumptions is that people are rational and that the default risk is mainly based on the character of the borrower. In this case, such loans would only be a good idea. They would give people the option of credibly revealing their type. Banks would charge lower interest rates on the loans where people could not default, because those loans loan would be less risky. If you were a responsible person and you knew you would repay, you would sign up for the no-default option to get the lower interest rate. If you thought you might default, you would pay a higher interest rate for the right to do default. The current system is a pooling equilibrium, where everyone with the same credit score pays the same interest rate. This new system would generate a separating equilibrium, where different people make different choices and pay different rates. This is the 'sorting mechanism' that my friend mentioned. The current system means that good borrowers pay for the deadbeats, and this option would eliminate that. It would generate a higher interest rate for deadbeats, meaning that they would take out less loans and less resources would be wasted on them.

But if money problems can happen to good people at random, for example if they get laid off because of a change in technology, then the situation changes. There are good reasons that our society got rid of debtor's prisons and allowed people to go bankrupt and eliminate their debts. If you suppose that everyone is the same, and faces some small chance of job loss or other misfortune, then the ability to default is best seen as a kind of insurance. If bad things happen, you get to erase your loan, which is like giving you money. We know that buying insurance will improve the expected utility, or well-being, of someone who is risk-averse, and most people are like that. The current default rules mean that everyone gets insurance, which makes society better off. If people had the option of not buying this insurance, then most of them would not bother. Everyone would take the option to default.

Both of these assumptions are simplistic. In reality, 'good' people have a small chance of default and 'bad' people have a larger chance of default. Modeling this situation properly would require some heavy-duty economic analysis and game theory, and I am not going to spend the time to do so, but I have seen similar situations and models in my Financial Economics class so I have a good feel for what would happen.

The current pooling equilibrium gives valuable insurance to everyone, while also causing good people to subsidize the deadbeats. A separating equilibrium resulting from the no-default option would erase both of these effects. Good people would no longer pay for bad people, but if misfortune hit, they would be in very bad shape.

However, we know that a separating equilibrium can only be generated if the 'good' people are better off choosing the no-default option. If the insurance is valuable enough to them, they will choose the default option, even with the higher interest rates that result from being pooled with the bad people.

It is hard to say if a separating equilibrium would emerge. It depends on how much people value the insurance and how many 'bad' people there are. But I am pretty confident that if a separating equilibrium did emerge, it would be better for society. Under rational actor assumptions, giving people the choice of a no-default loan will allow them to be better off, even though they would lose their 'insurance'.

However, this conclusion changes once you add in psychological factors like the overconfidence bias and limited information. This means moving from neoclassical economics to behavioral economics. If people underestimate the chance of misfortune happening to them, then they will not buy insurance when it would be in their best interest to do so. In this case, too many people would choose the no-default option, and end up suffering when misfortune hits and they cannot erase their debts. If you believe these assumptions, the current 'paternalistic' system where everyone must buy insurance with their loans is the best system.

The best option for society would be one that kept the insurance but eliminated the subsidy to 'bad' borrowers. This could be done by the creation of more complete insurance markets. If everybody bought layoff insurance the way they buy house insurance, then the no-default loan would not have any disadvantages. When good people got laid off, they would be able to use the insurance payments to keep paying off the loan. There would be a separating equilibrium where 'bad' borrowers pay more, and society would be better off.

This is another reason to remember the targeting principle. If we want people to have insurance against misfortune, then we should provide it directly, rather than bundling it with loans. Forcing the loans to come with insurance generates unwanted side effects in the form of subsidies to 'bad' borrowers. Our bankruptcy laws were written before most individuals had access to insurance. Before the 1800's, individuals did not buy insurance of any kind. There was no market for it and there were no companies providing it. Now that this has changed, our bankruptcy laws may be obsolete. It is a very good thing to give people insurance, and the side effects were unavoidable back then, but we can do better now.

Stimulus Jobs

2011-10-23T12:57:00.001-04:00

One major difference between now and the 1930's is production technology. Back then, infrastructure projects were very labor-intensive. You could accomplish something useful by gathering up hundreds of low-skilled unemployed people and putting them to work. But that is not true anymore. Most major construction today requires high-skilled workers, from project managers and senior engineers to people who know how to handle a backhoe.

Almost all jobs programs coming out of the government will do nothing to help unemployed people. Instead, they tend to throw money at sectors like health care and information technology where there is very little unemployment. This can be actively harmful, if the money displaces private activity and hires people away from firms where they were already producing useful things.

A Great-Depression style public works program will simply not work in the modern world. If we are going to do fiscal stimulus, we need projects where we can hire low-skilled people to do useful jobs. This article, written by an energy industry insider, identifies one such job:

Energy efficiency is generally more cost effective than pretty much anything else having to do with energy. Current incentives should focus on that, we should develop energy efficiency jobs and go out and weatherize everybody's house to cut or emissions because the amount of energy we simply waste is pretty mind boggling considering how costly energy use is to us.
...
once you start digging into old house, what you find that needs fixing can be never-ending. The actual work of crawling through somebody's attic or crawlspace with a caulk gun is also especially miserable, dangerous, and temporary in nature, so we should keep in mind that the "green jobs revolution" we often hear touted is something of an idealization.

The work of crawling through attics and crawlspaces with a caulk gun is absolutely perfect for a government jobs program. It requires no special skills and accomplishes something useful. And since it is nasty and people will probably hate it, they will not want to remain on the government payroll for too long. Once they establish a record of steady work, private employers will be more likely to hire them. This kind of thing is the best possible scenario for fiscal stimulus.

Unfortunately, it still has not worked:

Federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed, government records show. Two years after it was awarded $186 million in federal stimulus money to weatherize drafty homes, California has spent only a little over half that sum and has so far created the equivalent of just 538 full-time jobs in the last quarter, according to the State Department of Community Services and Development.
The weatherization program was initially delayed for seven months while the federal Department of Labor determined prevailing wage standards for the industry. Even after that issue was resolved, the program never really caught on.
"Companies and public policy officials really overestimated how much consumers care about energy efficiency," said Sheeraz Haji, chief executive of the Cleantech Group, a market research firm. "People care about their wallet and the comfort of their home, but it's not a sexy thing."

This does not mean that it would be impossible to have a good jobs program. I can tell from the article that this program was badly managed. Instead of letting the market determine wages, the government 'determined prevailing wage standards' or set price controls. That never works. The article later notes that there were 200 applicants for 16 job slots for a green jobs program, which is a sign that the wages it assigned are way too generous. It would be better to pay each person less and hire more people, meaning that less people have to suffer the effects of unemployment. Instead of having a bureaucracy delay things seven months to craft a damaging regulation, they should let individuals choose their own wages.

Also note the math. $93 million has been spent for 538 jobs. That is over $172,000 per job. That number is actually pretty low compared to the amount that tariffs cost to keep a job, but it is still not a good use of money. Also note that this money is just the amount of taxpayer money spent on this program; it does not include the money that other people had to pay, or the time and money spent writing the regulations.

$93 million is enough money to hire over five thousand people at minimum wage for a year and supply them with the basic weatherproofing tools. Instead of trying to get homeowners to pay money to have a stranger of questionable character come to their house, the government should just hire all the people to weatherproof government buildings. The energy savings in the future would have repaid the cost, and a lot more people would have been helped. Then, once people had the experience, they could have been hired by private companies to do this work or something else.

An important lesson from economics is the targeting principle. If you want to do something, you should do it in the simplest and most direct way possible. If you want unemployed people to have a job, then you give them a job. You pay them the money yourself and have them do something useful. Do not mess around with partnerships and training and bureaucracy. Trying to be tricky will almost always generate a lot of negative side effects or will simply not work.

Of course, the Davis-Bacon act and public sector unions would make such a simple targeted program impossible. All of the newly hired people would have to be paid way too much, which means that a lot less people could be hired and they would not want to leave the government payroll. The failure of California's program shows that, even with the optimal situation, with a useful job that needs doing and can be done by unskilled people, our government, with current laws, cannot do fiscal stimulus right.

The War that was not Hell

2011-10-21T11:58:00.001-04:00

I grew up thinking about wars as huge nasty horrible bloody things full of savagery and carnage. War was what happened when all of the rules were thrown out of the window. I wondered why anybody would ever willingly enter one if there was any other choice, and thought that such choices were due to madness or socipathy.

But after reading this good article about privateers in the War of 1812, I have a better perspective. Consider the following story:

Boyle won a bruising battle but had little to show for it. The British man-of-war was heavily damaged, and because it was a man-of-war, not a merchant ship as Boyle had originally thought, it had little cargo of commercial value. Boyle could have sunk the St. Lawrence, but that action would have required taking onboard approximately sixty prisoners and then feeding and guarding them for the remainder of the cruise.
Not wanting to take on prisoners and bearing in mind his instructions from Congress and the president that "[t]owards the enemy vessels and their crews, you are to proceed, in exercising the rights of war with all the justice and humanity which characterizes the nation of which you are members" (qtd. in Garitee 1977, 97–98), Boyle sat down with the St. Lawrence's commander to strike a deal. Boyle would release the commander and his crew and return them to the St. Lawrence if they would agree to make immediately for the port of Havana with a promise not to take up arms voluntarily against the United States again. Such a promise, called a parole, had long been recognized as binding on both the parolee and his government. In practice, it was combined with another efficient and humanitarian institution—prisoner exchanges. Each prisoner's parole was treated as a debt. If the British released a captured American prisoner of equal rank, they thereby extinguished the debt and nullified the parole (Petrie 1999, 24–30)
Commander Gordon of the St. Lawrence issued a certificate to Boyle in consideration of Boyle's treatment of British prisoners,: "In the event of Captain Boyle's becoming a prisoner of war to any British cruiser, I consider it a tribute justly due to his humane and generous treatment of myself, the surviving officers and crew of His Majesty's late schooner St. Lawrence, to state that his obliging attention and watchful solicitude to preserve our effects, and render us comfortable, during the short time we were in hispossession, were such as justly entitle him to the indulgence and respect of every British subject" (qtd. in Coggeshall [1856] 2004, 366).

I had known about these kinds of things before but had not thought much about them. The naval part of the War of 1812 was fought with careful attention to honor and the rule of law. There was an amazing amount of trust on both sides. Partly this was because war was bring treated as an aristocratic game where the interests of the elites on both sides were not seriously threatened. In many ways, the opposing naval captains had more in common with each other than their countrymen. Winning the war and serving the interests of their country was less important to them than maintaining honor among their social circle and looking after their own comfort.

But it is true that the European nations had developed a long tradition of laws designed to make war less horrible. In many cases, armed conflict was seen as just another way of doing business. There were very few deaths due to combat, compared to deaths due to disease, which were endemic in the population anyway. There was more glory than horror in this kind of war, especially for the elites. This was the world that the people who started the massive wars of the modern age grew up in. Despite their other faults, most of the elites of this era had a deep respect for contracts and the rule of law. This kind of thing is the foundation of a healthy civilization. Wars fought among people who shared these cultural values really could be an honorable, civilized kind of thing.

European society between the start of the Enlightenment and the advent of mass public education was a thin veneer of civilization layered over a teeming mass of savagery. This is best illustrated in the treatment of Native Americans. Many of the wealthy aristocratic politicians tried to respect the rights of the natives, setting borders and treating them like independent sovereign nations, but the mass of common folk overran the countryside like a plague of rats, taking land with fraud and violence. This is why most of the natives sided with the British government during the Revolutionary War. It is also no accident that Andrew Jackson, the first president actually elected by popular vote, was responsible for the worst atrocities committed against the natives.

There was much evil and corruption within the aristocracy, but for a long time they were the only carriers of the Enlightenment values of reason, tolerance, rule of law, and human rights that eventually spread throughout Western society. A war conducted among such people will not have the same horror as a war where one or both sides are commanded by people who lack these values. The age of these kinds of wars was a brief and strange event of history, but it was real, and it generated a kind of romantic view of combat that still lingers to this day.

Amazon and Information

2011-10-20T11:30:00.001-04:00

Recently I read a Wall Street Journal article about the founding of Amazon.com. One paragraph was very surprising to me:

One of [the founder's] more controversial early decisions was to allow customers to post their own book reviews on the site, whether they were positive or negative. Competitors couldn't understand why a bookseller would allow such a thing. Within a few weeks, Mr. Bezos said, "I started receiving letters from well-meaning folks saying that perhaps you don't understand your business. You make money when you sell things. Why are you allowing negative reviews on your Web site? But our point of view is [that] we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions."

I have always been used to user feedback and reviews, so I just considered it a natural fact of life on the Internet. It amazed me that the concept could be controversial or that anyone could question it. Yes, if people post negative reviews of a book, then other customers will not buy that book. They will buy a different book. Then they will be happier with that other book, which means they will be happier with the store and more likely to come back. And chances are that the better-reviewed book will be more expensive, so the store get more profit when reviews steer your customers away from cheap junk and toward good stuff.

People who questioned Amazon's strategy obviously have no idea how the modern world works. Lying, misrepresentation, or even just concealing information is not a viable long-term strategy in the Information Age. Companies that try to prevent information flows in order to sell inferior products will not survive very long, nor should they. People who would prevent the posting of negative reviews have a short-sighted sociopathic mindset. They are trying to make a quick buck by shoving junk onto their customers. Any well-run company, by contrast, will welcome user feedback and use it in their purchasing decisions, in order to reduce the chances of buying or promoting junk.

People have an instinct to lie and hide information. This is because these were good strategies in our ancestral environment of small bands of foragers. If there are only about a hundred people to interact with, and there is no written language, no kind of recording technology, no way to take objective measurements, and there is no rule of law and everything of importance is decided by political intrigue, then a charismatic liar can be very successful. People really can bury negative information forever in that environment. But that world started to end when the Dark Ages were replaced by the printing press and the Enlightenment, and modern technology is finishing it off.

In the modern world, people will find out the truth, and they will reward the people who help them do so. The success of Amazon, and the failure of so many of its competitors, shows this. But the Wikileaks mess shows that our governments do not get the modern world either. They are like the companies whose now-dead business plans relied on hiding information from people. Diplomacy is still based on lying, deception, double-speak, and other kinds of sociopathic Stone Age behavior, and our government shows no signs of trying to change its behavior. Instead, they continue to use the power of the state to try to fight the tools of honesty.

Structural Change: Reading

2011-10-15T07:45:00.001-04:00

Here's a good article on libraries destroying books.

When your entire local library can be replaced by a USB drive the size of your fingernail, the only thing keeping those books out of an industrial-size furnace is people who have some innate fondness for books. And there isn't much room in this economy for innate fondness.

Random Comments

2011-10-12T22:50:00.001-04:00

I learned today that wearing Vibram Fivefinger shoes increases the probability that a Hare Krishna evangelist will approach you.

A good rule to follow is to be very individualistic in your consumption patterns, but very cooperative and rule-following whenever you are involved in a production process. Most of the time, individuality is harmful when you are trying to get things done efficiently, but individuality of consumption preferences means that everyone can be happier because there is less competition for the same stuff.

I found an interesting story at the end of an article on property rights:

Property Rights for "Sesame Street"
Janet Beales Kaidantzis
Ever seen two children quarreling over a toy? Such squabbles had been commonplace in Katherine Hussman Klemp's household. But in the Sesame Street Parent's Guide she tells how she created peace in her family of eight children by assigning property rights to toys.
As a young mother, Klemp often brought home games and toys from garage sales. "I rarely matched a particular item with a particular child," she says. "Upon reflection, I could see how the fuzziness of ownership easily led to arguments. If everything belonged to everyone, then each child felt he had a right to use anything."
To solve the problem, Klemp introduced two simple rules: First, never bring anything into the house without assigning clear ownership to one child. The owner has ultimate authority over the use of the property. Second, the owner is not required to share. Before the rules were in place, Klemp recalls, "I suspected that much of the drama often centered less on who got the item in dispute and more on whom Mom would side with." Now, property rights, not parents, settle the arguments.
Instead of teaching selfishness, the introduction of property rights actually promoted sharing. The children were secure in their ownership and knew they could always get their toys back. Adds Klemp, "'Sharing' raised their self-esteem to see themselves as generous persons."
Not only do her children value their own property rights, but also they extend that respect to the property of others. "Rarely do our children use each other's things without asking first, and they respect a 'No' when they get one. Best of all, when someone who has every right to say 'No' to a request says 'Yes,' the borrower sees the gift for what it is and says 'Thanks' more often than not," says Klemp.

Now that I think about it, I remember that when I was young, my parents also did a good job of defining and enforcing property rights. Everything belonged to either me, or my brother, or my parents, and I knew that my stuff was mine, but that I should not take anyone else's property without getting permission.

Law and Culture

2011-10-11T17:58:00.001-04:00

In the Public Economics workshop today, a professor presented a paper on patterns of tax evasion in Russia. It is relatively easy to evade taxes there; the company pays all taxes so they would report very low wages to the government but pay their workers under the table. They can only do this if the worker agrees to an employment contract with very low reported income; presumably the company splits the tax savings with workers by offering a higher salary. The professor has a data set that connected car ownership to reported income. It is much harder to drive an unregistered car than evade income taxes, so the value of someone's car is a better measure of their income than their reported income.

He found that people working for foreign-owned companies had five to six times as much reported income than people working for Russian companies, but that their cars were only worth about 20% more. This is evidence of large and pervasive tax evasion in domestic companies. There are several possible reasons for this. Foreign companies could be subject to legal action in their home country if they evade taxes. Foreign companies could be watched more closely by the Russian authorities, or they could have standard rules and contracts that they prefer to work by, or they could just have a preference for honesty.

Another interesting fact is that when workers move from foreign to domestic companies, they keep reporting a high level of income. They do not start evading taxes. There are two possible reasons for this. The paper's authors speculated that people develop a preference for honesty after working for foreign firms. However, this explanation was questioned by the other professors. A simple preference story is unlikely, because when people move from a tax-evading domestic company to a more honest foreign company, they stop evading taxes. There is no 'preference for tax evasion' that sticks with people. A better explanation is that the tax authorities would probably audit people who move jobs and report much lower income, so they have to stay honest once their true income is revealed by working for a foreign firm.

The data also showed that when people move from a foreign to a domestic company, the reported incomes of other workers at their new company go up, but car values do not. Again, the authors assumed cultural transmission of honesty preference, but it is also possible that a big difference in reported incomes for people doing the same job would make the tax authorities suspicious, so once a company reports more income for one person, they have to report more income for everyone else.

The the economic historian spoke up. He pointed out that there are large costs to lying, cheating, and dishonesty. If your job contract says you get paid $300 a year but you are verbally promised a lot of money under the table at the end of the year, what can you do if your employer does not pay you? Once people have experience operating in an honest environment, they discover that it is more efficient. One person cannot change a system alone, but they can negotiate for an honestly reported high salary if they can plausibly claim that tax evasion is very difficult for them because of their previously reported salary.

This story does not have a clear ending, conclusion, or moral. It is mainly just a look at a part of my life. But it does illustrate the difficulty of figuring out how the world works. There are complicated feedback loops between individual incentives and social conditions, and it is very easy to tell stories about them. Many different stories can fit the same facts.

POW Economics

2011-10-07T14:58:00.001-04:00

This essay is great. It is a British economist's analysis of life in a World War 2 Prisoner of War camp:

We reached a transit camp in Italy about a fortnight after capture and received 1/4 of a Red Cross food parcel each a week later. At once exchanges, already established, multiplied in volume. Starting with simple direct barter, such as a non-smoker giving a smoker friend his cigarette issue in exchange for a chocolate ration, more complex exchanges soon became an accepted custom. Stories circulated of a padre who started off round the camp with a tin of cheese and five cigarettes and returned to his bed with a complete parcel in addition to his original cheese and cigarettes; the market was not yet perfect. Within a week or two, as the volume of trade grew, rough scales of exchange values came into existence. Sikhs, who had at first exchanged tinned beef for practically any other foodstuff, began to insist on jam and margarine. It was realized that a tin of jam was worth 1/2 lb. of margarine plus something else; that a cigarette issue was worth several chocolates issues, and a tin of diced carrots was worth practically nothing.
In this camp we did not visit other bungalows very much and prices varied from place to place; hence the germ of truth in the story of the itinerant priest. By the end of a month, when we reached our permanent camp, there was a lively trade in all commodities and their relative values were well known, and expressed not in terms of one another – one didn't quote bully in terms of sugar – but in terms of cigarettes. The cigarette became the standard of value. In the permanent camp people started by wandering through the bungalows calling their offers – "cheese for seven" (cigarettes) – and the hours after parcel issue were Bedlam. The inconveniences of this system soon led to its replacement by an Exchange and Mart notice board in every bungalow, where under the headings "name," "room number," "wanted" and "offered" sales and wants were advertised. When a deal went through, it was crossed off the board. The public and semipermanent records of transactions led to cigarette prices being well known and thus tending to equality throughout the camp, although there were always opportunities for an astute trader to make a profit from arbitrage. With this development everyone, including non-smokers, was willing to sell for cigarettes, using them to buy at another time and place. Cigarettes became the normal currency, though, of course, barter was never extinguished.

I love the way that interesting events things are described in a dry, understated tone:

More interesting than changes in the general price level were changes in the price structure. Changes in the supply of a commodity, in the German ration scale or in the make-up of Red Cross parcels, would raise the price of one commodity relative to others. Tins of oatmeal, once a rare and much sought after luxury in the parcels, became a commonplace in 1943, and the price fell. In hot weather the demand for cocoa fell, and that for soap rose. A new recipe would be reflected in the price level: the discovery that raisins and sugar could be turned into an alcoholic liquor of remarkable potency reacted permanently on the dried fruit market. The invention of electric immersion heaters run off the power points made tea, a drag on the market in Italy, a certain seller in Germany.

The essay is a good introduction to basic economics, and a fun look at a historical event. It also shows some constants in how uneducated people people react to economic facts:

There was a strong feeling that everything had its "just price" in cigarettes. While the assessment of the just price, which incidentally varied between camps, was impossible of explanation, this price was nevertheless pretty closely known. It can best be defined as the price usually fetched by an article in good times when cigarettes were plentiful. The "just price" changed slowly; it was unaffected by short-term variations in supply, and while opinion might be resigned to departures from the "just price," a strong feeling of resentment persisted. A more satisfactory definition of the "just price" is impossible. Everyone knew what it was, though no one could explain why it should be so.

You can read the whole thing at The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp

Training

2011-10-06T13:51:00.001-04:00

Earlier this week, I and some other guys form the dojo were running 2-mile loops through campus to train for the USMC Mud Run. As we ran, we went over, under, and through various obstacles like signs and barriers. Some people saw us and asked is what fraternity we were pledging for. This was a reasonable assumption. If you see a group of guys doing odd things on campus in September or October, they are probably frat pledges.

The incident got me thinking about fraternities. Before I was an economist, I assumed that fraternities were just parasitic nests of drunkenness and nepotism. But in the last few years, I have learned to think more deeply about features of society. If something persists for a long time, there are probably good reasons for it. I have realized that a lot of things fraternities do are actually useful skill-building exercises.

For example, consider the way they make their pledges wear suits and carry frat paddles. Every fall in my class, there is always a day when about half a dozen guys come into my class wearing suit jackets and bow ties, and I know they are frat pledges. This continues for several weeks. At first, they are obviously uncomfortable and self-conscious. But as time passes, they become much more comfortable. You can see the improvement in self-confidence.

Bring comfortable in a suit is a very useful skill. By forcing pledges to live weeks of their lives in a suit, fraternities develop this skill in their members, which will serve them for the rest of their lives. They will look better in any formal setting. Beyond this, they are teaching their members to be comfortable drawing attention to themselves. Carrying around a frat paddle and wearing a pink bow tie is awkward and embarrassing, but after a while, the pledges get used to it. They learn that there is nothing wrong with being loud, bold, and a center of attention. This too is a useful skill, and will serve them well whenever they have to give a speech or presentation.

There are a lot of skills that help people get ahead in the world. Many of them are a mystery to me, a kind of black magic. I suspect that a lot of what fraternities do is build these skills in their members. The best way to train any skill or learn anything new is to join a group of people who either have that skill already or are also training in it. Fraternities are probably a lot like dojos, but instead of training in physical fitness and mostly obsolete combat skills, they train in the art of social power. The evidence suggests that this training is remarkably effective.

And of course, power corrupts.

Assassinations

2011-10-04T11:00:00.001-04:00

For a long time European society has had a very bizarre moral belief about how to conduct war. This is the belief that assassination is wrong, somehow more wrong than waging a war that kills thousands of troops. For example, during the Revolutionary War, a Scottish officer and sniper refused to shoot an American officer in the back, an officer that might have been General Washington. He did not regret this decision, because it would have been 'ungentlemanly' to assassinate an officer.

This moral belief may be partly due to the well-known cognitive failure of focusing on individuals. Our emotions honestly do believe that the death of one is a tragedy and the death of a million is a statistic, so we feel more squeamish about ordering the death of one person than ordering a large troop mobilization that could kill millions.

But more cynically, such a moral code clearly benefits the aristocracy at the expense of the peasantry. If I were a selfish political leader or a general, I would do everything I could to promote a moral code that says the targeted killing of people like me is very wrong. If someone were to go to war with my country, I would want then to do so in a way that killed thousands of peasants rather than me or people like me. This moral code allowed the aristocracy to treat war like a game, wasting the lives of thousands of people in pursuit of glory. It worked out great for them, and not so good for the people stuck in the middle.

Militaristic aristocrats do not care about civilians or troops. They only care about their own life and their personal power and glory. For example, modern research suggests that the leaders of Japan honestly did not care that we were carpet-bombing their cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. This was irrelevant to them; their concerns were more personal:

But Hasegawa and other historians have shown that Japan's leaders were in fact quite savvy, well aware of their difficult position, and holding out for strategic reasons. Their concern was not so much whether to end the conflict, but how to end it while holding onto territory, avoiding war crimes trials, and preserving the imperial system. The Japanese could still inflict heavy casualties on any invader, and they hoped to convince the Soviet Union, still neutral in the Asian theater, to mediate a settlement with the Americans. Stalin, they calculated, might negotiate more favorable terms in exchange for territory in Asia. It was a long shot, but it made strategic sense.

In fact, Wilson argues, history suggests that leveling population centers, by whatever method, does not force surrender. The Allied firebombing of Dresden in February of 1945 killed many people, but the Germans did not capitulate. The long-range German bombing of London did not push Churchill towards acquiescence. And it is nearly impossible to imagine that a bomb detonated on American soil, even one that immolated a large city, would prompt the nation to bow in surrender.

Thankfully, civilized nations no longer carpet-bomb civilian population centers. But we still have international conventions against assassinations, and we are still squeamish about targeted killings, with the result that we are often forced to engage in large-scale street-fighting, a meatgrinder that kills troops and puts civilians at risk but does not much affect the leaders who actually caused the problem.

If we do not want to treat war like a game, if we actually want to eliminate a threat, then we need to hit the leaders rather than the troops. Troops can be replaced easily, partly because they all have friends and families that will want to avenge them if they die. Killing a thousand ground troops will accomplish almost nothing. As long as the organization has its leadership structure in place, those thousand people can be replaced. Killing the leaders will be more effective at stopping the immediate threat, and it will be a much better deterrent to other potential leaders. And even if you care more about morality than effectiveness, it should be clear that the death of one is preferable to the death of thousands.

We are learning this. We are learning that targeted killings of leaders works:

That doesn't mean that we'll see an end to terror ... But we can reduce it to a statistical nuisance, rather than a cataclysmic danger. And whatever our political views, we should acknowledge President Obama's willingness to unleash our special capabilities in our current campaign to kill terrorists leaders. He's gotten this part right and deserves credit for it.

I am troubled by any kind of extrajudicial killing, but I recognize that the killing of one person can often prevent a messy engagement that kills dozens or hundreds of people. The way forward is not to ban assassinations and revert to medieval notions of warfare and deterrence. We need to face up to reality, acknowledge targeted assassination as a legitimate strategy, and incorporate it into our legal framework so that the ability is not abused. Imagine a world where large-scale military conflict is a thing of the past, and we keep the peace by, after due process of law, arresting or assassinating the individuals likely to cause wars and terrorism. I think that this would be a better world.

Corection

2011-10-03T07:49:00.001-04:00

The Armed Forces Journal is not published by the US military and the author of the article I mentioned yesterday was not a military officer. He was a professor at a military college.

Freedom of Speech

2011-10-02T10:43:00.001-04:00

My cousin, a colonel in the Army, emailed his circle of friends the following article form the Armed Forces Journal, ~~which is a magazine produced by the US military~~:

Growing Up: Toward a new maturity in civil-military relations

I would recommend reading the whole thing, but you may need some explanation or clarification first. You can tell that the article ~~was written by a military mind and that the article~~ is intended for a military audience. It is long, comprehensive, detailed, and full of the kind of vocabulary that only military people are comfortable with. It is also not obvious at first what issue the article is addressing.

The article is basically arguing that military officers should have a right to free speech, specifically the freedom to publicly oppose policies that they think are wrong. This belief may not seem controversial, but it is. People often claim that if military personnel oppose the civilian administration in any way, this is a threat to democracy. The article argues that the real threat to democracy is the suppression of dissent.

The opening paragraphs look like something you would expect a radical anti-military protestor to write:

What if U.S. troops were used — and acquiesced in being used — to conduct extrajudicial targeted assassinations inside the sovereign territory of another country without prior congressional approval or even consultation?

What if U.S. military personnel, weaponry and munitions similarly were used — again with uniformed acquiescence — to conduct aerial bombing of another sovereign country, with at least the partial intent of killing a head of state, also without prior congressional approval or consultation, and the president then openly flouted the legal reporting and troop-withdrawal requirements of the War Powers Resolution?

What if the dramatically expanded size, use and global presence of U.S. special operations forces — operating as they do in extreme secrecy, blurring the boundaries that normally separate military operations from police, intelligence and internal security operations, and subject to minimal congressional oversight — were to pose unseen and unknown challenges to civilian control of the military?

'Civilian control of the military' is a sacred value among the U.S. armed forces. Officers know that dozens of civilizations, including ancient Rome, have been ruined because their armed forces have started meddling in civilian politics, causing everything to descend into armed savagery and civil war. Among our military personnel, it is a source of professional pride, even a foundation of their very identity, that they are not the kind of soldiers that overthrow lawful authority. Like all sacred values and matters of honor, it must be discussed very carefully, which is one reason for the length and language of this article.

One could say that civil-military relations in this country already are relatively mature — if by relatively, one means compared with others (at least regimes with fewer years of democracy, putative or real, under their belts) and by mature, one means generally stable, predictable and democratically nonthreatening. But if by relatively, one means compared with what we could and should be, and by mature, one means having achieved an ideal state of civil-military relations — a strategically effective military, whose leaders provide strategically sound advice, to civilian officials who are themselves strategically competent and answerable to a strategically aware and civically engaged public, all of this undergirded by a critical free press, a vibrant civil society and a properly subordinated military-industrial complex — then we are a far cry yet from adulthood.

This is the central idea of the article, a statement of what we should be. Everything before it lists the problems, and everything after it lists solutions. The first step to finding solutions is to gain a better understanding of reality.

we live today on what might be considered a global battlefield in which there has been an almost total convergence of the tactical and strategic domains of action. There no longer is anything purely tactical or narrowly military that is without almost instantaneous strategic consequence or ramification. Thus, there no longer exists any meaningful boundary circumscribing the proper purview of the military and demarcating it from a pristine civilian domain of strategy.

Here, the author assumes that the audience appreciates the difference between the strategic and the tactical. Strategic choices are things like "We are going to declare war on Germany" and tactical choices are things like "We are going to call in an artillery strike at coordinates XYZ to provide covering fire while the tanks advance along Route Q to attack the German pillboxes on that hill." As the paragraph implies, the ideal has been that strategic choices should always be made by elected civilians while tactical choices should always be made by well-trained military personnel.

This next bit is one of the author's most important points:

6. Civilian direction isn't inherently constitutional or legal.

Just as there is an implicit quid pro quo that civilian authorities be strategically competent and provide strategically sound direction to the military in return for the military's keeping its advice narrowly military, so too is there a quid pro quo that if the military is to live up to its oath of office — to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic (not least including those within government who seek to subvert or circumvent it) — civilian authorities who expect unquestioning obedience from the military are in turn expected to act constitutionally and legally. The problem — a problem of overriding import — arises when the military assumes, unquestioningly, for reasons good or ill, that civilian authorities are doing so.

Why would the military consent to being deployed to invade another sovereign country without a declaration of war — or, at a minimum, a priori congressional authorization? Why would the military carry out targeted assassinations in violation of domestic and international law, especially without apparent congressional consultation? Why would the military subject a U.S. service member to inhumane treatment for allegedly passing information it itself had classified to a news organization — the democratic free press — before that individual is accorded due process of law? Why would the military torture (or "coercively interrogate") enemy combatants (or "prisoners of war" if we in fact are at war) and imprison them indefinitely while denying them habeas corpus? Why would the military engage in domestic surveillance and secretly infiltrate citizen groups exercising their rights of assembly and free speech? Why would the military suppress or deny public access to information it possesses for the purpose of nothing more elevated than protecting civilian political sensitivities?

These are examples of where the military acts dutifully at the behest of civilians and assumes, often wrongly, often for reasons of convenience or expediency, that the latter are responsible and accountable for the constitutionality and legality of their actions. Such frequently misplaced assumptions by the military exemplify an over-obeisance to civilian authority, represent an abrogation of responsibility for questioning authority and guaranteeing constitutionality and legality, and demonstrate more than a modest measure of civic illiteracy on the part of those in uniform.

This article makes it clear that many people* in the military are not happy about the things they have been told to do recently, and want to be able to air their grievances and dissents.

My personal opinion is that the military should never have the right to initiate things, but they should always have the right to say "No, we are not going to do this." In other words, both the military and civilian authorities should have a veto on any kind of military action.

*Not all of them

Butterflies

2011-09-25T17:22:00.001-04:00

There is a scene that will probably remain in my memory as long as I am alive. I do not know why I was thinking of it today, but I was:

Behind my parents' house, there are woods, and in those woods there is a creek. Several years ago, in the late spring, a few days after some heavy rains, I went down through the woods to the creek, as I often do.

It was a beautiful sunny day. When I got to the creek, I saw that it had been high but was back to its normal level. Along one of the sand banks on its shore, there were puddles and little pools of water that were no longer connected to the creek and were drying up in the sun.

I looked in the puddles and saw hundreds of tadpoles. The toads had laid their eggs in the shallow water in the high rains, and they had hatched to become tadpoles, but then the water level had fallen and left the young amphibians stranded. I knew that the water would dry up and kill them before they matured.

I felt a strange sense of kinship with the tadpoles, trapped in a situation beyond their comprehension, in a world that was slowly dying. I spent some time digging a canal between the pools and the creek, so that the tadpoles could swim to deeper water. Their chances of life would still be small, but they wound not be zero.

Then, further along the sand bank, I saw dozens of bright yellow tiger swallowtail butterflies, bright and beautiful in a patch of sunlight. I had never seen so many butterflies clustered so close together, not even in butterfly gardens or on my mom's butterfly bush. They were on the ground, not moving but obviously healthy, slowly flapping their wings.

I went to investigate. The butterflies remained where they were even as I approached. Normally butterflies will move away if they sense something coming, but these did not, even when I was less than a foot away.

The butterflies were clustered around what had been a small puddle with tadpoles in it. The sun had dried this puddle completely, leaving a dark gray oozing gelatinous mass of dead tadpoles stewing in the hot sunlight. The butterflies were greedily drinking this tadpole stew like a pack of wolves devouring an elk carcass.

There was a strange savage beauty to the whole process, a study in grim efficiency. The butterflies did not care about their image as cute and beautiful flower-loving nectar-drinkers. They had access to a wonderful source of protein, and they were taking advantage of it. They were going to turn that sickening mass of dead tadpoles into butterfly eggs, and they would not be scared away from their prize.

To this day I cannot look at a butterfly without thinking of dead tadpoles. Nature is what it is, and does not care about what we think it should be.

A Better Campaign

2011-09-24T11:44:00.001-04:00

I've been seeing complaints about the Republican presidential candidates. After the last debate, commentators said all of the contenders were either boring or stupid. I think this is mainly due to the constraints imposed by the debate format. It's almost impossible to display intelligence, character, or wise thoughts in one-minute responses to questions.

Political debates used to mean something, and they use to require real intellect and rhetoric. Candidates would spend hours crafting detailed speechrs responding to each other's positions. Television changed that, turning the whole process into a shadow of its former self and reducing it to a farce. All the candidates can do is repeat sound bites crafted by image consultants.

There is no point in watching one of these debates. You would learn more about their character and capabilities by watching them play a game of poker.

Now that I think about it, that would actually be a good idea. Instead of going through another round of a mutually destructive competition, wasting resources and making everyone look bad, they could generate publicity with a positive-sum game of skill, calculation and cunning.

The Republican National Committee should ask all of the candidates to go into a room, put ten million dollars of campaign funding on the table, and keep playing poker until somebody wins the whole pot. ESPN would probably pay a lot of money for the rights to film it, and I know I would like to watch. The game would certainly be a better preparation for the trials of being president than a lot of the campaign events they go through now.

Depressing Propaganda

2011-09-21T14:46:00.001-04:00

When I filled out the paperwork to get my master's degree, they entered me in the school's alumni database. This means that they regularly send me appeals for money, even though I am still here earning a modest PhD student's teaching assistent stipend.

The most recent one illustrates much of what is wrong with our educational system:

Dear AW,
It's a great week to be a C.. Tiger!!
* C.. named a top 25 public university by U.S. News & World Report
* Three home football wins including a 38-24 victory against defending National Champion Auburn
* C.. ranked 21st in the AP Top 25 College Football Rankings
We are proving once again that ORANGE isn't just a color, it's a way of life. Show your colors and your determination to lead with this exclusive new T-shirt. We're counting on each of you to step up as leaders during the final months of ...
Make your gift today by...

Let's start with the grammar. The bullet points are inconsistent sentence fragments, and the wording implies that there were three football wins in one week. The use of double exclamation points, and putting a word in all caps, is simply unprofessional.

The first bullet point brags about a ranking that has been creeping down in recent years, from 22 to 23 to 25. I am reminded of the shrinking chocolate ration in 1984. The other two bullet points are about football.

The appeal is almost insulting. Be a determined leader by buying a t-shirt. The paragraph mocks and subverts the very idea of leadership; it is an impressive bit of newspeak, indicative of a postmodern mindset that attempts to redefine reality by words. Buying a t-shirt is the opposite of leadership, it is mindless herd-following and emotion-driven slacktivism.

This email was propaganda and manipulation in its purest form. It opens with a feel-good emotional appeal, devoid of substance, and then uses loaded words to try to turn that feeling into an impulse purchase that funnels money into the university.

But none of this is the really depressing thing. I see blatant advertisements all the time, and I see bad writing all the time. The really depressing thing is that the university is doing this because it works. People will buy that t-shirt after reading the email. The depressing thing about this email is what it says about human nature, and how it demonstrates how little that human nature is affected by graduating from what is supposedly a good school. Tribal instincts still rule over thoughtful calculation, and our top educational institutions deliberately encourage this process for their own benefit.

PS: I redact my name and the name of my university so they will not show up too easily in search engines. I have nothing to hide from friends and regular readers, but it is too easy to take random stuff out of context.

Three Identity Links

2011-09-15T14:58:00.001-04:00

Recently I have seen three things all worth reading, and all on a roughly similar topic.

A friend of mine has an excellent blog post. I cannot describe it well enough to do it justice, but it is a very thoughtful and inspiring note on self-confidence and identity.

A philosopher-economist cuts through health-care arguments with an incisive point:

A great many ill, collapsed, etc. folks in the world are largely left to die, at least if curing them costs like a US hospital stay. ... argues above for "decent" national care, not global care. And even libertarians wouldn't leave family members to die. So everyone agrees that we heroically help some, and leave others to die. We only disagree on who falls into which category.

and expands it into a good analysis of how people are defined by 'us and them' tribal identities.

And finally, here is a comic that mocks a certain tribe.

At first, I simply thought "This is a great comic. I have never seen a better take-down of Mensa." But then I started to wonder why I liked it so much. After all, Mensa is mostly harmless, and there are more appropriate targets for mockery. Why do I feel good when someone cracks jokes at their expense?

Humans have an instinct to 'put in their place' people who become too self-important. Mensa is a social club, with an odd entrance requirement. As long as people understand that, nobody has any problems. But a lot of people who score high on an IQ test think that the test score makes them special and superior. The comic fights that attitude. Still, it was probably wrong for me to instinctively like it so much; it shows that I am still infected with tribal thinking.

PS: I am fairly sure that I have a Mensa-level IQ, but I am too much of a lazy tightwad to spend the time and money on the 'proper' IQ test to find out. I could join based on my 99th percentile GMAT score but I have no desire to. I do not consider 'high IQ' to be an important part of my identity. I remember character in a book saying something like "Being clever is nothing to be proud of. It is just something you come by, like being tall." I am pretty sure that it was one of the witches in a Terry Pratchett book, but I could not find the quote to confirm this. Anyway, it is a good thing to remember.

Critical Thinking

2011-09-13T14:04:00.001-04:00

During WWII, statistician Abraham Wald was asked to help the British decide where to add armor to their bombers. After analyzing the records, he recommended adding more armor to the places where there was no damage!

Why did he do this? Think about it a minute. If you are looking over the records of damaged bombers, where they got hit and what the effects were, why would you want to add armor to places where there was no recorded damage?

The answer is here. (linked from Marginal Revolution)

This is a good lesson in how to think about the big picture. The technical term is 'selection bias' which means that the things you are looking at are not the whole picture; there was some process that made you look at only a small fraction of reality. Without considering that process, all of the best statistics in the world will not help you find the truth.

Connotation of Government

2011-09-12T12:08:00.001-04:00

One of the main things you learn when studying or discussing philosophy is that a lot of confusion and disagreements come from people using the same word in different ways.

Consider the word 'government'. What does it make you think of?

To some, 'government' means the people who have their salaries paid by taxpayers.

To others, 'government' means the people who have the ability to fine you or put you in jail.

To others, 'government' means the things done by the apparatus of the state, like building roads or mailing Social Security Checks.

To others, 'government' means the set of laws and rules that say how society is organized.

And some people use 'government' to mean an abstract nebulous thing that has little connection with reality, like 'the will of the people'.

People who say 'government' and think about an IRS agent will find it difficult to communicate with people who say 'government' and think about the Bill of Rights. The word has so many meanings that it becomes meaningless.

I tend to use the word 'government' to mean 'a bureaucracy with the power to spend your money and put you in jail'. 'Bureaucracy' refers to the complex feedback loop between the rules and incentives of a centrally planned organization, and the people who are selected, promoted, and trained by such organizations.

Ten Years

2011-09-11T16:33:00.001-04:00

Over the past ten years, approximately* 24 million Americans have died.

6,160,000 died of heart disease.

5,620,000 died of cancer.

1,350,000 died of stroke.

1,270,000 died of lung disease.

1,230,000 died of accidents.

740,000 died of Alzheimer's disease.

710,000 died of diabetes.

520,000 died of pneumonia.

460,000 died of kidney disease.

340,000 died from infections (septicemia, or blood poisoning).

Those are the top ten causes of death. Many of them may seem natural or inevitable, but a large number of them could have been prevented. The lowest estimate of the number of people killed by preventable medical errors is 44,000 a year, so at least 440,000 Americans have been killed by their health care providers in the last ten years.

Here are some causes of death that are more obviously preventable:

430,000 died from car crashes.

340,000 committed suicide.

183,000 were murdered by other Americans.

34,000 died from drowning

26,000 died of malnutrition. Americans, starving to death.

6,472 American soldiers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And finally,

2,977 Americans died from foreign terrorist activity on American soil.

The number of people killed by terrorists is tiny compared to other causes of death. And yet, our instincts tell us that they are more important. This is because our instincts developed in a very different world. In primitive tribes, people constantly died from natural causes, but the thing most likely to wipe your tribe out completely was enemy action. If someone attacked you in a dramatic way, then you would have to respond decisively or risk the complete destruction of your entire family. So the people with instincts to remember aggression and retaliate were the ones most likely to pass on their genes.

But these instincts are not appropriate for the modern world; they cause us to overreact foolishly. In response to the events that caused about 3,000 deaths, our government has invaded two foreign countries and spent about three trillion dollars**. Three trillion is about $10,000 for every single person in the country. If that money had been spent on other things, then we could have saved around 300,000 lives.

After the 9/11/01 airline hijackings, it was reasonable and appropriate to react and make some changes. Sealing off airplane cockpits from the passengers was a very good idea. In fact, this action, by itself, would be enough to prevent any future attacks of that nature. None of the other security measures were necessary, and many of them were not even helpful.

The idea of terrorists with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons is very scary, and they could theoretically kill more than 300,000 of us. But protecting ourselves from these weapons is best done with non-proliferation efforts, which are inherently diplomatic. There will always be random terrorist groups who hate us, no matter how many terrorists we kill, but a world without weapons of mass destruction can be achieved. Our military actions over the last ten years have damaged our diplomatic standing worldwide, making it harder to control WMD's, while causing a lot of people to hate and fear us even more.

Then there is the fact that a natural pandemic is more likely and more lethal than a terrorist attack, as well as being easier and cheaper to prevent. If the CDC had been given that $3 trillion to spend on medical research and pathogen monitoring and emergency stockpiles, I would be a lot safer than I am today.

We need to start thinking of terrorism as just one more thing in a long list of potential hazards, and allocating our limited resources in a calm and well-calculated manner. Emotional appeals rarely generate good policy. The call to 'Remember 9/11' belongs in the history books, along with 'Remember the Maine'.

*These are not exact numbers, because that would take too much time to research. I took the numbers from the death statistics in 2007 (table 10), multiplied by 10, and rounded down.

**The wars plus increased homeland security cost 2 trillion dollars, and over the past ten years the annual Pentagon budget has increased by 80%, which probably would not have happened if there was no War on Terror. Defense spending over the past ten years would probably have been 5 trillion instead of 6 trillion without the attacks.

Play Review: Caesar and Cleopatra

2011-09-09T16:25:00.001-04:00

I am reviewing a play that was written in 1898, that most people have never seen or read, by a person most people have never heard of. But like most of my reviews, it lets me make a more general point.

I mentioned the play last week and noted that it had a quote I liked and seemed good.

Then I read it, and found that the first impression was wrong. That one scene was the only good part of the play.

I should specify why the play was bad. It was quite well-written, full of good quotes and characterization, and plenty of cleverness and wit. It is bad because of its moral core. It is one more thing to add to the list of art in the spirit of Triumph of the Will: high quality propaganda for a really nasty mindset, just like Gone with the Wind and Bonfire of the Vanities.

The author, George Bernard Shaw, combines a caustic hatred of his own society with a gushing admiration of antiquity. Either one of these things alone is bad enough, but the two of them together is truly obnoxious.

He seems mainly motivated by a Nietzschen morality. Here is what he says in the notes at the end of the play:

Hence, in order to produce an impression of complete disinterestedness and magnanimity, he has only to act with entire selfishness; and this is perhaps the only sense in which a man can be said to be naturally great. It is in this sense that I have represented Caesar as great. Having virtue, he has no need of goodness.

and

For this raises the question whether our world has not been wrong in its moral theory for the last 2,500 years or so.

Apparently what he likes about the ancient world is that it had 'great' men who used it as their playground. The play of full of contempt for the officers and leaders of his contemporary Britain, which by any objective measure except longevity is the greatest empire the world has ever seen. In terms of power, scope, audacity, morality, and positive effect on the peace and prosperity of the world, it far outclassed ancient Rome.

Anything that is to be admired about ancient Rome or Egypt, and there is much to admire, was even better in Britain. Anything to hate about Victorian Britain, and there is much to hate, was far worse in antiquity.

The one exception might be art and architecture. I happen to agree with his contention that the ancient Egyptians had better taste in interior decoration than the Victorian British. But this is utterly irrelevant to any serious judgment of a society.

The glorification of antiquity is pretty common. Lots of people like to make a political point by saying bad things about parts of their society they do not like. They use places that are far away in either time or space as a kind of imaginary utopia, claiming the imagined virtues of these other places and times as part of their own political ideals.

But the main problem with the play was a moral lesson that was powerfully delivered, persuasive, and totally wrong and evil. The play says, repeatedly and explicitly, that it is better for agents of the government to personally kill people they decide must die, instead of executing them after due process of law. This summary execution is portrayed as a noble virtue, while calling a court session to dispense justice is seen as weakness and vice.

Basically, George Bernard Shaw is attacking the very foundation of a free society, and championing the worst kind of despotism. In order to see how he manages to insinuate this twisted moral lesson into the mind of the reader, you would have to read through the whole play, which I do not recommend unless you are interested in social history and have a well-developed moral philosophy.

It may or may not be a coincidence that George Bernard Shaw was a Fabian Socialist, a eugenicist, and a vocal supporter of Stalin.

Obama and Libya

2011-09-07T16:39:00.001-04:00

The rebels have won in Libya. An evil dictator has been driven from power and into hiding, his regime crushed. An enemy of our country has been eliminated. The people of Libya now have a chance for freedom and democracy.

Think of every justification that has been given for the Iraq conflict. Think of every good thing that has come from eliminating Hussein. All of these things are also true about eliminating Gaddafi. Obama's military adventure has accomplished just as much as Bush's military adventure, at a tiny fraction of the cost.

No American lives were lost, as far as we know. The marginal cost to the military budget was tiny. Almost nobody, anywhere in the world, thinks that America acted as an aggressive imperial power. This will not help anybody recruit more terrorists against us.

It is possible that the rebels will fail to form a decent government, that the country will descend into chaos or produce another dictator. But even that worst-case scenario is no worse than what has already happened in Iraq. And even if it does happen, it will not be our problem. We will not be stuck in the middle and nobody will blame us. We gave the Libyan people a chance for freedom, and their chances of making it work are at least as good as the Iraqis' chances.

Obama has proven himself to be an effective commander-in-chief, the right person for a complex world where the primary use of military force is for civilized nations to protect people in other countries from violence and oppression. He was presented with a tough situation, made a difficult but necessary choice, and managed the situation well. He was good at building consensus and alliances for this fight, and we could not have done this without allies. We did not have enough firepower in the theater and we did not have the right connections with the rebels. The other NATO members helped with the former, and several Arab countries helped with the latter.

As I have said before, the things that Obama's administration is directly responsible for, the things that he does quietly behind the scenes, all seem to be well-managed and produce good results. But whenever Congress gets involved, he shows an astonishing inability to lead them well or produce anything of value. I still blame Congress more, but that is a topic for another post.

Obama will probably not get the credit he deserves for this. The Libyan conflict has been almost unnoticed among the continuing economic mess, and the people who did comment on it tended to complain about Obama for one reason or another.

People have a bad habit of judging things by input rather than output. Many people will see the Iraq conflict's horrible cost of blood and treasure and hate, and then tell themselves that the results must have been worth it, and then congratulate Bush on making 'hard choices'. Then, if they think of the Libyan conflict at all, they will see its tiny cost, think of it as insignificant, and conclude that Obama has no experience handling important things. This is exactly backwards. Obama's Libyan intervention has produced good results for a low price.

Obama's Economist and Wages

2011-09-06T12:08:00.001-04:00

President Obama consistently nominates high-quality economists to top positions. His recent pick, Alan Krueger, is one of the best labor economists on the planet, which, given what it takes to be a labor economist, means that he is also one of the best statisticians on the planet.

Krueger has extensively studied the effects of minimum wage increases, and found that in many cases, they do not result in low-wage workers losing their jobs. There has been a massive academic fight about these results, which did uncover some problems with Krueger's early papers, but in the end the consensus is that the evidence is mixed, and it is hard to find any clear proof that raising the minimum wage causes unemployment.

A few days ago, I saw a very ignorant editorial in response to this nomination. The writer was blasting Krueger, saying

Alan Krueger can be counted on to ignore fundamental economic principles...a higher minimum wage reduces employment opportunities for young, low-skilled and inexperienced workers. After all, this is Economics 101.

Think about this for a minute. The author is claiming that a model from simplest kind of economics is better than a top expert in the field. He is saying that if you take an introductory course, then you know everything you need to know about labor economics.

All models are simplified representations of reality, and the 'Economics 101' models are very simple indeed. A lot of detail gets left out, and a lot of assumptions get put in. The basic supply and demand model does work surprisingly well in most cases, but it is not universally true.

Yes, basic economics says that in a competitive labor market, a minimum wage will reduce employment. But intermediate economics says that in a labor market where employers are price searchers, a minimum wage can increase employment. Being a price searching buyer means that you have some choice about the price you pay for things. Instead of being forced to take a market price, you can pay less and get less, or pay more and get more. In such a setting, employers will maximize profits by paying workers less than the free-market price and hiring less of them, just like a monopoly will maximize profits by charging more than the free-market price and selling less stuff.

So there are two competing models. The only way to choose between them is by collecting data. It becomes an empirical question, and Krueger has spent his life answering these kinds of questions. There is a lot of data to show that employers are price searchers, especially when dealing with workers who find it very costly to move to a different job. In the extreme situation, where there is only one factory in a town and it is hard for workers to move, a minimum wage law or a union will increase wages while actually increasing economic efficiency.

This, by the way, helps you understand the 'company towns' of the Industrial Revolution. Providing workers with houses, schools, doctors, churches, and social clubs is a way to trap them. It is not benevolence. If you want to be nice to people, it is always more efficient to simply pay them more. If you can afford to hire a doctor for your workers, you can afford to pay them enough to hire a doctor themselves. People, even poor and ignorant ones, are better off making their own decisions. If you live in a paternalistic company town and you quit your job, you lose everything. So the employer has much more pricing power over your wages. It is no accident that the people working for the most 'benevolent' employers, like Pullman, were more likely to unionize, because they were most likely to be underpaid.

As a population of workers becomes more mobile, more willing and able to switch jobs, their wages will rise. When workers can easily quit, the employers have to pay fair market wages to keep them. Highly skilled urban professionals are extremely mobile; if you have a good resume and a good network and live in a place with lots of employers, you can find a new job without too much trouble. The basic econ model works well to describe these labor markets. The best way to raise wages for everyone is to make all labor markets more competitive and all workers more mobile.

Disability

2011-09-05T22:12:00.001-04:00

The only student in my class to ace today's quiz was a student with a documented learning disability.

I do not know what the disability is. I only know that he gave me a letter from the disability office telling me to provide accommodations like note taking and a reduced distraction testing environment.

This happens about three or four times a semester, and the list ofo accommodations is usually about the same. I would guess that most such students have been diagnosed with ADHD.

I am not exactly sure what this says about me, my class, my teaching style, the education system, and/or the medical system.

Physiology Part 2

2011-09-04T20:12:00.001-04:00

16 days ago, I sprained my ankle. It was worse than I thought at first, but a few days after the sprain I was able to walk normally on flat ground, and by nine days after the sprain I had recovered the mobility of a normal person and was able to do most of the exercises in our martial arts workout. But 'normal person' is a much lower level of ability than I am used to. As the ankle healed, it got tight, especially the Achilles tendon, so I had to keep exercising and stretching it out and there were the occasional twinges of pain.

I just finished running our parkour course. Even though I was not very graceful, and had to do most of the jumping off the other foot, which I am not used to doing, I was able to do most of it. My overall performance was probably about equal to the second or third time I did the course.

Sometimes it is easy to underestimate how much you have trained your body. My ankle is probably stronger and more flexible than it was five years ago, but it still feels weak to me because I am used to it being so much better.

'Top 100' speculative fiction books

2011-09-03T13:08:00.001-04:00

NPR used a poll to come up with a list of the "Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books". My friend went down the list and commented on the books she read.

Since I have a habit of commenting on books, and there are several on here that I have read but not talked about, I will got down the list too. If I have not read the book but have read other things by the author, I will comment on the author.

1) The Lord Of The Rings
I used to be a huge fan of this. But whenever I have tried to reread it in recent years, I never seem to want to finish. There is just too much excess prose. Also, as time goes by, it is becoming increasingly clear that Tolkien came from a world that is sharply at odds with modern sensibilities. The glorification of royalty is particularly galling.

Honestly, I now think the movies are better than the books. You get most of the good stuff in a more condensed form. My only real complaint is the absence of Bombadil; I think his existence and character added an important depth to the story.

2) The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
I read all of the books in the series. They go downhill after a while, but the first two books are full of memorable and imaginiative things.
3) Ender's Game
I never read it and don't want to. I get the impression that this book is only popular because people read it as children and want to see themselves in the genius protagonist.
4) The Dune Chronicles
See my earlier review. The summary is:

It is possible that this book is a Watchmen-style deconstruction of the epic hero genre. If so, it is a good one. But it is also possible that the book is a confused mess that straddles the fence between genius and madness. I am inclined to think the latter, because there are so many things that simply don't make sense. The plot and setting of Dune are like soap bubbles: if you poke them or just look at them too long, they disintegrate.

5) A Song Of Ice And Fire Series
Another thing I do not want to read. I simply refuse to make the time commitment to a massive doorstopper series that dwells endlessly on political intrigue.
6) 1984
Worth reading, even though the protagonist is a complete nobody with no heroic or redeeming qualities. The depiction of the world, and the comments on the use of language, are excellent.
7) Fahrenheit 451
I never read it, but I saw the movie. This is somewhat ironic given the premise of the book. I should probably read it sometime.
8) The Foundation Trilogy
I read it but would not recommend it. Like much science fiction from the '40's and '50's, it has not aged well. Its world is so far removed from our reality or any realistic future that it should be called 'fantasy'. It has interstellar travel and psychic powers, but no computers.

It is also clear that Asimov knew very little about economics; a small colony of scientists is somehow able to produce more technological advancement than an entire civilization of billions of people. I dislike any book that claims you can build a utopia by isolating a few of the smartest people, and the Foundation books are remarkably similar to Atlas Shrugged in this conceit.

9) Brave New World
I was not impressed. I thought it was vastly inferior to Orwell's work. The thing is simply not believable.
10) American Gods
I have read several Gaiman works, but not this one. Gaiman seems interesting and impressive at first, but I quickly started to dislike his writing while reading Fragile Things. His strength is that he knows old mysticism very well and can make it seem real and powerful, but this is also what made me dislike his stuff. It is a never-ending parade of terror, misery, and superstition.

11) The Princess Bride
I started reading it but cannot remember if I finished it. I remember that it was good, but not really any better than the movie.
12) The Wheel Of Time Series
I read the first three and decided that there was no point in reading any more. The main character gains the ability to destroy any opponent, even demon lords, with a single magic spell, which means that there can be no interesting adventure and any future books must be based on politics. It was fairly well-written, but there were too many things that just seemed wrong or senseless.

13) Animal Farm
It is an excellent book and everyone should read it. It is also fairly short and easy to read, so the cost of reading it is low. Too few reviewers take this kind of cost-benefit analysis into consideration when making recommendations.

14) Neuromancer
I have never read it, but I have read other Gibson works. They are memorable and imaginative. But I think that once you have read a couple, there is not much point in reading others.
15) Watchmen
I read it and liked it. Like Animal Farm, it is a fun easy read packed with ideas. Although it is definitely not for children.
16) I, Robot
I have read most of Asimov's robot stories. They are much better than the Foundation series, but I would still not recommend them. They often feel like some kind of strange philosophical thought experiment in a world that has very little relation to our own.

17) Stranger In A Strange Land
I have read a lot of Heinlein books, but not this one. It seems to be one of his social/mystical stories, and in my opinion those are the worst. I probably will not bother.

18) The Kingkiller Chronicles
I have heard good things about these and plan to read them all when the whole trilogy is finished.
19) Slaughterhouse-Five
I have read this, and a lot of Vonnegut short stories. Vonnegut is interesting and strange, a relic of a very different world. His works are a bit too bleak and cynical for my taste, but I am glad I read them. Only recommended if you like trippy mind-bending things that are more focused on philosophical musings than storytelling.

20) Frankenstein
I have read it and I am glad I did, even though I did not enjoy it that much. Much of the novel seems to be pointless filler, but the good parts are very good.
21) Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?
I have read a lot of Philip K. Dick short stories and generally enjoy them. I get the impression that I would not enjoy this novel as mich, though. See my comments on Blade Runner.

22) The Handmaid's Tale
I read Atwood's 'The Penelopiad' and liked it. Maybe one day I will get around to reading this.
23) The Dark Tower Series
I read part of a comic adaptation of this and thought it was fairly dumb. I have not been impressed with the Steven King works I have read. He knows how to write powerful and memorable things, but I do not like what he does with this ability. He is a lot like Gaiman. When I read things by either author, it is like witnessing a work of destruction rather than creation. They both seem like literary vandals, making a scene by smashing up sacred things and making the viewer nervous and uncomfortable.

24) 2001: A Space Odyssey
At first I could not remember if I had read this, or just watched the movie. Then I looked up the plot and differences between the movie and remembered that I had read it.
Overall I am not a fan of Clarke. Some of his short stories are quite good, but his books do not entertain me, and I see little value in speculating about super-advanced aliens and how they did or might affect mankind.

25) The Stand
Finally I get to something I have never heard of. Since I have already talked about Steven King, I have nothing to say. From this point I will start skipping things I have not read, unless it is an author I am familiar with but have not talked about before.

29) The Sandman Series
I started reading it, and liked it at first, but it got old very quickly. I would recommend starting it to see what you think.
31) Starship Troopers
I liked it a lot. Definitely recommended. You should read at least one Heinlein book, and it should probably be this one. It has at least as much social value as 1984, and is a lot more fun to read.
32) Watership Down
Started it, could not get further than a few pages in.
33) Dragonflight
I have read a few Anne McCaffrey books. She really loves the 'Special people who are superior' theme. It it is clearly an attempt to flatter the intended audience and provide a wish-fulfillment fantasy, and this rapidly gets tiresome. I started reading this one and did not get past the first few pages.

34) The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
I liked it, even though it rests on the amazingly stupid idea that a moon colony would export food to the Earth. It is also quite bothersome that Heinlein says that a superior society will form after people have the freedom to kill each other off at will with no penalty.

35) A Canticle For Leibowitz
This one is really good, and underappreciated. The world is well-developed, the characters are good, and it explores interesting themes. But as I reread my earlier review, I see that my earlier reaction was more mixed than the long-term memories I formed. I guess it is like a vacation where you only remember the good parts.

36) The Time Machine
This definitely deserves its place as a classic. Interestingly enough it has aged much better than a lot of more modern works. I recommend it.
37) 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea
I did not like this book much. I was never really impressed with Verne, I see him as inferior to Wells.
38) Flowers For Algernon
Middle school reading assignment. I remember not hating it, and not being impressed either.
39) The War Of The Worlds
Another classic, but I agree that it is not as good as The Time Machine. It is still a lot better than a lot of things above it on this list.
40) The Amber Chronicles
I have never read it, but I have seen credible sources saying that it is really dumb, with the main character having far too many powers for the book to be interesting.
42) The Mists Of Avalon
I should probably read this one day. I tend to like reading female authors of sci-fi and fantasy, and I saw and liked the television adaptation.
43) Ringworld
I liked it, and I like most Niven books. Niven is perhaps the best example of good 'hard' science fiction that doers its best to take the laws of science seriously rather than just use technology or aliens as an excuse to make crazy things happen. In my opinion, his best work I have read is 'The Integral Trees' but Ringworld is also good.

45) The Left Hand Of Darkness
I have read several Le Guin books, but not this one. I liked them, so I probably should read this.
46) The Silmarillion
I tried to read it a few times and failed each time. I like Tolkien's random short stories, but the things in The Silmarillion always bore me.
47) Contact
I liked this, it had good characters and a decent plot, it handled the 'alien contact' theme better than Clarke. Although the claim that aliens made the universe and hid a message in the digits of pi is really dumb. Pi is not something like the gravitational constant that can be changed when you make the universe, it is a fact of math that cannot be altered. Still, that is a minor point in the book and the rest is quite good.

52) Stardust
I liked the movie.
53) Small Gods
There are better Discworld books than this, but it is still very good. I recommend almost every Pratchett book; he deserves a much higher spot on the list.
58) The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant The Unbeliever
I read about 20 pages of this, and decided that it was very bad. I wanted nothing to do with the main character or the book or the writer.
60) Going Postal
An excellent book. Highly recommended. This is one of Pratchett's most recent books, but it is still a good starting point.
61) The Mote In God's Eye
I like both Niven and Pournelle, so I should probably read this one.
64) Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
An excellent book, highly recommended, which deserves a higher place. I have discussed it here, and also see my comments on The History of Magic.

67) The Sword Of Shannara Trilogy
I read a few chapters, and then decided that it is utter trash, just a cheap cargo-cult copy of The Lord of the Rings.
68) The Conan The Barbarian Series
I should not like these as much as I do. The morality of the main character, and the author, is wrong and dangerous. And yet I really enjoy reading them. It is a guilty pleasure.
72) Journey To The Center Of The Earth
This one is one of the better Verne books, more fun and interesting than most. This is probably because I can see it as a fantasy adventure with no connection to science or our history.
73) The Legend Of Drizzt Series
This is decent genre fiction, with good characters and plots in a well-developed world, with nothing that was annoying or ovbiously derivative. If you want pure fantasy entertainment, Salvatore is a good choice.
74) Old Man's War
Good and fun. A well-developed military sci-fi story.
76) Rendezvous With Rama
One of Clarke's better books. It ended up being a bit of light fun entertainment rather than anything deep, which was probably not the plan, but I liked it.

78) The Dispossessed
This is a good exploration of social systems and people's relationship to them, but only really worth reading if you are a philosopher or social scientist.
82) The Eyre Affair
Wacky fun for people who either like british humor or know and love literature. I have reviewed it before.
86) The Codex Alera Series
I like Butcher's Dresden books but I have no desire to read these. I cannot understand why he would give up an interesting and original character and world to write yet another generic fantasy novel series. I also cannot understand why people would vote that series up above the Dresden books.

88) The Thrawn Trilogy
Zahn is one of my all-time favorite authors. This should be much higher. I highly recommend it, as well as everything else he writes. He tells good stories with good characters in good, well-developed worlds.
99) The Xanth Series
I should probably try these; I have read several other Piers Anthony books and liked them.
Now, we get to people who should be on the list but are not:
HP Lovecraft. This guy is as much of a classic as Wells or Verne. He definitely deserves a spot above a lot of things here.
Michael Crichton: There should be something by him on here, probably The Andromeda Strain. That is one of the better science fiction books I have read.
Lord Dunsany: This guy is to fantasy what Wells is to science fiction. His works are classics and I recommend reading a few of them at least. They are surprisingly deep, original, and well written. Think of a cross between Hemingway and old fairy tales.
L. Sprauge de Camp deserves a place here. He is a classic writer of both science fiction and fantasy and his stories are good.

Impressions

2011-09-02T14:04:00.001-04:00

A student who added my class late came to my office today to talk about some things, and during the conversation she remarked "You are much nicer than I thought you would be." I asked why she thought I would be mean, and she mentioned that she had read the syllabus and got the impression from it that I would be harsh.

My syllabus includes several examples of actions that will result in a point being taken off a student's final grade, like coming in late or having a laptop and not sending me class notes. I basically have to write these penalties down. It would be unfair and wrong for me to apply them without proper warning, and I need to be able to apply these penalties in order to make my class run smoothly.

She thought that I would be a mean person because I discussed these penalties. But the reverse is true. The fact that I include these penalties in the syllabus, and use them as needed, is what allows me to be nice to people. If you come in to my class late, I will not be mean to you or make you feel bad or do anything negative. I will simply mark a point off your grade, politely inform you of this fact, and continue with the class.

One of the rules I live by is "Never impose an emotional penalty when you could impose a real penalty." Emotions are a sign of weakness; they are what you use to try to control people when you have no real power. I have the ability to chop points off a student's grade. I use that ability regularly, without any hint of negativity or malice, which allows me to control things without any emotional drama or bad feelings. I set a reasonable price for bad behavior and impose that price fairly.

People have remarked that public praise and private criticism is the bast way to handle people. That is probably true for close-knit groups. But when handling a class of 40 people, I find that the opposite is true. I am very nice and forgiving in private, but I smack people down in public to show that I am serious about the rules. It works very well.

Culture and Gender Ability Gap

2011-09-01T15:38:00.003-04:00

A long time ago I saw the following quote:

CAESAR (recovering his self-possession). Pardon him. ... he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

That is from George Bernard Shaw's play Caesar and Cleopatra.

After tracking down the quote, I opened the play to see it in context. I will probably be reading the whole play soon; it looks like an excellent work.

The reason I was reminded of this quote was this article. An economist studied two tribes in rural India with almost identical genetics, wealth, and living conditions, but very different cultures. This is almost a perfect natural experiment, so I expect these two tribes to be studied a lot more in the future.

One of the tribes is patrilineal. Women are not supposed to own land, and the oldest son inherits the property. The other is matrilineal. Property is inherited by the youngest daughter, men are not allowed to own land, and any earnings of the male are supposed to be handed over to his wife or sister.

They had the villagers do a simple puzzle-solving test. In the patrilineal tribe, the men did better than the women. In the matrilineal tribe, there was no statistically significant gender gap. What is even more in interesting to me is a fact that was not mentioned in the Time article: The men in the matrilineal tribe actually did better than the men in the patrilineal tribe:

Here is the actual academic paper, which may be gated. If you can open it, do so, because it is full of fascinating details that the news articles left out. If you have any unanswered questions after reading the popular article, as you should, head over to the actual scientific article.

Note that this study, like most good science, is a small bit of knowledge. It tells us about one particular mental ability. More studies are needed to test other abilities. But it is still very important. It provides evidence that the 'gender gap' in math and spacial abilities could easily be due to culture rather than genetics.

I have not seen anyone speculate on why the men in the female-dominated culture actually did better than the men in the male-dominated culture. The men in the patrilineal society actually had more education, and education was correlated with faster problem solving.

Keep this study in mind whenever people talk about 'innate' ability differences between groups. The customs of our tribe are not laws of nature.

Haimish

2011-09-01T14:41:00.001-04:00

I learned a new word today. That does not happen so often.

I know only one word to describe what the simpler camps had and the more luxurious camps lacked: haimish. It's a Yiddish word that suggests warmth, domesticity and unpretentious conviviality.

Read the whole article

Definitions: Sport

2011-08-31T18:18:00.001-04:00

What, exactly, is a sport?

Most people find questions like that to be annoying. Most people's working definition of 'sport' is 'whatever my culture says a sport is'. Definitions are based on tradition or authority. And most of the time, that works just fine. If you say 'sport' to someone in your culture, they will know what you mean.

But anyone with a philosophical or scientific mindset refuses to accept such definitions. We hate it when concepts are vague and fuzzy, and we hate circular logic and answers based on tradition or tacit knowledge.

Also, people probably agree less than they think. Here is a list of items. For each one, think, "Is it a sport, yes or no?"

American Football

Ballet

Baseball

Basketball

Billiards

Boxing

Car Racing

Chess

Cross Country Running

Fencing

Gymnastics

Horse Racing

Poker

Professional Wrestling

Skiing

Soccer

Synchronized swimming

Target shooting

Track and Field

Video Games

Weightlifting contests

I am pretty sure that your answers are different from the answers of most people reading this. How would you resolve a dispute?

One way is to identify things that are definitely sports and find their common attributes. There are probably a few things on the list that everyone would agree on. Then, for things that are not sports, analyze their attributes and see what separates them.

My office mate and I have had a couple conversations about this, and I have thought about it while driving. Here is the definition I came up with that we agreed on:

A sport is an interactive, competitive, physical activity.

Interactive means that you and other people are doing things simultaneously, and that it requires the participation of you and the others. If you can do the thing without anyone else and it is basically the same experience, then it is not interactive.

Competitive means that your goal is to win. It also implies that there is a clear ranking, especially a clear winner, and that anyone can tell who it is. If you need a special judge, or subjective judgment calls, to tell you who the best person or team is, then it was not competitive.

When a thing is both interactive and competitive, strategic thinking is required. The appropriate action to choose depends on what the opponent is doing. You have the ability to disrupt your opponent's plan or performance in some way. There are strategies and counter-strategies, offense and defense.

I could have also said "A sport is something that combines strategic thinking and physical activity." but most people do not really understand what 'strategic thinking' is. They tend to think that any careful planning or optimization is strategic thinking, but that is not the case.

Physical activity means that you will improve your performance by training your body, and that some amount of strength, dexterity, and fitness are required to do well.

Each of those three concepts are important; A thing must have all three to be a sport. If it is not interactive, then it is a contest and not a sport. If it is not competitive, than it is a performance and not a sport. If it is not physical, then it is a game and not a sport. Put another way, a sport is a game and a contest and a performance.

Other people might add the requirement that a sport requires teamwork. That is a defensible argument, but I will leave it aside for now.

When you have a definition like this, you need to test it. The most controversial part of my definition would probably be the fact that it excludes track and field events, calling them contests and not sports. I think that this is reasonable. I argue that any event where you show up, do your best at something, and hope that nobody does better than you is missing a key ingredient of sports. There is no interaction, no strategy.

My definition of 'sport' also includes billiards, and if you stretch the definition of physical activity enough, video games. I don't like that. My gut tells me that video games are definitely not sports and that billiards probably is not. I can probably get around this by fine-tuning the definition of 'physical activity' to mean something that requires more of your body than just manual dexterity.

Now, let's compare my definition to Wikipedia's:

A sport is an organized, competitive, entertaining, and skilful activity requiring commitment, strategy, and fair play, in which a winner and loser can be defined by objective means. Generally speaking, a sport is a game based in physical athleticism.

This definition adds several constraints that I feel are unnecessary. 'Entertaining', and 'skillful' are subjective terms, and in my opinion not essential to the definition. I definitely disagree with the 'requiring commitment'. If I play a game of pickup soccer once a year without any training or preparation, then I have still played a sport.

'Organized' and 'fair play' are qualifiers that I had not considered. I agree that a sport must be bound by a set of rules in order to avoid degenerating into a brawl. I guess I implicitly assumed that. Now that I think about it, my definition does include random fights, which should not be called a sport. I think 'organized' is unnecessary if 'fair play' is included because the key should be the common set of rules that the participants are using.

I also like the 'requiring physical athleticism' qualifier; it works better than 'physical activity'.

So now we have:

A sport is a competitive activity requiring strategy and fair play, based in physical athleticism, in which a winner and loser can be defined by objective means.

I think that any activity satisfying these definitions will also end up being both entertaining and skillful. Does anyone have a counterexample?

Intro Econ Class Notes

2011-08-29T18:31:00.001-04:00

Just like I did last year, I am posting student notes from the class I teach for fast content:

Econ 200 Section 2 notes 8/26

Homework Review

What are your most important values? How do they affect your beliefs and actions? (question 3a)

When you analyze economic things, you first have to identify incentives (what you want) and know how it will affect you. Also, you have to also know how to get what you want.

Economics is the combination of your personal values and facts about the world. In order to make an action you have to know what you want and the facts about the world. For example, if you want people to be loyal, you have to be nice and show that you are a friend.

How would you explain a billion dollars to a young child? (question 3b)

The young child must know what a huge stack of money is so that they can relate to it. For example, a child does not understand what it means to wrap dollar bills around

You must use some kind of tangible object that a child can understand, such as candy bars, season tickets, or other valuable objects.

Number game (question 6)

Rationality Levels

0: random

1: you assume other people are 0. So the average is 50, so the answer is 25.

2: assume others are 0. So the average is 25 and the answer is 12.5.

3: assume others are 0. So the average is 12.5 and the answer is 6.25.

Hyperrational (equilibrium solution): 0 ß- best answer

As the game continues, people get smarter and become more rational. In the third rotation of the game, someone will begin to realize that if everyone answers 0, then everyone gets a point. As the rotations continue, people begin to guess a lower and lower number.

Economics is about what is the societal result from everyone making their own decisions. You have to begin to understand others' reactions.

Questions

1. Which event in history played the biggest role in shaping our economy today?

Our American Revolution allowed us to escape from the British system of monopolies, cartels and create a more free society. We were able to form a very different economic society. We borrow a lot from English culture. You need a good set of stable rules for a good economy. The best set of rules usually comes from the bottom up (traditions). But in some cases tradition is not best, such as in the case of slavery.

Common Law is where decisions come from the bottom up. Decisions are made from knowledge that is known in society for many years. People use their knowledge to try to make decisions that are best for everyone. New governments are bound by the existing legal system.

Civil Law is where every law is made by a legislature.

Common law will win. In our country, the Supreme Court can strike down a decision that goes against the common law traditions of the country. But, you have to have some change so that you aren't stuck in the same social situations forever. The United States is more toward the end of common law than civil law on a scale. Other countries are at different points on the scale and may be civil law countries.

2. Is a line of credit better for a business then loans?

Yes. The bank allows you to borrow money if you need it. It is like a credit card that has a borrowing limit and you don't have to pay interest rates. You have to have someone check you out and approve you to get the line of credit so you have to pay money for the process, but it saves money for you in the future.

3. Is inflation part of a strong economy?

The healthiest amount of inflation is about 2%. There are costs of both inflation and deflation. When prices changes suddenly it confuses everyone. You have prior knowledge about how much things cost and have habits, but when prices change unexpectantly you don't know what you should do and what to buy. There has to be some small amount of inflation for wage adjustment. If you don't pay people based on how much they produce, you will go out of business. For example, if people produce 1% less, you can cut their pay by 1%. A 1% cut and 0 inflation is the same as 1% raise and 2% inflation. Right now our inflation rate is too low. Hyperinflation is extremely bad, but deflation is also bad. Central banking is harad because you have to figure out the perfect amount of inflation.

4. Does minimum wage cause inflation?

When the minimum wage goes up, it does not cause inflation because it does not change the total amount of money in the economy. It just means there is less money available for other people. The minimum wage people have more money, but other people have less. The distribution of money just changes.

MxV = PxY

M=money supply; V= velocity of money (how people spend their money and how quickly the financial circuit puts it back in circulation); P= price level (the consumer price index); inflation= the % change in the price lever (if the price was 200 in one year and 220 in the next year, then inflation is 10%); Y=GDP

In the short-term, the velocity of money has fallen a lot today. The government has printed a lot more money today to compensate for the lower velocity. The increased printing leads to increased prices. We are having a problem because government has not printed enough money and this has caused our recession.

5. Why does your credit score take a hit when people check it?

It is a sign that you want to borrow more money. People think that you are trying to take out a lot of loans and that makes you seem like a higher risk. The more loans you have, the worse your credit score because it seems like you will be paying a lot of other people.

6. As the economic situation recovers, will it cost us more now or later (cost of living)?

Houses are cheap now so the cost of living is lower. A lot of people want houses to be really cheap when you are looking to buy one. People who have houses don't want prices to drop. An economic recovery can raise the cost of living because what you want to buy will be more expensive. Recessions are good for people with lots of cash because things are cheap, but not good for people who don't have a lot of money. However, a better economy means you can get a better job and wages will go up.

7. Is it better to pay of student loans sooner or later?

Should be the last loan you pay off because it is subsidized. You should pay off the highest interest loan first. Pay off your credit card, then house, then student loan. If stocks and bonds start to recover, you can make more money in returns than you have to pay in interest rates in loans. If the interest rates are lower than what you get in investments, then pay off the loans first. You want to minimize the interest rates.

8. Should the US start selling some of its gold reserves?

Yes. Anyone with gold reserves should. Gold today should not be this high. Economic bubbles are when prices go up really high then go down (what is happening to gold). For example, real estate prices went really high then dropped in 2008. Gold prices could keep rising, but will probably drop. Gold prices go up when there are indication of high inflation, which will not continue in the US.

Suppose that you knew gold prices would keep going up, you would want to hang onto the gold. But if you had a credit card charging 17% interest, then you should sell the gold and pay off the debts.

9. Is it better to invest in a house?

There is a huge opportunity cost. You tie up a lot of money in a house and you have to pay a lot of interest. You pay the bank a lot to get a loan. A lot of times you have to buy a house to get into a better school district or raise your standard of living. You should try to rent if you can because your money is more liquid and not tied up in a house, unless you plan to stay in the house for 10 years. You should rent and pay off your debts while your money is in the stock market so you will have more money in the long run. Every time you buy a house you pay a huge transaction price (6%). People overestimate the benefits of buying a house, and underestimate the costs.

10. Is uncertainty is killing the economy?

It may be a little true, but it isn't as big as people are claiming. Investors and businesses hate risks and uncertainty. People want to know what the economic situation is so that they know what to do with their money. For example, if there is a risk that minimum wage will go up, then a person would not want to start a business. You need to know what regulations and prices will be.

** There are always deeper causes to things. Always look at the long term.

10-and-Under football

2011-08-24T11:06:00.001-04:00

There is a small track and stadium behind our apartment, and during football season have junior league football games there on Tuesday nights. These are often interesting to watch. Here are the thoughts that went through my head as I watched a game last night:

Watching little children play football often seems to be a surreal Kafka-style black comedy. Often, more yards were gained and lost due to fouls and errors than actual plays. During one possession, the ball was snapped way over the quarterback's head, and then two defenders broke through the line, so the quarterback had to run back and dive on the ball to prevent a turnover that would have resulted in a goal. Then the offense lost more yards to a foul. Then there was another bad snap just like the first. Then another foul against the offense. At that point, the announcer said, "Third down, and, um, about two and a half acres."

During one play, two players collided with enough force to make an audible noise. I winced at this while most people were cheering, and it turned out that this had caused a minor injury. Both of the players ended up stunned. The tackler got the worst of it, and after a while I saw that he was a tiny little guy. It was kind of surreal. You see this massive helmet, and huge shoulder pads, and hanging from this is a tiny little matchstick arm. The whole thing felt wrong, and I felt sorry for the kid.

Passing and fancy plays never work. Running back or to the side is a sure way to lose yardage. Even if the kid manages to evade one defender, the rest of the people will converge on him. The only way to make a big play is for the ball carrier to charge straight at the defensive line in the confused first few seconds when they are not sure who has the ball, and hope that nobody manages to grab or tackle him. Even if they do, the momentum will usually gain yardage.

But even with the pointlessness and risk of it all, it is a good thing. If not for this activity, they would probably be rotting away their minds and bodies with television or video games. The children are learning how to think on their feet and follow rules and function as a team in a chaotic and stressful environment. I like the way that everyone respected law and order, nobody ever yelled at the referees and it was always made clear that the children had a responsibility to follow the rules. There was very little negativity; the focus was on good sportsmanship and pride in honest effort rather than winning the contest.

Still, I would prefer that our society glorified something other than a brutal zero-sum physical contest reminiscent of tribal warfare. There was a massive government subsidy to this event in the form of the venue and the time of the multiple police officers and EMS people present. In an ideal world, we would be supporting events and contests that build up science or engineering skill.

But human nature is what it is, and most people enjoy football, no matter how pointless and irrational it seems to me. If we are going to have sports like this, then we are doing a good job of accenting the positive and making it a good thing for the participants. I felt like an anthropologist watching an odd tribal ritual, but in the end I liked what I saw. Little league football is a little slice of America, and even with all of its craziness and flaws I feel better about our country after watching those games.

Physiology

2011-08-20T12:27:00.001-04:00

During parkour yesterday I was jumping from pole to pole and slipped off one of the poles. I sprained my left ankle and scraped my left knee and my right elbow.

I knew that none of these injuries were serious, and nothing actually hurt, but I had trouble moving, as if someone had punched me in the gut and knocked the wind out of me.

After a couple minutes it seemed better so I limped off to rest and get some water. But then something strange started to happen. The muscles in my arms locked up and got really tight and the arms felt like they were going to sleep. The tightness in my forearm muscles caused my hands to be pulled back and the fingers to be curled up up so they looked like the hands of the squirrel.

I gave one of the guys my car keys and asked him to drive the car to where we were and bring me my bread and water, which I had planned on eating after practice.

While he was gone, the numb tingling got worse and spread to the muscles in my jaw. I could only move my arm or jaw muscles with deliberate effort, and then only slowly.

It is a very odd sensation to hear your voice slurred and know that you're perfectly conscious and lucid. It probably sound like I had a concussion.

But the instant I started eating the bread all of these problems started to go away. All of the muscles loosened up and I could move freely again. I felt better even before any food would have a chance to travel down my esophagus to my stomach.

My body must have sensed the cascade of small injuries and assumed it was being mauled by a tiger or something. It was clearly trying to keep all of the blood out of my extremities, and tensing up the muscles to force the blood back into my core.

I am not sure why eating helped so much. We had been going for a full hour of a high intensity workout when this happened, jogging from one obstacle to another and then going up them without any breaks. So maybe my body had low blood sugar. But maybe the act of eating something convinced my body it was no longer in danger.

After I ate and my muscles recoverwd, I started to feel cold. It was easy to warm up by stepping outside.

Luckily my friend and I had carpooled to school from our apartment building in my car. When it was clear that I would be fine he drove me home and I took a hot shower and ate lots of food.

My ankle is still swollen and sprained but otherwise I feel fine now. I should be back to normal in a few days.

At the time, we called what was happening to me 'shock' but now, after I look up the term, I see that it was not. Shock is something different, and worse, caused by loss of blood. I'm not really sure what happened to me, but if anything similar happens to you, be sure to eat something as soon as possible.

Treasure Gathering

2011-08-19T16:23:00.003-04:00

I have a kind of a primal need for treasure gathering. This is not treasure hunting; I do not much like searching for things. I mean the process of rummaging through a collection of stuff looking for something good. The most natural expression of this is berry picking. I like picking berries and fruit, and I am good at it. My mind enters a flow state, as I focus on identifying and selecting the best things to pick. But berries are only in season part of the year, and I need to to this at least once every two months. So I tend to go through thrift stores or discount stores looking for deals.

A few days ago, I went to Amazing Savings and saw, to my dismay, that is was closing down. But the good thing was that there was a 2-for-1 sale on everything in the store, so the already low prices were cut in half again. In one part of the store, there was a lot of stock that was not even priced or sorted. I could go through the boxes, and anything I found would be two for a dollar.

As I searched, my mind entered the same kind of flow state that it does when I pick berries. I went through the stuff, setting aside things I did not want and hunting for the treasures. And there were treasures, including five bottles of premium olive oil and two jars of coconut oil. Those seven things alone were worth what I paid for the entire haul.

After some time, I ended up with three banana boxes worth of high-quality food for $53:

Notice the tall stacks of tomato sauce and spaghetti boxes in the back.

I will probably not get a bargain like that anytime soon. But still, it is amazingly easy to acquire stuff for almost no money. Today I went to two thrift stores, looking for a toy plastic bat for a martial arts demonstration. I found one, but I also found a nice aluminum baseball bat, a game with a collection of good riddles and brain teasers, and a good kitchen knife block full of medium-quality full-tang kitchen knives, all for less than $10.

Television Review: Mad Men

2011-08-10T13:29:00.001-04:00

Recently I watched the first three episodes of Mad Men. It was highly recommended, it seems to be important culturally, and I was curious.

The main thing I noticed was that the producers of Mad Men went out of their way to portray 1960's America as a toxic and brutal place. Many of the scenes seemed specifically designed to shock the sensibilities of a modern viewer. Everyone, including a pregnant woman, is constantly smoking and drinking. There is rampant sexism and racism. Authority figures and doctors constantly behave in disturbing and unethical ways.

These things might have been necessary to be an accurate portrayal of the era. But then there are vindictive little flourishes like showing a child playing with a dry cleaning bag on her head. The mother responds to this by saying "if the clothes in that bag are on the floor, you will be in trouble." Mad Men is full of things like that, scenes that serve no purpose but to scream that the world is different, and worse, than the one we live in today.

Despair and alienation are the major plot themes in Mad Men. The title theme clearly invokes breakdown and suicide. Everybody is shown as miserable and unhappy. The better characters characters suffer nervous breakdowns, develop psychoses, or cope by weeping openly. The worse ones cope with alcohol, adultery, and inflecting petty cruelties on other people. It is clear that everyone is suffocating in a world that is a virulent stew of idle decadence and primitive savagery.

It seemed obvious to me that Mad Men was a deliberate exercise in smug superiority, a way of saying "Look at how horrible things were in your parents' and grandparents' time. We are so much better than that today. Your life might be bad, but there is no way that it is this bad."

And then I go on Wikipedia and read that Mad Men evokes nostalgia, and that people think of the setting and characters as attractive.

It is Gone With The Wind all over again. A moving picture depicts a nasty brutish world with nasty brutish people and the viewers fall in love with the characters and setting. It seems that all you have to do to make people nostalgic for a time period is to put rich, powerful, and/or physically attractive people in reasonably accurate costumes and settings from that period.

It really amazes me how people are hypnotized by superficial things like beauty and power, and how they form positive associations with anything that seems connected to beautiful and powerful people, no matter how rotten it is at the core.

One of the people who recommended Mad Men was my cousin, a very good, high-quality human being. I find it hard to believe that he would like the show. Maybe he likes it because he sees the rot in it and it makes him feel better about his life. But an incident from my past makes me fear that this is not the case.

This cousin's family brought The Matrix to Thanksgiving for everyone to watch, and they all talked about how much they liked the movie and how good it was.

I watched, and was impressed at first. But then the movie got to the bank lobby scene. The movie had already established that everyone they encounter is a real human being, who will die in real life if they die in the simulated world. It has already established that these people have the ability to jump high and climb walls, and that they have access to advanced technology. Their leader is being held captive in the upper stories of a building. Clearly the best thing to do would be to sneak in as covertly as possible to attempt a rescue.

But instead, they gleefully and remorselessly murder dozens of innocent security guards. This action had no tactical benefit. It wasted valuable time and senselessly alerted everyone to their presence. It would have been trivial to bypass the lobby completely, but they felt a need to instigate an act of wanton carnage.

Sometime later, perhaps after seeing all of the shells raining down from the helicopter, I realized that the The Matrix was doing everything it could to make violence appear beautiful. Even at the age of seventeen, I found this disturbing and abhorrent.

Maybe this is a confabulation. My thoughts on the movie probably took a while to crystallize, and are probably influenced by my current beliefs. Memory is a tricky and unreliable thing. but I know that I did not like the movie, that watching it made me feel uneasy and caused me to question the morality and character of my family members who had recommended it.

All of these three cousins are deeply religious, and have jobs or volunteer positions in churches. They are all very good people. And yet they consistently seem enthralled by entertainment with thoroughly anti-Christian moral messages. It is as if they see no connection between their moral beliefs and their entertainment choices. They see no contradiction in consuming and recommending things that are actively hostile to the values they hold dear.

Maybe such things have no effect on them. Maybe I am just being paranoid about the effects of media exposure on attitudes and actions. But I have seen a lot of research showing that these kinds of things do matter, that people's memories and mental associations are changed by the vivid lies of television and movies. It worries me that so many people are so quick to love rotten things for superficial reasons.

Movie Review: Gone with the Wind

2011-08-09T14:27:00.001-04:00

A friend mentioned popular conceptions of history, specifically Southern American history, in a recent letter, talking about how people seem to glamorize the antebellum period and focus on it rather than other periods of history.

I thought that I had already written a blog post on 'Gone with the Wind'. I was sure that I had written about it somewhere. But no matter how much I search, I cannot find any blog posts, or even emails or notes, about it. Maybe I composed it in my mind and then forgot to actually write it down. That happens sometimes. Or maybe I was talking about it in a conversation, and said these things then. So let me say what I thought I had already said:

I watched Gone with the Wind a few years ago, and I hated it on almost every level imaginable.

Fifteen minutes into the movie, after seeing the depiction of a spoiled, frivolous, idle aristocracy, I was rooting for Sherman to come and burn the entire society to the ground. I wanted something, anything, to end their pointless, wasteful lifestyle.

Then a lot of stuff happens, almost all of which reveals the main characters to be despicable human beings. Their only redeeming feature is a Nietzsche-style will to power that causes them to be interesting and dynamic, if you ignore the innocent people they crush under their heels.

It was obvious that Rhett and Scarlett hated each other, that they were two greedy and amoral people who only entered into the relationship because they thought they would gain personal advantage from it.

After their daughter died, he raped her. There is no other word to describe what happened. I was appalled both by this action, and the movie's insinuation that she was happier as a result. It was almost as bad as the movie's obvious pro-Klan propaganda.

If I did not know the historical and social context, I would assume that Gone with the Wind was a deliberate attempt to make the viewer hate the characters and the society they lived in.

And yet, people love Gone with the Wind. They specifically love the bits that I find most abhorrent, such as the rape scene and the idle parties of the aristocracy. If you take inflation into account, it is still the best-selling movie of all time. Aside from the technical quality of the movie, which is impressive, I cannot understand this. It must have something to do with 'beauty' and 'glamour' and other such nonsense. Or more worryingly, perhaps people identify with and/or idolize the main characters.

It is always hard to tell the difference between a cause and a symptom in cases like this, but Gone with the Wind must be at least partially responsible for people glorifying the lifestyle and culture of the antebellum South. This is a very bad thing, because when people idolize dysfunctional and abusive social systems they are more likely to make bad decisions about how to organize our country in the future.

The movie's justification of racial violence and marital rape must also be responsible for at least a few instances of those crimes. I have made this comparison before, but Gone with the Wind is much like Triumph of the Will. Both movies have core values of of pure poison, wrapped in an attractive coating of artistic quality.

I support free speech. There should never be any official attempt to suppress anything. But some things are so toxic and harmful that responsible people should caution against them. I would not want my child to watch Gone with the Wind. It has a proven power to be attractive to simple minds, to distort perceptions of history, and to cause people to form positive associations with despicable things. A young mind should not be exposed to something like that.

For reference, here are some other blog posts I have written about how I dislike certain popular books and movies:

Catch-22

Blade Runner

Full Metal Jacket

Bonfire of the Vanities

I also hated Avatar, for reasons that are eloquently explained here.

In my mind, the main unforgivable sin in any work of fiction is to distort the consumer's perception of reality. Anything that is very vivid, yet not representative of reality, will permanently distort the thoughts of anyone exposed to it in harmful ways. Jaws is a perfect example. Shark attacks are very rare, much less common and dangerous than things like car crashes, but people who watch that movie tend to think that shark attacks are a much bigger threat than they really are.

Our brains naturally assume that anything we see is an accurate representation of reality. Our emotions and subconscious thoughts do not know how to deal with the vivid lies of movies and well-written books. Whenever you consume any work of fiction, you must constantly remind yourself that it is a vivid lie, something that is not true yet will be easily recalled in your mind. This easy recall of false information will bias your understanding of reality, potentially causing you to make bad decisions.

In most cases, the effect is mostly harmless. But in cases such as 24 making torture look like a good thing to do, society can be actively harmed by fiction that distorts reality. Gone with the Wind clearly fits into the category of harmful, reality-distorting entertainment. It is something that people love, yet it rots their mind away. It is yet another example of a harmful superstimulus.

Current Events

2011-08-07T11:23:00.001-04:00

My mom asked me what I thought of the recent US downgrade and other economic news. So here goes:

The rating on corporate or government bonds is basically like your personal credit rating. For ordinary people, companies, and small governments, the credit or bond rating determines the interest rate they have to pay. That credit rating is the main source of information that investors use when deciding if they want to lend money.

However, the case of the US government is a bit different. People and institutions often invest in US treasuries as a kind of automatic action when they do not know what else to do. Even with the downgrade, US treasury bonds are the safest investment on the planet. Some large corporations may have slightly better credit ratings, but the market for their bonds is less liquid. That means it is harder to find someone who will buy them. You can literally sell off billions of dollars of US treasuries in a millisecond without really affecting the price you get for them. Financial institutions value that option.

The interest rate that people demand for holding US treasuries fluctuates all the time. It is not like a personal debt, where the rate gets fixed for years. The fluctuations in this interest rate depend more on overall economic conditions and world events than the actions of the government, but those actions do matter and people take them into account. The 'smart money' has already adjusted the interest rate based on the actions in Washington. The downgrade will not affect their decisions, because it gives them no new information.

The biggest affect of the downgrade will be on fuzzy things like 'consumer confidence' or 'business sentiment'. It will make people less likely to invest, which could hurt the economy. Nothing fundamental has really changed, but people are now more aware of the problems that exist.

One of the main problems with our economy is that there is not enough money. The inflation rate is way too low. The money supply in a country depends both on the central bank (the Fed) and the banks. After the financial crisis and credit crunch, the Fed printed a lot of money to make up for the change in bank lending, but it was not enough. We are in danger of a deflationary spiral, just like the Great Depression and Japan in the last two decades. Anyone who complains about inflation is completely out of touch, like a general fighting the last war.

The biggest problem with our political system is gerrymandering. That is the fundamental cause of the dysfunctional behavior. Politicians are not elected by the median voter anymore; they are elected by the median primary voter in a district designed to be full of people of a certain party. Political scientists have shown that congresscritters from the two political parties are getting more and more polarized over time. Their constituencies are actively rewarding them for this kind of ideological posturing, with the result that things start to fall apart.

Now for come practical advice:

The current situation of low returns on investment, lower economic activity, and high energy prices will probably continue for some time. This means that now is absolutely the best time to do things like improve the insulation in your house or get a more energy-efficient HVAC system. If you invest in these kinds of things, you will get a much higher return, in the form of energy savings, than you could get in a bank. Since the construction sector is still really depressed, you can probably get these things done pretty cheaply.

Getting an electric car is probably not practical now, but it will be in a few years. In the meantime, get a tuneup of your car to improve gas mileage.

In general, when shopping around for things, pay a lot more attention to total cost of ownership, of which energy efficiency is a big part. Paying an extra $200 for the washing machine with the best energy efficiency will earn you a far higher return than letting that $200 sit in the bank.

If you have any kind of medical problems relating to muscles or joints, think about things like buying really good shoes, or upgrading any tools you use frequently. You might find that getting a fancy ergonomic keyboard or high-quality garden tools will make your life better and dramatically reduce future medical costs. At a minimum, ask about tool sharpening at your local hardware store.

If you have any money sitting around the bank, you should seriously consider making these kinds of 'lifestyle investments'. It will be good for you and good for the economy.

Natural Experiment: Twins

2011-08-03T15:09:00.001-04:00

The best way of finding information about any social issue is to look for an unexpected change in one thing that keeps everything else constant. For example, it is no good comparing a family with three children to a family with two, because the parents who chose the larger family are presumably different in a lot of ways.

But twins are unexpected. They are a shock to the system, one that people only have a few months at most to prepare for. Parents with twins will have less time and money to spend on each child, so you can look at families with twins to see what happens as a result of the children getting less resources:

So what does it mean for an older brother when Mom and Dad come home for the hospital with twins? What's it like to be the younger sister of twins?
First, you get less computer time. Frenette finds that, even after controlling for family income, education, and myriad other factors, having twin siblings reduces the number of computers per child by 14.1 percentage points.
Second, you are less likely to be enrolled in private school — youth are 4 percentage points less likely to in private school when there are twins in the family, all else being equal.
Third, parents are less likely to save money for their children's post-secondary education in families with twins.
And the impact of fewer computers, less private school, and less saving for post-secondary education on children's academic performance is…not much.
Fifteen year olds from families with twins do no worse than other children in international standardized assessments of reading achievement. If anything, they appear to do slightly better — but there are too few families with twins in Frenette's sample to know whether the difference is statistically significant.
As a parent, I find these results encouraging. Even if your resources are stretched, and you can't do everything you've planned for your kids, they might turn out just fine anyways.

Source, linked from Marginal Revolution

There is a lot of evidence that shows that, once their basic needs are met, the life outcomes of children have very little to do with how much time and money is spent on them. There is not really much need to work so hard on raising children.

South Carolina Wedding

2011-07-31T18:11:00.001-04:00

I went to a wedding yesterday. Two of my friends from the martial arts club got married.

Because it was two and a half hours away, several of us carpooled. We ended up getting there 30 minutes early and were the first guests. About 20 minutes before the wedding, they seated us.

I took one of the Bibles in the back of the pew in front of me and started reading the book of Ecclesiastes. Given the occasion, that was probably a mistake. However, I did find a verse that would have made the ceremony better if the pastor had included it:

"Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun--all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun."
- Ecclesiastes 9:9, New Living Translation

The ceremony itself was rather traditional, much like my cousins' weddings. The most notable thing wad that the wedding vows were long, complicated, and asymmetrical.

I wore my suit and fancy shoes to the church, but for the reception I took off the suit jacket and changed into my Vibrams. I had gotten prior approval from the bride to wear toe shoes to the wedding, and I knew there would be dancing. I got the impression that she wished she could have worn her Vibrams.

She took off her shoes for dancing, like most of the women. But her wedding dress had been measured so it would barely touch the floor while she was wearing her high heels, which meant she had to hold it up the entire time she was dancing.

Our sensei asked the DJ to play "Everybody was kung fu fighting" and all of the martial artists, including the bride and groom, danced one of our katas to it.

On the car ride home, we started talking about how this compared to other weddings we had seen. This was the first white person's wedding that one of my friends had seen. In all of the black weddings that he had been to, there was always a lot more music and a bride and groom usually drove off in a limousine. Also, it is still traditional in the black community to jump over a broom. I always liked that tradition.

Future Shock: 3D Printing

2011-07-29T15:05:00.001-04:00

Some grad students in England 3D printed a working airframe with low-drag elliptical wings and a high-strength geodesic frame in less than a week with a budget of a few thousand dollars. Yesterday, this is something that I thought was several years in the future.

If you do not have a lot of technical knowledge, this might not seem impressive. But these kinds of aviation designs used to be really difficult and expensive to design and prototype. Things used to take months and years are being done in weeks or days, and for costs that are two orders of magnitude lower. And they are just getting started. The technology is advancing rapidly, and lots of impressive things are coming our way. And in addition to those impressive things, a lot of ordinary things will get cheaper and better as rapid prototyping enables better design.

At this point in a blog post, many tech enthusiasts might start talking about how we will all have 3D printers in our house and never have to buy anything from a store. This is silly. No matter what level of technology you have, there will be a lot of production processes that benefit from economies of scale. Sure, there may be a day in the future when I have a 'replicator' that can make things cheaper than a factory can make them today. But the factories of the future will also have access to advanced technology, and they will be full of people who can use that technology more effectively than I can. It will be even cheaper to pick up things at the store.

A comparison to 2D printers is useful. If I wanted to, I could print a copy of 'War and Peace'. But it would be cheaper to order a used copy online, and I would get a better and more convenient product. However, if I lived 30 years ago and somehow had access to a modern printer, printing that book would be cheaper and easier than buying a copy from a local store or a catalog.

The only reason we would use 3-D printing for everyday goods is if transportation becomes incredibly expensive and if the feedstocks can be made easily from random biomass. But that will probably not happen, because if we could make feedstocks from biomass, we will also be able to make fuel from biomass and transportation would be cheap. This technology will not cause any radical changes in the economic order. It will 'simply' be another driver of economic growth.

Economic Analysis and Irrationality

2011-07-26T15:22:00.001-04:00

The assumption of complete markets and profit-seeking is a powerful tool. It helps you analyze a lot of claims. Put simply, the process is like this:

1) If this were true, could people make money exploiting it?

2) Are they?

For example, it is often claimed that people do not learn much in college, that it is just a wasteful signalling game. If this were true, then large companies could save a lot of money by giving jobs to high school graduates with high test scores. They rarely do so, which is evidence that you actually do learn things in college.

Now consider the claim that medical care is mainly about social signaling and feelings of status, and that people are either really bad at evaluating the actual outcomes of medicine, or that they do not really care.

If this were true, then people could make lots of money by offering 'medical care' that had no actual physiological benefit. They would just claim to be a provider of medicine, and people would pay them money. Societies all over the world would be filled with quacks taking money from people and providing nothing but a feeling of being cared for.

That sounds like the world we live in. Maybe we should take this claim seriously.

If a proposed inefficiency or irrationality is real, then people will be making money exploiting it. You can also run this process in reverse. Look for businesses that make a lot of money delivering things of dubious value, and then try to figure out what kind of irrationality drives the demand for their product.

A traditional example is gambling. People will pay lots of money to gamble. At best they do so with the knowledge that they are paying for entertainment, and at worst they ruin their lives. Cognitive scientists have studied gambling extensively and used that data to identify flaws* in the way that people instinctively analyze risk and reward.

One thing that is not analyzed nearly as much is television. It is so ubiquitous that most people do not consider it. But its existence really is bizarre. Why would people be willing to pay upwards of $100 a month, or even go without enough food, for the privilege of having someone waste their time with a parade of vivid lies that distort their sense of reality? What cognitive flaw is at work here?

We know that telling stories is a form of social bonding. A tribe that has a strong shared identity will survive better than one that does not. We know that people have a strong desire to learn about the personal lives of their associates and people in positions of power. People who learned these things were better able to predict and manipulate the actions of others, increasing their chances of survival. We know that people have a desire to be close to attractive and/or powerful people. Gaining such people as allies increases survival chances.

Television appears to be a fake superstimulus substitute for all of these things, just like a candy bar is a fake superstimulus substitute for fruit. Television satisfies the desire for knowledge of and interaction with real people, but in a way that leaves you worse off. It is a lot like drugs or alcohol, only the effects are less obvious and extreme.

I am aware of the fact that I waste my time watching television, and with similar activities like reading fiction novels. I watch television a lot less than most people, and less than I used to, but sometimes I relapse. It is extraordinarily hard to break an addiction when the culture you live in supports and enables that addiction.

A complicating factor is that if enough people watch the same television show, then it becomes an actual part of your culture, and you will be left out if you do not share in it. Alcohol is a good comparison here. The stuff is mostly harmless if you drink it socially and in moderation, but if you drink alone, it is a strong signal that you have a real problem. Television should be treated the same way. Try to limit your use to social occasions. Only watch something if several of your friends are talking about it, and if you also enjoy it a lot. Watching something that you will never talk with anyone about is like getting drunk alone. It may seem pleasant while you do it, but the long-term effects are very bad.

* These mental processes were not necessarily flaws in the environment that they evolved in. But the world has changed, and we have to adjust to the new reality.

Debt Ceiling

2011-07-23T13:42:00.001-04:00

One of my former students just sent me an email asking about the ongoing debt ceiling mess. The answer I sent him is a good, simple explanation of the risk involved:

If the government failed to make an interest payment, it would be very bad. That would cause government bonds to be downgraded, and be worth less money. Banks hold these bonds as capital, and bank rules say that you have to have a certain amount of capital. So if the government missed a payment, banks all over the world would see the value of their assets drop. They would have to store more capital, which would mean less lending, a lowering of the money multiplier and money supply, a credit crunch like the one in 2008, and another recession.

If the deadline comes without a deal, the government would probably keep the interest payments going and stop paying things like salaries of government workers. The damage from an US government default and downgrade would be immense. That is why bond prices have not changed much; the market knows that the administration knows this, and will not allow a default to happen.

Robot Emotional Intelligence

2011-07-23T11:25:00.001-04:00

The emotionally clueless computer or robot has been a science fiction trope for quite some time. AI entities are shown to have incredible math skills, but have serious trouble understanding, predicting, and interacting with humans.

I had always assumed that this was justified. After all, humans do not have brain circuits specifically for things like math or logic, we have to literally rewire our brains (with practice and study) to do basic math problems. But we are inherently social animals; with brain circuits specifically meant for things like reading the facial cues of other people. Replicating those circuits in a computer should be a very hard problem, like machine vision or speech recognition.

It turns out that it is not. With relatively little effort, a small team of scientists has made a device that can read human facial expressions better than humans can. Right now, the device takes the form of a pair of glasses that gives information to a person wearing them. But it would be trivial to add this functionality to any computer that interacts with people, and the face-reading can probably be improved even more.

What this means is that by the time we get computers or robots that can talk with us, they will have an emotional intelligence greater than most humans. Their powers of insight and perception will be as far above that of people as their math skills. They will know from your expression if you are thinking, agreeing, concentrating, interested, confused, or disagreeing, and will adjust their behavior accordingly.

Combine this with the fact that it is very easy to get people to emotionally bond with robots, and the fact that the robots will be programmed to obey you, and most people will probably prefer the company of a well-programmed robot to the company of a human. Household robots, even the first generation of them, will not act like cold robotic automatons. The marginal cost of adding things like emotion reading and very expressive faces will probably be low, compared to the cost of something that can understand speech and interact with a complex environment.

The first generation of robots will probably be more like Forrest Gump than Data. They will be dumb, and they will admit to being dumb, but the people they interact with will love them because they are emotionally responsive and friendly and never get upset or flustered.

The more I think about this, the more it scares me. If normal humans no longer have a comparative advantage at interacting with other humans, then what role will they play in a future economy with lots of robots? At the moment, the only thing computers have serious trouble with is metacognition and game-theoretic stuff like poker. Computers are horribly bad at poker and any skill similar to poker, and there is no sign that this will change any time soon. This is good news for our ability to control and manipulate them, but bad news for people in a social system that does not handle unemployment well.

Wasp and Cicada

2011-07-22T16:51:00.001-04:00

While walking outside earlier, I heard a loud buzzing and saw a cicada plummet down to the sidewalk. Cicadas are, as far as I know, the heaviest flying insect in our climate zone. They are big, and I do not see them very often.

I went over to investigate, and saw that the cicada was being attacked by the biggest wasp I had ever seen. This thing was definitely larger than a hornet or a red wasp. The wasp had clearly hit the cicada in midair, and was clinging to it in a death grip, stinging it repeatedly. The cicada was buzzing its wings at first, but quickly fell still on it back.

I was surprised by what happened next. The wasp moved so so its head and the head of the now-dead cicada, clung to the belly of the cicada, and then took off into the air. I would never have guessed that the wasp could fly with so much weight; the cicada probably weighed five times as much as it did. It was like seeing a crow flying around with a large rabbit in its claws. The wasp buzzed around laboriously, slowly lifting off, almost hitting a car, and then went off into the bushes.

Maybe the wasp will eat the cicada, or maybe it will lay eggs in it. I do not know enough about insects to know what kind of wasp it was. I am guessing it was a solitary and not a social insect, and I saw a lot of bright red on it, but that is all I could say.

Clear Cutting

2011-07-18T22:39:00.001-04:00

About two weeks ago, a few acres of hardwood forest near my parents' house was logged. The loggers cleared a path through the barns behind the house and through another section of forest, moved in a lot of big equipment, and clear cut the patch of woods. I saw the result when I visited my parents last weekend. It was an interesting experience. The site seemed so much smaller after it was cut. I could walk to and through it much more easily.

I used to play in those woods. I would go through the pine woods near our house, then through that little hardwood forest to a creek and a ravine. I would climb up the sides if the ravine, getting incredibly muddy, and I would play in the creek.

Thankfully the ravine and the creek were not affected. My favorite trees on the edge of the ravine, the ones with the trunk hanging over thin air with roots clinging to the side of the ravine, are still there. It is now much easier to get to those two sites, and the nature preserve near them.

I am actually not upset by the logging. I know that the forest used to be pasture land. It was all cut when the settlers moved in, and then was farmed until about a hundred years ago, when the pasture land was abandoned and the forest grew back. I counted the growth rings of two different trees. They were over a hundred years old. I did not guess that before. I had thought that the forest had been logged maybe 50 years ago, but now I know that it had probably been growing wild since the farm was abandoned.

I was more upset by the litter they left. In another hundred years the forest will be back as it was, assuming that they do not develop it or plant pine trees. But the plastic trash, the wrappers and bottles and containers of motor oil, will still be there.

The pine woods between my parents' house and this patch of woods were cut about a decade ago, and since then they have been impassible, a mess of bushes and briars and poison ivy. But now the pine trees are almost tall enough to shade the ground and kill the undergrowth, so I should be able to walk through them soon.

I really liked those pine woods. I remember them as cool and clean and neat; the straight rows of pines were kind of like pillars in an old cathedral. Of course those pines are not native to the area, and not really good habitat for anything, but I did not know that when I was a little child. When the new pines grow up, I will probably enjoy them as well, if for no other reason than good memories.

Fundamental Attribution Error

2011-07-15T14:02:00.001-04:00

A few days ago, I went to the university's 'Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation' to ask for a video of my teaching and a classroom observation. The director did the observation yesterday and we talked about it this morning.

She seemed very impressed overall with my teaching. During our conversation, she said something like "You are born to be a public speaker."

My parents can attest that this is simply not true. I am, by nature, quite introverted. I have no natural instinct for many basic social skills, like 'reading a crowd'. It has taken a lot of work over a lot of time to get me to the point where I can do a good job of teaching and interacting with a group of students.

I will admit that teaching a class is much easier than most social interactions, because I am unquestionably in control of the situation. I can act rather than react. If I know my stuff and plan well, then I do not have to worry that any uncertainties will develop. The only unknown factor is the attention and understanding of the students, and I have the ability to demand information and responses of them, rather than play the social guessing games that still confuse me.

I guess it is good that I have trained enough for people to think that I am 'a natural'. But it is a bit annoying that people credit innate ability for that. This is the 'Fundamental Attribution Error' of the title. People assume that what they see in others is the result of innate characteristics, rather than planning or training or the situation.

Something similar happened a few weeks ago in a conversation with my martial arts teacher. I told him that I am naturally clumsy and he had a hard time believing it. He sees me doing martial arts moves I have trained for years, and the parkour moves that are closely related, and thinks that I have a natural dexterity. I don't. I am naturally clumsy, and it has taken a lot of training to fight that clumsiness.

Gunsmoke

2011-07-14T15:38:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I watched a random 1961 episode* of the TV western Gunsmoke. It was the best thing I have watched in a long time.**

In almost everything I watch, I either know exactly what is going to happen or I do not care what happens. But this show was able to create a rare sense of tension in me. At several points, I had no clue what was going to happen next, and against all logic, I found myself caring.

This may be because I am unfamiliar with the show. After seeing more episodes, I will probably be able to predict things better and it will lose its ability to generate dramatic tension. But even then, the show would still be a better thing to watch than most others, assuming most episodes are of this quality. The writing, acting, and technical quality of the show were all of high quality.

The plot seemed quite sophisticated for 1961. It was about a woman who had been captured by one tribe of Indians and sold to another. The main character, the town marshal, accompanies some cavalry on a mission to buy her back. The leader of the cavalry is a racist 'Indian hater' and his violent nature threatens the mission. The marshal soon discovers that the woman is reluctant to leave; she had been treated well and enjoys her new life. She and the brave who bought her have fallen in love with each other.

Maybe this plot line is a tired old trope that shows up in many Western stories, but it was new to me and it was executed well. I usually enjoy any story where there are no real bad guys and the conflict comes from a clash of values or circumstances, with everyone honestly trying to do what is right but having different beliefs about what that is. The show did this well; even the racist cavalry officer, who was clearly portrayed as the 'bad guy', was a sympathetic character who cared about his men and his mission.

Much of the tension came from the implied threat of violence in the genre; I found myself thinking that the negotiations might fail, and some incident would lead to a big firefight between the cavalry and the Indian tribe. I did not want that to happen, and so I was hoping that the marshal could manage a peaceful solution. If that feeling was what the filmmakers intended, as I believe it was, it shows a maturity that is often lacking in TV shows.

Sure, there were all kinds of minor flaws. They pushed the 'noble savage' theme a bit too far, many of the 'Indians' were clearly Anglo actors, and their costumes had a few too many seashells for a Kansas tribe. The woman looked way too good for spending a year in a hunting camp: she had the typical suite of 'hollywood blonde' superpowers, including the ability to skin a buffalo without getting her fingernails dirty, and the ability to make the wind cause her dress to flutter just the right way.

But these flaws, or worse ones, are still present in most things. The woman still seemed more real than a lot of characters in modern shows.

This episode of Gunsmoke compares favorably to the good episodes of the original Star Trek, the ones based on scripts written by good science fiction writers. I am guessing that Gunsmoke also benefited from good writing. The Western novel was a highly refined at that time, which meant that everyone had high standards to live up to, and a deep pool of plots and characters and situations to draw from.

My enjoyment of the show could be party due to me expecting it to be bad. I have seen various Western movies, including classics, and was generally not impressed. I expected this to be worse. I watched it on Netflix because I was curious. I mainly saw it as a historical document, a glimpse into the dominant American culture of my parents' childhood. I knew that Westerns used to be the dominant thing, and I chose Gunsmoke because it was the best and longest-lasting show.

I am glad that I took the time to watch it as an experiment. There is a lot to be said for sampling lots of things that are widely agreed to be high-quality, rather than just sticking with more copies of things you have liked in the past.

* Season 7, episode 10, "Indian Ford"

**Note that I normally watch about four or five hours of moving pictures a month, so this is not really saying that much.

Choices

2011-07-10T14:23:00.001-04:00

I dislike making choices when I do not have good information.

I think this is one of the reasons I do not like going to non-buffet restaurants. All restaurant food is worse and more expensive than what I or the people in my life can cook, but on rare occasions the convenience is worth the price. At those times, I always prefer to go to a buffet. At a buffet, I can make an informed choice. I see the food, I see the ingredients and how it is cooked, and I can choose as much or as little as I like. I can grab a small sample to taste, and then go back for more if it turns out to be good. But with a menu, there is no way I can make a good choice. All I see is a partial list of ingredients. I have to choose only one thing from a list of dozens of items, I can only choose one thing and the choice is permanent, and I do not have enough information to make the choice well.

I also tend to dislike it when people ask me to make choices about things like what to eat. I know that this makes me unusual. Most people have their own special preferences and want those to be satisfied. I am different. I want the highest quality thing that can be provided, and I do not much care what it is.

There are others like me. In fact, the fanciest restaurants in the world typically give the consumer no choice. They cook things the best way they can, and expect you to enjoy it. This is actually quite logical. A good chef knows far more about food than I ever will, and knows the exact combination of ingredients required to make a world-class meal. It would ruin the meal for the ignorant consumer to start taking part in the production process.

Here is a foodie's comment:

When I go into a (good) restaurant, I like to simply tell the waiter that I don't want to look much at the menu, and he should simply bring me what is best. If he asks what that means by "best," I (sometimes) respond by telling him I am an aesthetic Platonist and that best is best. Or I will ask the waiter to imagine it is his last meal on earth and to bring me the relevant dishes he would order

Maybe I should start doing that.

Robots and Personality

2011-06-30T10:56:00.001-04:00

My sense of humor is bizarre. I just laughed out loud for several minutes after reading this:

The most effective way to find and destroy a land mine is to step on it.
This has bad results, of course, if you're a human. But not so much if you're a robot and have as many legs as a centipede sticking out from your body. That's why Mark Tilden, a robotics physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, built something like that. At the Yuma Test Grounds in Arizona, the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-insect, strutted out for a live-fire test and worked beautifully, he says. Every time it found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a path through the minefield.
Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself forward. Tilden was ecstatic. The machine was working splendidly.
The human in command of the exercise, however -- an Army colonel -- blew a fuse.
The colonel ordered the test stopped.
Why? asked Tilden. What's wrong?
The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg.
This test, he charged, was inhumane.

I think I found this story so funny because I can see the conflict between two personality types: the engineer who happily watches his machine perform its intended function, and the leader who identifies emotionally with the people and tools under his command. I was laughing at the confusion of the engineer who made a flawless machine but failed to consider the human factors in the design.

The article is interesting throughout, as is the one that pointed me to it:

They're designed to do a job, and they're designed to be able to interact with people to the extent that it facilitates their ability to do that job, but service robots are really not programmed to be your pet, your best friend, or a member of your family.
Whether it's in their programming or not is, to some extent, beside the point, since it happens anyway. And when it happens, it dramatically changes the way that people interact with what on a primary level is intended to be little more than a tool. Realizing this, a team from Delft University of Technology and Philips Research in the Netherlands decided to take a look at how people actually want their robot vacuums to behave, and what kinds of personalities they'd like them to display.

Psychiatric Drugs Continued

2011-06-22T21:06:00.001-04:00

More scary stuff:

What should be of greatest concern for Americans is the astonishing rise in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness in children, sometimes as young as two years old. These children are often treated with drugs that were never approved by the FDA for use in this age group and have serious side effects.

I believe that people should have the right to take drugs that the FDA has not approved. However, they should only do so with full knowledge of the risks, and knowledge of the fact that the government does not think it is safe. The existence of regulatory agencies often gives people a false sense of security. They assume that things are safe, instead of asking the questions they should.

But then, maybe they are making a rational calculation:

As low-income families experience growing economic hardship, many are finding that applying for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments on the basis of mental disability is the only way to survive. It is more generous than welfare, and it virtually ensures that the family will also qualify for Medicaid. According to MIT economics professor David Autor, "This has become the new welfare." Hospitals and state welfare agencies also have incentives to encourage uninsured families to apply for SSI payments, since hospitals will get paid and states will save money by shifting welfare costs to the federal government.
Growing numbers of for-profit firms specialize in helping poor families apply for SSI benefits. But to qualify nearly always requires that applicants, including children, be taking psychoactive drugs. According to a New York Times story, a Rutgers University study found that children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines.

That first sentence is nonsense. People could survive without this government program, and the assertion that they cannot is incredibly insulting and misleading. But it is true that without these kinds of programs, people would have to reduce or alter their consumption and/or learn new skills and work harder. Nobody wants to do that, so they do what it takes to get the diagnosis.

One of the mantras of public choice economics is "If you subsidize something, you get more of it." That is what we are seeing here. The government gives you money if your kids are on psychoactive drugs, so more people put their kids on psychoactive drugs.

Read the whole thing

Misc

2011-06-20T18:38:00.001-04:00

One of my favourite lines – and I haven't been able to find out who came up with it – is that "There's an age when boys read one of two books. Either they read Ayn Rand or they read Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. One of these books leaves you with no grasp on reality and a deeply warped sense of fantasy in place of real life. The other one is about hobbits and orcs."

Source

I read Lord of the Rings, thankfully.

Then I read Hume's Enquiry, this wonderful, humane book saying that nobody has all the answers. What we know is what we have evidence for. We do the best we can, but anybody who claims to be able to deduce or have revelation about The Truth – with both Ts capitalised – is wrong. It doesn't work that way. The only reasonable way to approach life is with an attitude of humane scepticism. I felt that a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders when I read that book.

I have never gotten around to reading Hume, but I know the general idea of his works and I definitely approve. I rarely have the patience for reading the full text of philosophers write. They are far too verbose. It is much more efficient to read summaries.

Residents of the Austrian mountain town of Hallstatt, population 800, are scandalized. A Chinese firm has plans to replicate the village — including its famous lake — in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, Austrian media reported this week.

Source

The Chinese possess a fascinating combination of initiative and shamelessness. They decide that they want something, and then they do it. Their entrepreneurs will gladly make copies of anything and everything, and their consumers will gladly buy it. The concept of 'authenticity' seems completely foreign to them.

Ayn Rand would be proud of them.

Depressing Health Facts

2011-06-16T18:08:00.001-04:00

Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics and Census Bureau, I estimate death rates of working-age prisoners and nonprisoners by sex and race. Incarceration was more detrimental to females in comparison to their male counterparts in the period covered by this study. White male prisoners had higher death rates than white males who were not in prison. Black male prisoners, however, consistently exhibited lower death rates than black male nonprisoners did. Additionally, the findings indicate that while the relative difference in mortality levels of white and black males was quite high outside of prison, it essentially disappeared in prison. Notably, removing deaths caused by firearms and motor vehicles in the nonprison population accounted for some of the mortality differential between black prisoners and nonprisoners. The death rates of the other groups analyzed suggest that prison is an unhealthy environment; yet, prison appears to be a healthier place than the typical environment of the nonincarcerated black male population. These findings suggest that firearms and motor vehicle accidents do not sufficiently explain the higher death rates of black males, and they indicate that a lack of basic healthcare may be implicated in the death rates of black males not incarcerated.

emphasis mine

Source (You may not be able to read the paper without access from a university library.)

So basically, this study says that being locked in a cage with people selected for their violent and antisocial tendencies is a healthier environment than black men normally live in, and that remains true even if you ignore deaths from cars and guns. I have skimmed the paper and it looks like they used decent methodology.

There are a lot of ways you could spin this. It could be due to a better diet and increased access to health care, or it could be due to controlling dangerous actions and habits, or maybe a combination of both. Nobody is going to claim that quality of life is higher in prison, but it is kind of disheartening to see data showing that, for a segment of the population, having the government lock you in a cage and manage your life (badly) results in less mortality than living on your own in our society. No matter if you blame society or the individuals involved, something is seriously wrong here.

The second link is a newspaper article about life expectancy:

Women in large swaths of the U.S. are dying younger than they were a generation ago, reversing nearly a century of progress in public health
...
In some parts of the United States, men and women are dying younger on average than their counterparts in nations such as Syria, Panama and Vietnam.
...
Communities with large immigrant populations — Southern California, for example — fared considerably better than average despite relatively high poverty rates. The worst-performing counties were clustered primarily in Appalachia, the Deep South and the lower Midwest. In those places, women died as much as a year younger in 2007 than women did a decade earlier. Life expectancy for women slipped 2 1/2 years in Madison County, Miss., which recorded the biggest regression.

Again, you have the same debate over social causes versus individual responsibility, but it is clear that something is very wrong. There are pockets of people in our country that are regressing in the most basic measures of well-being.

Just like with prison, there is a lot more to your overall quality of life than your mortality rate. Most people would probably think that living in the modern world and dying at 70 is better than living a hundred years ago and dying at 75, just like they would prefer to not be in prison. But mortality is related to health, and your health has a huge impact on your quality of life.

This is a big problem. Something is missing. When analyzing problems like this, the key is to try to find the relevant scarcity, to figure out what is lacking so you can provide it.

Living a healthy life requires both knowledge and willpower. The two are substitutes. For example, the more you know about cooking, the less willpower you need to eat healthy, because you know how to cook healthy food that tastes really good. Giving people more knowledge is something most people agree on, but the problem is that it is often hard and expensive to do so.

One thing that might help is to provide people with 'artificial willpower' by making systems that allow you to make and enforce commitments. People should be able to tell their credit card companies and grocery stores to refuse to process any transaction involving junk food. I have talked about this before.

Hopefully in the future we will all have robot butlers to do our shopping for us. They can be our commitment mechanisms; we can tell them to get healthy food and not buy bad things, and we will not go in stores and be confronted with impulse purchases.

Shoes

2011-06-14T15:38:00.001-04:00

I just spent $160 for two pairs of Vibram Fivefingers shoes, one pair of Komodos and one pair of Classics. The Komodos are designed for sports, including parkour, that involve lateral motion and balancing on the forefoot. I liked the way they felt. Even though the soles were a bit thicker and more padded, I still had plenty of freedom of movement in my feet. I will see how they do in the next parkour session. They are also supposed to be more rugged; hopefully they can handle the abuse that I inflict on my shoes.

The classics were on sale for $50. They will not be able to handle any serious activity, but they will be good for everyday use, and should be fine for light jogging. I had a ratty old pair of sandals that I wore when I did not feel like putting on my KSO's, but the classics are so easy to put on that I will not need to wear them anymore.

I am very frugal; I live more cheaply than anyone I know. I hate wasting money. But when it comes to shoes, I will gladly pay for quality. Your footwear has a huge impact on your quality of life. You will spend at least half of your life in your shoes, and with every step you take, they will do either good or bad things to your feet, ankles, knees, legs, and even your hips and spine. If people put more thought into choosing the shoes that are right for them, and were willing to spend the money, they would have a better lifestyle and fewer health problems.

My mom's mother is 93 now, and still active and moving around. One of the reasons for this is that she refuses to buy 'little old lady' shoes. She goes to the kid's section of the shoe store and buys sneakers made for little boys. They are bright and colorful and comfortable and meant for moving around and have convenient velcro straps rather than laces.

My dad's mother, by contrast, is much younger but seems to have more trouble moving around. The main reason for this is that she will often wear horrible flip-flops that make it impossible to move well. Some of her family were considering getting her a scooter. My family did our best to convince them that this would be a terrible idea and that getting better shoes so she could actually walk around would be much better.

Part of the effect of shoes is psychological. Putting on little kid's shoes makes my grandmother feel younger. Studies have shown that this makes a difference; if you surround old people with things that remind them of their youth, their health actually improves. Of course, when my grandmother was young, running around being a tomboy and playing sandlot baseball, nobody had shoes like that. But in her mind, those shoes equal youth, and so she is healthier and acts younger.

I freely admit that part of the effect of my Vibrams may be psychological. They press all the right buttons: they are new, well-engineered, and high-tech, but not associated with a traditional shoe company and all of their annoying celebrity endorsements and manipulative ads. They are affiliated with the outdoor sports and natural fitness movement.

In a way, I like the attention they bring. I like signaling that I am the kind of person who tries new things, is willing to push social boundaries, and wants and needs shoes designed for an active and unconventional lifestyle. From a standpoint of practicality and biomechanics, this is irrelevant rubbish, but I have a primate subconscious like everyone else, and these social things matter to it. The feeling I get from wearing my Vibrams is probably the feeling that most people get when they wear designer clothing or other status symbols, and for the same reason.

In a few years, there will probably be a cheaper brand that works just as well. The popularity of Fivefingers is bringing lots of competitors. This can only be a good thing; being the only provider of these kinds of shoes allows the Vibram company to extract monopoly profits from me. We will only see the full potential of minimalist shoes when we have a competitive market with lots of options, and lots of companies trying to outdo each other to deliver better value.

But if Vibram manages things well, they will retain their cachet and all of the benefits it brings them. It will be interesting to see if I stick with that company or switch to a different brand.

RIP Fivefingers KSO

2011-06-13T11:04:00.005-04:00

My 21-month-old pair of Vibram Fivefingers finally died yesterday in the line of duty, during a two-hour parkour session:

As you can see, I had completely worn out the treading on the sole; it was bald in several places, and very thin.

They actually lasted longer than I thought they would. My shoes usually fall apart in a couple years, and I used these for running and hiking and parkour and climbing and normal everyday wear. Ever since I got them, I have not worn anything else aside from dress shoes, sandals, and winter boots.

I got a second pair last summer, and that pair is already looking rough. This pair looked like it was falling apart after about six months, but after I superglued them back together they held up well and did not need any more fixing. I have not had to glue my second pair, but the soles of those are also looking ragged.

I am not sure what I will get to replace this pair. Black KSO's are known for having the most quality problems of any of the Fivefinger family, as my experience demonstrates. Hopefully they have gotten that under control in the last year, but they may have been too busy making new models. I tried the one meant for hiking, and did not like it. I may try the one meant for running, which has a thicker sole. Some fivefinger enthusiasts do not like the feel of that either, but a thick sole may make them last longer. They also have a few more advancements, like a plastic coating on the tops of the toes to prevent them from getting holes. I'll just have to try the different types on.

Drug Testing

2011-06-10T17:48:00.001-04:00

Despite the fact that I support full drug legalization, I have absolutely no problem with the recent Florida law to test welfare recipients for drugs and remove benefits from those who are using them. There is a huge difference between using punishing something with state-sanctioned violence and punishing it by the removal of state assistance. Access to taxpayer money should be a privilege, not a right, and you should lose that privilege if you are spending the money on recreational chemicals.

I mentioned in my last post that we need ways to make strong social statements against drugs without making them illegal and instigating violence against people who use them. This is an excellent way to do it. If you spend your own money on drugs and your habit does not cause any problems for anyone else, you should be free to do as you like. But if you have demonstrated an inability to support yourself without taxpayer money, you should have your behavior monitored and controlled by the state. Ideally this should be done in the spirit of medical care and self-improvement rather than punishment. But the simple fact is that if you have money to spend on drugs, you are clearly getting too much money from the state.

City with No Government

2011-06-10T11:08:00.001-04:00

Interesting article

The reader comments are also worth reading.

Psychiatric Drugs

2011-06-08T21:30:00.001-04:00

I have read about a lot of studies showing that antidepressants perform little better than placebos. The data show that they are dangerous and basically useless. Now the evidence is showing that mental illness is not actually caused by chemical imbalances in the brain:

Neurotransmitter function seems to be normal in people with mental illness before treatment. In Whitaker's words:
Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known "chemical imbalance." However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one manner or another, throws a wrench into the usual mechanics of a neuronal pathway, his or her brain begins to function…abnormally.
Carlat refers to the chemical imbalance theory as a "myth" (which he calls "convenient" because it destigmatizes mental illness), and Kirsch, whose book focuses on depression, sums up this way: "It now seems beyond question that the traditional account of depression as a chemical imbalance in the brain is simply wrong."

Read the whole thing, and don't let anyone you know start taking those drugs. Future generations will probably look at these things the way we look at the doctors who treated people by bleeding them.

Early to Rise

2011-06-08T08:41:00.001-04:00

For some reason, I woke up before 6 this morning, while it was still dark. I read some news articles on my phone, but shortly after dawn I realized that I would not be getting back to sleep, and I had set my bread machine to finish around 7:15. So I did something I had never done before: I went for a morning run before breakfast.

I felt great at first. The weather was wonderfully cool and I was going at what felt like a good pace. I don't know the time, because I had left my watch at school. But after about two miles, I ran out of energy.I started feeling a bit light-headed, and my body simply refused to move at a pace faster than a walk. So I stopped, took a shower, read some more, and then ate breakfast. The bread tasted really good, partly because it was a good loaf* and partly because I was hungry.

I have walked around in the morning before. In the summer, it really is best to be active early. The weather is great and there are far fewer bugs than there are in the evening. The problem is that most places are closed. Most stores do not open until 9, by which time the weather is already nasty.

The Spanish really had the right idea of how to structure a day in a hot, sunny climate. You get up early, get stuff done, take a nice long siesta during the hot nasty part of the day, and then get up refreshed and keep doing stuff in the late afternoon and evening. But for cultural reasons, we are stuck with a work schedule developed in a much colder and darker climate.

On the way to school I stopped by the grocery store to get yogurt. Not the little cups of flavored junk with corn syrup, but a big container of all-natural yogurt. The ingredient list said "cultured milk" and nothing else. My mom introduced me to the potential of this stuff. She gets the fat-free version, and flavors it with fresh or frozen fruit. I get the full-fat version. Given my current physique and diet and exercise habits**, I actually need more fat in my diet. On many days, the only fat I eat comes from cooking oil and the nuts in my bread, so a nice helping of dairy fat is wonderful.

I flavored it with some of the wild flower honey I have in my desk. It was great. I ate over half the container before storing it in the office fridge.

*Equal parts oatmeal, whole wheat, and white flour, with brown sugar, raisins, walnuts, flaxseed, and a tablespoon of rye flour.

** My weekly routine now includes five nights of martial arts practice, a two-hour parkour session, three or four intense sessions of bouldering problems on the climbing wall, and the occasional run.

Drug Abuse

2011-06-03T14:00:00.002-04:00

Mind-altering drugs like alcohol, caffeine, tobacco, marijuana, and 'hard' illegal drugs sit right in the middle of a hideously complicated tangle of economics, sociology, psychology, and biology. The problem is even more complicated by the fact that discussions of the subject are often infected by partisan thinking in which people take sides and then try to focus only on the evidence that supports their side. I have found few sources who are willing to simultaneously admit two things that seem to me to be indisputable facts:

1) Drug and alcohol addiction is a horrible thing that can completely ruin people's lives. Addiction can cause one of the worst things that can be inflicted on a person: the transformation of a human being into a semi-sentient brute.

2) Making drugs illegal does not do much to stop the damage they do, and generates a lot of very nasty side effects. Incarceration can often do as much damage to a person's mind and character as an addiction

It is a very common human instinct, when confronted with something that causes so much death and pain, to try to make it illegal. The problem is that the process of 'making something illegal' is very different than what our instincts think it is. Our emotional and social instincts evolved in a time when humans lived in tribes of about a hundred people. In that setting, you can usually accomplish what you want to accomplish by gathering everyone together, talking things over, coming to an agreement, and then monitoring each other for compliance. If the tribe agrees that something should be taboo, then enforcing the taboo is generally pretty easy and effective, and agreeing to make bad things taboo is generally a good idea.

When most people say something like "this should be illegal" what they usually mean is "We should all agree that this is a bad thing that should be avoided." They usually do not mean "Agents of the state should seek out anyone who does this and throw them in a cage with violent criminals, even if they are otherwise blameless and productive members of society." The problem is that in a modern society, 'making something illegal' implies the latter and not the former.

The drug debate highlights the fact that laws have two wildly different functions. The first function of law, the one that economists usually focus on, is altering the costs and benefits for certain kinds of behavior. The second function of law, the one that most people instinctively focus in, is shaping the social and moral structure of society. By passing a law, you are making a strong social statement that certain kinds of behaviors are not acceptable, and trying to shape a society where those behaviors do not exist. We need a way to separate these two functions, so that we can make strong social statements against things without actually imposing large costs on the people who do them.

There are two kinds of drug and alcohol users. Casual users are those who gain some benefits from the drug and do not suffer any major problems from it. The vast majority of Americans are casual users of both alcohol and caffeine. Quite a large number of people are physically addicted to caffeine, which is a mind-altering drug quite similar to cocaine, but the delivery mechanisms in place and the social knowledge of how much to use prevent the addiction from spiraling out of control. It is possible to be a casual user of a 'hard' drug, and it is possible for safe and well-functioning markets in those drugs to exist, as this article demonstrates.

Making a drug illegal harms casual users. They either lose the benefits of the drug, or they are forced to obtain it from criminals and risk being harmed by both those criminals and the state. There is also evidence that making drugs illegal actually increases the risks of casual users becoming addicts, for a variety of reasons. The quality is less predictable, people have an incentive to use stronger versions of the drug, and the social norms that enable safe habits of use are destroyed:

Prescribing heroin, as Switzerland and the Netherlands do, seems to cut the number of users a lot, as dealer-addicts are taken out of the equation, breaking the link between wholesalers and casual customers. Decriminalising the possession of cannabis in Western Australia and Portugal (which decriminalised possession of all drugs in 2001) had no impact on consumption, but saved a lot of money. A study of American states found no link between the diligence of enforcement and changes in user numbers. When Britain reclassified cannabis as a less serious drug in 2004, consumption slumped. (Despite that, the government backtracked five years later.)

Source

Making a drug illegal also harms addicts. They find it very hard to get help with their debilitating problem, and the penalties for their use make the problem even worse. They end up becoming victims of criminals and of their own government, in addition to their condition.

I believe that, in a perfect world, nobody would use drugs. I include alcohol and caffeine in this statement, as well as processed superstimulus foods that can trigger addictive behaviors. Note that I do not think that consuming these things is morally wrong. I just think that the consumption is either foolish, pointless, or only of value in limited situations.*

But I also believe that all drugs should be legal. Attempts to combat the damage they do by making them illegal have all failed miserably, causing huge social problems without any noticeable decline in drug use. We should just learn to accept that there will be damage from addiction, the way we accept the 30,000 deaths caused on our roads each year.

Of course, we should work to minimize that harm, the same way we engineer cars to make them safer. But stopping the harm that drugs do is a very hard problem, much harder than installing seat belts and telling people to use them. The only things that seem to work are instilling self-control and rational thinking in people, and creating a society where everyone knows the acceptable ways of using the substance in question. But that is a lot easier said than done.

*I will consume alcohol if it is served to me in social situations, but I do not buy it or seek it out.

Hunger Placebo

2011-05-23T09:31:00.001-04:00

This is an interesting study. Some researchers fed people identical milkshakes, labeling one as low-calorie and another as high-calorie, and then did chemical tests of their blood.

Results: The mindset of indulgence produced a dramatically steeper decline in ghrelin after consuming the shake, whereas the mindset of sensibility produced a relatively flat ghrelin response. Participants' satiety was consistent with what they believed they were consuming rather than the actual nutritional value of what they consumed.

What this means is that eating something labeled as healthy causes the body to react as if it has eaten very little, so you sill still feel hungry after eating it and will want to eat more. Combine this with the 'Health Halo' effect and you have a recipe for overeating and obesity. If you think that a food is healthy, you will underestimate the calories it contains, and your body will actually react as if you ate less calories and make you feel like you need to eat more.

This is another reason why it is very important to know the calories in the food you eat. If you underestimate the calories, then your body will actually have the wrong biochemical response to the food, which could lead to nasty things like metabolic syndrome. Because people always underestimate the calories in restaurant food, you should avoid restaurants whenever possible, or only go to places that post the calorie counts.

The good news is that you can take advantage of this. This is speculation on my part, and assumes the effect is symmetric, but it might work. If you baked a low-calorie dessert but told your guests it was grandmother's recipe, with a whole stick of butter melted in, and served them a small portion of this "indulgent treat", they might react as if they had eaten a lot of calories. They should feel full, without actually consuming the calories.

You can also alter the way your own body reacts to food. This kind of conditioning is a bit trickier, but it can have huge payoffs. If you manage to convince yourself that an apple is a high-calorie, indulgent treat, then you can use it as a placebo to cure your feelings of hunger. Each time you bite into an apple, imagine yourself eating a rich apple pie. Close your eyes and imagine the dessert you ate last Thanksgiving. Visualize yourself eating several helpings of apple pie as you eat the apple. If you repeat this process each time you eat an apple, you might be able to trick your body into feeling full. It is worth a try.

If you already have a good way of making the placebo effect work in your favor, like prayer or meditation or exercise, then this is another thing that it can apply to. If you ask God to make you feel less hungry, and you really believe that He can and will do so, then you will feel less hungry and eat less. I am surprised that pastors have not told people this. It is less dramatic than most 'faith healing' and would require a long-term commitment, but it would work.

The broader lesson here is that the human subconscious is very complicated and powerful, and it often works against your better interests. People are programmed to seek out and consume as many calories as they can. This habit was necessary to stay alive for 99.9% of human history, but is a serious problem in modern society. There are a lot of other habits like it. In order to free yourself from those habits, it is necessary to understand and alter the way your mind works. This is hard work, but very rewarding. If you understand the desires and impulses of your primitive mind, you can deal with them and not let them control you.

Statistically Significant

2011-05-21T09:52:00.001-04:00

It is very important for you to realize what 'statistically significant' means. The definition of a statistically significant result is:

"There is a 5% or less chance that we would see this result happen if there was really nothing going on"

This standard makes sense when you are running laboratory experiments, but it can be very misleading when applied to correlations you observe in the world. If you take a hundred surveys on things that have nothing to do with each other, then five of them will produce results that are 'statistically significant'. This is for exactly the same reason that if a hundred people go to Vegas and play the slot machines, five of them might get lucky and come home with more money then they started. The world is full of randomness. This comic illustrates the effect well.

It appears that the writers and editors at The Economist do not understand this fact:

According to his "Guide to Complementary and Alternative Medicine", around 95% of the treatments he and his colleagues examined—in fields as diverse as acupuncture, herbal medicine, homeopathy and reflexology—are statistically indistinguishable from placebo treatments. In only 5% of cases was there either a clear benefit above and beyond a placebo ..., or even just a hint that something interesting was happening to suggest that further research might be warranted.

Finding a 'benefit' in 5% of cases is exactly what you would expect to find if all of the treatments were just placebos. The article is pretty good otherwise, but they realy should have pointed this out. As printed, people might think that 5% of these things are actually doing something, and naturally they will assume that whatever they believe in is one of the things that has been 'proven' to work.

Martial Arts

2011-05-12T10:19:00.000-04:00

Although collar-and-elbow was seen as a common man's sport in Ireland, it was considered a gentlemen's pastime in several areas of the colonies. It was part of the curriculum at the Reverend James Maury's Academy in Fredericksburg, Virginia. George Washington, at the age of eighteen, held a collar-and-elbow championship that was at least county wide. Twenty-eight years later, in command of the Continental Armies, he demonstrated his wrestling skill by dealing flying mares to seven volunteers from Massachusetts. Washington was not the only grappling president of the United States. Zachary Taylor, William Howard Taft, Chester A. Arthur and Calvin Coolidge also practiced at one time or another the style of collar-and-elbow. Abe Lincoln was a champion of catch-as-catch-can wrestling and once referred to himself as possibly the second best wrestler in southern Illinois.

Source

The 'flying mare' mentioned in the quote is basically the same thing as the ippon seoinage judo throw. Although 'George Washington, judo master' sounds like something from a bad webcomic, our first president would have a good chance of winning a judo match with a samurai. Truth is stranger than fiction.

Although martial arts is often associated with Oriental cultures, all European societies also have a long tradition of martial arts. Usually this involved some kind of wrestling or bare-knuckles brawling in a very competitive and brutal environment. Getting thrown into a ring with lots of different people is a very effective training method, if you survive.

Many Oriental martial arts also originated from this kind of atmosphere. But sometime in the last two centuries, western martial arts turned into a variety of competitive sports like boxing and catch wrestling, while Oriental styles lost the focus on intense competition and became more structured, traditional, and philosophical. The result of this was that Western champions usually won fights with Oriental 'masters'.

Ironically, the same attributes that make rigid Oriental martial arts styles ineffective also preserve them. There are a lot of people who would like to learn self-defense and fighting skills but do not want to be thrown into a competitive sport. A structured and safe curriculum is ideal, even if it comes at the expense of effectiveness. A year of high school wrestling will make you a better ground fighter than a year of martial arts, but the wrestling will not help you if you get injured, or simply stop training because the experience is so unpleasant.

Magic Government

2011-05-06T15:11:00.001-04:00

There are a lot of issues where people accurately diagnose a problem with our society, but then assume that 'the government' is the solution to that problem. Here's an example:

The pressure starts early, with vending machines and fast food chains a significant presence on school campuses — something Nestle vociferously opposes. "Vending machines in schools was like the invasion of the Pandora's box," she said

So basically, government agencies are callously sacrificing the health of the children under their care for a quick buck. What is the solution to this?

Nestle believes that such deliberate targeting of children in the marketing strategies of food and beverage companies is unethical, which is why she suggests there is a role for government regulation in improving Americans' diets. "We have unbridled capitalism at work here," she said. "I think capitalism is fine, but you need to bridle it a little. There needs to be some kind of check and balances, and the only thing that can do that is government. You have to have government involved."

And what do we observe in the cases where government is most involved with what is fed to people?

More than regulation, though, caring is something Nestle emphasizes again and again in conversation. Discussing the recent recall by the USDA of 143 million pounds of beef — much of which had been sent to school lunch programs — due to evidence that the processor had sent sick cattle to slaughter in violation of federal regulations, Nestle said, "The school lunch program is looking for the lowest cost possible. That's one of the reasons why that company had low costs. That's just the government saving money. Because poor kids eat school lunches, right? Their parents don't vote; some of them are illegal immigrants. Nobody cares. In situations where people do care, they're able to be much more respectful about it, and the kids eat better.

So despite the fact that she chronicles all of the nutritional harm caused by the government, she wants to solve the problem with ... more government.

I think that when people say 'the government needs to do X' they really mean 'people like me need to be given power and put in control of X.' And it is certainly possible that nutrition in this country would be a lot better if people like this nutritionist were in charge of food. But somehow, that never happens.

"There was an inspector (from the USDA) in the plant," she recalled, "and I said to the people, 'What's with the inspector?' They said, 'You could butcher a dog in front of him, and he'd never notice!' I met the inspector; they were right. He had to check the paperwork. It was boring, routine work. He wasn't paying any attention to where he was; there was no thinking going on."

The best way to get people to eat healthier is to increase their income. On average, poor people eat badly, and rich people eat well. With the exception of the laws that correct for externalities and improve things like security and the rule of law, each new government regulation is sand in the gears of the economy, making everybody a little poorer. Every well-intentioned intervention has the side effect of making it harder to run a business, meaning fewer jobs, an increased cost of living, and more poverty.

I actually agree that in a perfect world, nobody would be allowed to advertise anything to children. They simply do not have the wisdom to cope with it, and it warps their desires in unhealthy ways. But instead of attacking the companies, start by reforming the government. Vending machines in public schools should be banned. There is no excuse for them.

They should also get rid of the school cafeterias. Just have the kids bring a bagged lunch like in the old days. All of the money currently spent on subsidized school lunches should be given directly to the EBT card balances of poor families. The multiple layers of government spend over $3 for each free lunch, and almost every parent could spend that $3 more wisely. You can easily buy week's worth of apples, bananas, lunch meat, and bread for $15. If a kid comes to school without a lunch, then report the parents to social services; they would have no excuse for not feeding the kids.

Doing Things

2011-05-05T10:16:00.001-04:00

I always used to think of salad dressing as something that came in a bottle from a factory. I never thought that you could make it without special tools and training. The idea of normal people making it themselves simply did not occur to me.

If I had thought about it, I would have realized that this was a foolish assumption. People have been eating salads for thousands of years, making salad toppings from scratch in farm kitchens. The industrial process is just an extension of that.

But I never thought about it. The assumption lay in my mind, unacknowledged, subtly constraining my behavior and choices.

Recently, I saw a friend on a sugar-free diet making her own salad dressing. It was very good. But for some reason, I thought of this process as a magical skill, requiring a deep knowledge of spices, and something that I would not be able to do.

Last night, I stopped by the store to buy some fresh fruit, and ended up grabbing a bag of spinach on impulse. When I got home with it, I wondered what I would do with it. I wanted to eat it, but did not have any dressing or hummus or other salad toppings. I was looking through my cabinets for inspiration, when I had the idea of making my own dressing.

I had no idea where to start, so I went to my bookshelf and grabbed a 'Better Homes and Gardens' salad cookbook from the 1960's that I had gotten at a yard sale years ago. A depressingly small percentage of the book was about fresh vegetable salads; the majority was devoted to jello-based concoctions and mayonnaise-laden 'potato salad' monstrosities. One of the pictures featured, prominently, a tin of anchovies.

I flipped through the bits on vegetable salads and dressing, picking up some basic tips and getting an idea of what should work well together. It had what I was looking for: a page on making vinegar-based dressings; the cookbook called them French but nowadays we would call them Italian.

The recipe called for 'salad oil'. I had no idea what that was, so I figured that olive oil would have to do*. I got an old jar and poured the olive oil and some red wine vinegar into it. I did not bother measuring anything; that would have been too much work, and would have required washing all the measuring cups and spoons afterwards.

I started throwing and shaking things in the jar: powdered garlic, minced dried onions, dried chives, salt, pepper, paprika, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme**, and some powdered hot central american chilies. Then I added a lot of chopped walnuts, screwed the lid on tight, shook the jar for about a minute, and then poured it over the spinach.

The resulting 'Mayan Walnut Vinigarette' was good. Not as good as my friend's dressing, but better than most commercial dressings. I credit the lack of sugar. I ended up eating half of the bag of spinach.

The important thing is that, with a little bit of instruction and a fairly simple spice cabinet, I was able to make my own salad dressing. It was amazingly easy. Any experienced cook could do the same thing, and probably do a lot better than I did. A procedure that seemed mysterious and out of reach became something that I could do quite easily.

Our minds are littered with these kinds of unknown assumptions. It is simply impossible to think carefully about everything in the world; you have to have assumptions and mental shortcuts to cope with a complicated reality.

But often it pays to challenge these assumptions. The process of buying bottled salad dressing is really inefficient. You have to buy a glass bottle, which then gets thrown away or recycled. You have to keep the thing refrigerated after you open it. The dressing is not really fresh, and it will not be exactly the way you want it.

The key to living a good life is to do things. When you try doing things, you will build up skills that will let you do more things. Watch other people and learn from them. Consume a variety of things. I am not sure why I knew that walnuts would be good in a spinach salad, but I guess I must have seen and/or eaten a fancy nut-laden salad somewhere.

It is both very easy and very hard to free yourself from bad assumptions and explore new possibilities. If you just try to think things through, it will be almost impossible. But if you interact with lots of different people, and see them working and doing things, you will discover a world of possibilities.

* It turns out that 'salad oil' in a recipe means 'any kind of vegetable oil you feel like using'.

** The last four were all in a single bag, a 'Simon and Garfunkel Spice Mix' that I got from Amazing Savngs.

Links

2011-05-03T17:30:00.001-04:00

Here are the things I have put stars on in Google Reader in the last few months:

Reputation Management: Glitzkrieg "Respectability is for sale. Here is a buyer's guide."

Join The Party Party?

Even today, when the US desperately needs to cut spending to avoid going bankrupt, few dare to take such hippy-style positions, that most of the things we spend so much on just matter much less than most think, and so can be drastically cut. One might imagine starting a Party Party, based on a fun-loving hippy-style emphasis on simple living. But alas those who agree are less eager to be political. So I expect the usual political parties will continue to fall over themselves to emphasize how very important are things like war, medicine, school, parenting, etc., so important that you shouldn't dare to leave such things in the hands of those other incompetent parties.

How to be Happy A good, well-documented list of what modern scientific research says on the subject of happiness

I am anti-awareness and you should be too This is an excellent indictment of slacktivism, although she does not use that word.

On or about December 1978, the world's ideology changed

And finally, a couple of comics:

The Economic Argument

Ad Hominem

Beware Nostalgia

2011-04-30T10:30:00.001-04:00

Good short article

Television

2011-04-29T17:57:00.001-04:00

The Mexican home has been transformed. In 1990, one in five dwellings had a bare-earth floor. Now only 6% do. Virtually all have electricity, whereas 20 years ago one in ten went without. A tenth still lack sewerage, but this is better than the figure of one in three in 1990.
More interesting still is what Mexicans put in those homes. More houses have televisions (93%) than fridges (82%) or showers (65%). In a hot country with dreadful television this is curious.

I vaguely remember, in my childhood, a pastor reciting a couple of statistics about rural southerners. He said something like, "99% of houses have televisions, and 95% have indoor plumbing. This means that 4% of the population goes to the outhouse during halftime." And now it would seem that about 3% of Mexicans go to the outhouse during commercial breaks.

He was probably talking about the power that television had over our culture. As an economist, I will defend the rights of people to make choices about their own lives. But I still cannot figure out why they make them. Why does television have such a power over the human mind?

Rock Climbing

2011-04-29T13:48:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I went to the rock climbing wall in the gym. I met someone I knew from philosophy club, and he showed me the basics. I have been on climbing walls before, but I now realize that what I did before was just super-simple amateur playing. I had never done actual bouldering problems before, and it showed. I could barely handle the easiest V0 stuff.

It is amazing how specific your muscle and skill development can get. I can easily fling myself up a flat 9-foot wall, grab the top, and pull myself up. I can climb trees very quickly and easily. But when I cannot get a running start, and when I cannot wrap my hands around something large and solid, my ability to scale a surface suffers an alarming decline. In rock climbing, you have to navigate precarious grips one careful limb movement at a time, and keep your body well-balanced. It is a different problem than I have faced before, and my skills do not transfer well.

It has been a long time since I tried any physical activity and found myself doing so badly compared to others around me. I will have to work to develop both the muscles and the skills needed for this. Despite the fact that I am in very good shape, my forearms got tired pretty quickly, my back is sore today. Next semester, I will try to get in the habit of doing this for a half-hour before my martial arts practice, at least once a week.

Links

2011-04-26T12:09:00.001-04:00

Race and Economics: A short Sowell column reviewing an economics book. Unemployment among black people was lower than unemployment among whites before the government passed minimum wage laws. Those laws were basically the result of white union workers trying to remove the competition from nonunion black workers. The entrenched poverty and unemployment among black people is mainly due to bad government policies.

College Costs Linked to Risky Teen Behavior Research shows a correlation between high community college costs and self-destructive behavior. When reading things like this, always remember that correlation is not causation, but it certainly is plausible that people are more self-destructive when they see less chance of a good future.

In Defense of Flogging

I propose we give convicts the choice of the lash at the rate of two lashes per year of incarceration. One cannot reasonably argue that merely offering this choice is somehow cruel, especially when the status quo of incarceration remains an option. Prison means losing a part of your life and everything you care for. Compared with this, flogging is just a few very painful strokes on the backside. And it's over in a few minutes. ...
My defense of flogging—whipping, caning, lashing, call it what you will—is meant to be provocative, but only because something extreme is needed to shatter the status quo. We are in denial about the brutality of the uniquely American invention of mass incarceration. In 1970, before the war on drugs and a plethora of get-tough laws increased sentence lengths and the number of nonviolent offenders in prison, 338,000 Americans were incarcerated. There was even hope that prisons would simply fade into the dustbin of history. That didn't happen.

I have discussed a similar thing in the past. Of course, my proposal is more scientific than old-fashioned flogging.

Preferences

2011-04-25T15:55:00.001-04:00

The life of the rural poor is extremely boring, with repetitive back-breaking tasks interrupted by periods of enforced idleness ....
the authors remark, "things that make life less boring are a priority for the poor". They tell the story of meeting a Moroccan farmer, Oucha Mbarbk. They ask him what would he do if he had a bit more money. Buy some more food, came the reply. What would he do if he had even more money? Buy better, tastier food. "We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family when we noticed a television, a parabolic antenna and a DVD player." Why had he bought all this if he didn't have enough money for food? "He laughed and said 'Oh, but television is more important than food.'"

Source (read the whole thing)

Before you look down on this guy, remember that the revealed preferences of most Americans show that television is more important to them than their health. Americans would never answer the question so honestly, but just look at where they choose to spend their time.

Best Excuse Ever

2011-04-25T15:45:00.001-04:00

One of the students in my class is a maintenance tech taking advantage of a benefit that all staff at the university get: one free class per semester. He is not the brightest student in the class, but he is a hard worker and a good guy. He always shows up at my 8:00 class wearing his 'Facilities' uniform, and his questions show that he is really thinking about the real-world applications of the stuff I teach.

He missed the last two classes without an explanation, which was unusual. Today during my office hours, he stopped by, wearing a diaposable tyvek chemical suit, apologized for missing class, and explained that he had been busy dealing with a large chemical spill in the nearby lab building

That definitely counts as 'excused absence'.

Return to Arlington

2011-04-23T15:53:00.009-04:00

Last weekend I was in Washington for an academic seminar. After it was over, and before my flight back, I went back to Arlington National Cemetery. It is the perfect little side trip if you are in Washington on a busy schedule, because it is only a couple metro stops away from the airport. I also like going there. It always has a strong effect on me.

It was different than the last time I went. The weather was much nicer, and it was a weekend, so it was pretty crowded. The crowds and weather robbed the place of a lot of its character, making it feel more like a park and less like a shrine.

In no particular order, here are some musings and observations, based on my memories and notes that I wrote down:

What does it say about our country and our military that we choose to lay our honored dead in precise geometric precision?

The changing of the guard to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is an interesting ritual. I wonder what the history is behind the exaggerated leg swing and the loud heel clicking. Even the regular pacing of the guard feels so mechanical. This seems to be a relic of the old days of the army when keeping formation was the key to winning. Marching-band style maneuvers have been obsolete on the battlefield for over 170 years, but they still linger on in the rituals, training, and traditions of the military. That kind of thing does not just happen in the military; it is fairly common for actions to go from practical to ritualistic as technology changes.

I overheard this just after the guard change:

Little Asian girl: "If he is the guard and he has a gun, does that mean he will shoot anyone who goes to the tomb?"
Her mother: "I don't think so."

The mother seemed disoriented by the question. I understand why. How could you possibly explain this kind of symbolism to a little child? I did not even know if the gun was loaded. When I was there, I thought they were carrying M1 Garand rifles. You cannot tell if those are loaded or not. I just looked it up, however, and learned that the rifles are actually M14's, and that they are not loaded.

If I have to answer a question like that in the future, I will probably say something like "No, he will only shoot you if he thinks you have a gun."

I noticed a lot of jet noise from the airport. It definitely was distracting. I wonder if people complained about the airport being built so close to the cemetery

It was fascinating to look closely at all of the memorials in the display hall. The ones from American civic groups are kind of boring, but the ones from foreign leaders are very interesting:

All of the items in the picture above were presented by the Japanese. Japanese prime ministers and government officials often come to Arlington. I am not sure why. I know that it is traditional for foreign diplomats to visit Arlington to show solidarity with and respect for the USA. However, from what little I know of Japanese culture, it seems like this would be a humiliation. I wonder what it feels like to pay your respects at a place where the pilots who dropped atomic bombs on your country are buried and honored. Politics being what they are, we will probably never get an honest answer to the question of their feelings and motivations.

This is really impressive. More people should make plaques like this.

This is a mere club presented by the prime minister of New Zealand. I know that this is considered a sacred weapon, a symbol of honor and power, but it still feels very odd. How would all of the veterans of the Indian Wars buried at Arlington feel if they knew if a visit to their tombs was memorialized with the weapon of a "savage" like the ones they had been fighting?

There is a big wooden plaque from the 19th century from "The Grand Army of the Republic." I must confess that when I saw this I immediately thought of Star Wars. People do not use names like that any more; they are confined to history and fantasy. I was somewhat relieved when I looked it up and found that this was the Union solder veteran's organization, and not a name used by our actual military or government.

One final note: What is your reaction to this picture?

Give me your gut reaction in the comments.

Chinese in Africa

2011-04-20T14:14:00.001-04:00

Labour inspectors in Lusaka, who monitor sweatshops, have use of only one car and recently it was broken for four months. In the meantime Chinese engineers built an entire cluster of garment factories from scratch.

Source

The saga of the Chinese economic colonization of Africa really is amazing. I have written about it before. The feature that was not apparent a few years ago is the amount of individual entrepreneurial activity, in addition to the big state companies. The big companies are still digging resources and building roads, but we also see individual Chinese families going to Africa to open shops, just like they used to come to the USA.

This small-scale investment is going to be good for Africa, generating more benefits for the people than resource extraction. Any large influx of capital investment and managerial skill will help an economy.

Missing Things

2011-04-20T10:04:00.001-04:00

"Statistically speaking, you will die having missed almost everything."

( I posted this yesterday but got the link wrong. )

Siren Test

2011-04-13T14:22:00.000-04:00

Earlier today there was a siren test on campus. For some reason, I really like hearing the sounds of large warning sirens. I know this is totally irrational, but I feel that they have a kind of ethereal beauty to them. Every other kind of loud artificial sound is disruptive and annoying, but sirens are soothing.

I think the scale and regularity of the sound are part of it. I also like the sound of the wind whistling through trees or rocks.

But there is more than that. The sound of big warning sirens is an icon of law and order. It takes an advanced civilization with good engineering skills to produce that sound. The sound represents infrastructure, and disaster preparation, a bulwark against the forces of chaos. It is designed for communication; it has a rational purpose. Any tribe of primitive savages can produce music, but only a well-organized modern civilization can produce the sound of a siren.

Of course, it is entirely possible that the sound was specifically designed to make people feel this way, in order to keep us calm in a disaster, and this post has been nothing more than a confabulation.

Standardized Testing

2011-04-13T10:26:00.001-04:00

Here's a good analysis on testing in schools. It talks about the difficulty of measuring and controlling a complex system.

Basically, standardized testing is a clumsy, ham-handed reaction to the very real problem that there are a lot of lousy teachers that are hard to get rid of. The damage that bad teachers do is so severe that any system that gets rid of them will probably have large net benefits, even if there is a lot of collateral damage along the way. It would be nice if we could get rid of the loser teachers without causing this damage, but nobody has a credible way to do this.

What I'd like to know is how the elite private schools manage their teachers. My guess is that they hire the best people they can and let them do whatever they want, just like good universities do.

Research Notes: Children and Wealth

2011-04-12T16:59:00.001-04:00

A lot of people believe that a person's success in life depends mainly on how that person was treated as a child. A corollary of this belief is the idea that wealth will become entrenched, as rich people raise their children in such a way that the children are more likely to become rich.

It turns out that nurture is not nearly as powerful as people think. Once you pass a fairly low threshold of parenting quality, so that the child is not abused or neglected, parenting has very little impact on how children turn out:

The most prominent conclusion of twin research is that practically everything—health, intelligence, happiness, success, personality, values, interests—is partly genetic. The evidence is straightforward: Identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins in almost every way—even when the twins are separated at birth. But twin research has another far more amazing lesson: With a few exceptions, the effect of parenting on adult outcomes ranges from small to zero. Parents change kids in many ways; the catch is that the changes fade out as kids grow up. By adulthood, identical twins aren't slightly more similar than fraternal twins; they're much more similar. And when identical twins are raised apart, they're often just as similar as they are when they're raised together.

Source ( Short, general interest newspaper article, read the whole thing )

More evidence for this comes from recent research ( long complicated academic paper ) on wealth across generations in England over the past thousand years. When last names were first assigned, they were closely correlated with your economic status. At first, people with 'artisan names' like Baker and Miller did not show up at all as Oxford students or in wills of rich people. But over time, these names started to appear in the ranks of rich people, until the fraction of rich people with these names was equal to the fraction of the general population with these names. Meanwhile, names that appeared only among the Norman conquerers went from being a big fraction of the rich to a normal fraction.

In other words, there was quite a bit of social mobility. Poor people got rich, and rich people became poor, exactly what you would expect if earnings were mainly based on genetics and not upbringing. The process took generations, but over time the rich families were not able to maintain a privileged position. The money, education, and connections people inherited during childhood did not change things very much.

This paper claims that social mobility, as measured by names, has actually gone down in recent centuries. If this is true*, it could mean that rich parents have gotten better at raising their kids, increasing the effect of nurture.

Of course, if science ever advances to the point where people can directly control the genetics of their children, this question of nature versus nurture becomes meaningless. But until then, there is a big pile of evidence showing that

you can lighten up a lot without hurting your kids.
Serenity Parenting changed our lives. We used the Ferber method—let the kid cry for 10 minutes, briefly comfort him, repeat—to get our twins to sleep through the night. We enrolled them in an activity or two, but they spent a lot more time watching cartoons while we relaxed. Our family specialized in activities that were literally "fun for the whole family": reading books together, playing dodgeball in the basement, going to the pool for a swim. If "Lighten up" was the only practical lesson of twin research, my reading had more than paid for itself.

*The paper has several problems, and makes more claims than the data can support.

Deference

2011-04-09T20:19:00.001-04:00

A few minutes ago, I was sitting outside my apartment reading a book and enjoying the evening. Two women and several children walked by. The children were happily chattering. Upon seeing me, one of the women said to the children, "Be quiet, he is trying to read."

I am wondering why she did this. I was certainly not annoyed or upset by the children, and I hope that I did not look as if I was. Maybe she was trying to teach them manners, but there is no system of morality of etiquette I know of that requires people on a street in the early evening to be quiet. It is a public space, and I should not have any expectation of silence or privacy. If I wanted quiet, I would go in my apartment and shut the door.

It is possible that she just wanted them to be quiet and was using my presence as an excuse to demand silence. But either way, the lesson was wrong. They should not be asked to alter their normal behavior in a public space just because someone else is quietly sitting there.

I do not remember people being so deferential to me in the past. This is not an isolated incident. It seems that people greet me and hold doors open for me much more than they used to. It is somewhat disconcerting. I know that I have become more social and self-confident in the last few years, as well as more physically fit. It seems that this has made me more intimidating. Perhaps people subconsciously see me as a higher-status person who should be given more respect.

In recent years, I have become aware that a great deal of human behavior is determined by emotion and instinct rather than logic and the rules of society. Maybe I am imagining things here, and instinct had nothing to do with that woman telling the children to defer to me. I would like to know why she said that, but I never will.

Alexander Hamilton Rap

2011-04-09T15:38:00.001-04:00

This is old, but I recently learned of it.

Go watch.

A couple comments:

Hamilton is my favorite Founding Father. Idealistic revolutionaries, charismatic leaders, and military geniuses are a dime a dozen, but a person who can handle government finances well, and design good economic and political institutions, is much rarer. If you look at the history of our country, the thing that really sets us apart is the strength of our financial system. New countries usually crash and burn because of money issues, but Hamilton's policies helped us avoid that fate.

The guy who raps this is a very experienced performer, a veteran of literally a thousand Broadway shows. And yet, his song introduction is full of vocalized pauses and he comes across as a nervous, stammering novice to public speaking. The fact that he was performing for the President of the United States probably had something to do with it. It shows how anyone can choke in a high-pressure situation. But once he got going with the rap, he was fine. That shows the importance of practice and experience.

Digital Africa

2011-04-09T10:47:00.001-04:00

The front-line in Mogadishu was just beyond the ruined cathedral. You could hear the small-arms fire of the al-Qaeda fighters and the return of heavy machinegun-fire from the sandbagged positions of the African Union troops. But the scene on the sun-washed street in the Hamarweyne district was calm. Women were shopping for fruit and vegetables, and the ciabatta and pasta Mogadishu gained a taste for in its Italian colonial days. A couple of cafés, serving also as electronics shops, were crowded, with people inside making voip phone calls and surfing the internet. Outside on the street boys were fiddling with mobile phones, Nokia and Samsung mostly, but also those fantastical Chinese models you find in poorer countries, nameless, with plastic dragon-like construction, heavy on battery-guzzling features like television tuners. I asked my Somali companion what the boys were up to. He wound down the window and summoned his gunmen to go and ask. The answer came back. "They're updating their Facebook profiles."

Technology is changing the world more quickly and more thoroughly than you can imagine. Many of these Africans have mobile phones that are better than the one I had last year.

Religious Ritual

2011-04-08T11:37:00.001-04:00

Raising a vodka shot to Allah used to be standard practice in the Caucasus

Source

The world is far more interesting and complicated than you think.