New Ideas

Shocking but True Story:

While employed as assistant to the professor of the maternity clinic at the Vienna General Hospital in Austria in 1847, Semmelweis introduced hand washing with chlorinated lime solutions for interns who had performed autopsies. This immediately reduced the incidence of fatal puerperal fever from about 10 percent (range 5–30 percent) to about 1–2 percent. At the time, diseases were attributed to many different and unrelated causes. Each case was considered unique, just like a human person is unique.

Semmelweis' hypothesis, that there was only one cause, that all that mattered was cleanliness, was extreme at the time, and was largely ignored, rejected or ridiculed. He was dismissed from the hospital and harassed by the medical community in Vienna, which eventually forced him to move to Budapest.

Semmelweis was outraged by the indifference of the medical profession and began writing open and increasingly angry letters to prominent European obstetricians, at times denouncing them as irresponsible murderers. His contemporaries, including his wife, believed he was losing his mind and he was in 1865 committed to an asylum (mental institution). Semmelweis died there only 14 days later, possibly after being severely beaten by guards.

I wonder how many similar ideas are being ignored or rejected today.

Another Generation

Those white iPod earbud wires always remind me of the wires you see on patients in the hospital who are attached to some kind of medical equipment.  This is especially true when the iPod is worn on an elastic cuff on the arm, as is typical for people working out in the gym.

Smart Charity

They have found a way to train rats to find land mines.

We watched as the rats ran along wires between two handlers. When they smell a landmine, they stop, sniff the ground and begin to dig. This signal lets the Apopo staff know they have found a mine or some other explosive, which can then be removed.

Rats, according to Apopo, are much faster than men using metal detectors and are not distracted by metal contaminants. They are much cheaper to maintain than dogs and are easily passed between different handlers.

I did a bit more research.  The rats do seem to be quite effective at clearing land mines, and this organization it noted for being efficient and well-run.  They need more money for research and rat training.

You can pay to sponsor a rat.  I have done so.

Accounting History

This is a brief but good article on some of the history of accounting.

Misguided Charity

Fully half of the items on my shopping list were not on the shelves when I went to the grocery store today.  They were out of split peas, 2-pound bags of black beans and rice, dark brown sugar, and trail mix.  After about the forth missing item, I thought 'this is ridiculous' and grabbed an assistant manager that was wandering around doing inventory.

It turned out that most of the items were missing because of some program where people fill buckets with food to send to Haiti.  The manager explained this and gave estimates of when the food would be restocked.  While some of them would be in tonight, the others were missing completely from the warehouse.

This is exactly the wrong way to do charity.  If you want to help people, you either give them money directly or hire specialists, like my friend, who know what they are doing, know what people really need, and know how to spend money so it does the most good.

Haiti has plenty of food at the moment.  There were systems in place to feed the country before the quake, these systems were not really disrupted, and there are now 200,000 less people to feed.  There is so much food being given away for free that the local food merchants are going out of business, which is making the economic situation even worse. 

Even if they did need food, this would be the wrong way to supply it.  It would be far cheaper and more efficient to give a charity money to buy and ship wholesale truckloads of food, rather than filtering the food through a retail establishment in South Carolina.

What the Haitians really need is shelter.  That means building materials, construction equipment, and people who know how to direct its use.  The actual labor can and should be supplied by the Haitians; they would love a chance to get an honest job building houses.  Charities also need vehicles to move stuff around.

But the sad fact is that, when giving charity, people care almost nothing for the actual needs of the recipients.  If they did, they would just give people money.  What people really seem to care about is their own emotions.  They want to feel like they are doing good, and pulling beans off a Wal-Mart shelf to put in a bucket apparently accomplishes that goal.

This kind of misdirected aid can actually be counterproductive.  The Haitians are asking for specific things, and we are failing to give them what they actually need.  We are giving them the things we think they should want.  This breeds resentment.  Haitians are real people, just like you and me, and they are just as good at figuring out when people are just feeding their own egos or buying bragging rights instead of really thinking about making a difference.  Probably even better, because they deal with that kind of thing a lot more.

Whenever possible, aid money should be spent in the country being helped.  This helps develop an independent economy, building a network of small businesses that serve their own people.  As things recover and people start exporting things and earning their own money, they can transition relatively easily to economic independence.  But shipping goods in destroys that.  There is no development of local capabilities, and the people will either remain forever dependent on aid or suffer when it is stopped.

Economic Technology

Most people are familiar with the history of technological progress in physical goods.  Even those who are quite ignorant of history are aware that people did not have computers 50 years ago and that there were no cars in the 1800's.  People know the story of how scientists and engineers invent new technology that lets us build fun and useful things.  All you have to do to get a feel for these changes is to watch a few movies set in the past.

People are also aware of the social changes that have taken place in our history.  There is more ignorance in this area than there is in physical goods, but people generally understand that there is more personal freedom for everybody in a modern society.  They know that kings and royalty are less powerful, that people have a better chance in life, and especially that women and minorities have gained a lot of civil rights in the last century.

But very few people understand that many of the features of our economy are relatively recent inventions.  People do know that credit cards are only a few decades old, probably because they require relatively advanced technology to function.  People may be aware that their parents and grandparents did not have access to the same banking and investment services, but they may assume that this was because their ancestors were too poor to afford them.

This is true for a few things, like checking accounts and bank accounts and stock portfolios.  These are hundreds of years old, but only the very rich used them.  Most people did not bother.  All of their (meager) wealth was in the form of cash.  But for many features of our economy, the truth is that they did not exist at all. 

For example, mutual funds were invented about a hundred years ago and popularized about fifty years ago.  It seems so obvious that you can make a good, diversified portfolio and share it with all comers, but in the past all people either owned individual stocks or paid a specialist to custom-make a portfolio just for them.

A much bigger, and possibly more surprising, example is that the idea of consumer credit, of any kind, is about a hundred years old.  In the 1800's, there was no such thing as a house mortgage.  There was no such thing as buying on credit, from anybody.  Your ancestors simply could not borrow money to buy a house.  They had to rent, or pay cash up front.  The overall philosophy of banking was that it was irresponsible and stupid to make long-term loans.  Banks collected savings and made short-term loans to businesses to smooth out their cash flows.  If you wanted to raise money for something, you had to issue stocks or bonds.  Banks would not help you.  The idea that you can lend to consumers to help them smooth their consumption over their lifetimes is a recent invention. 

Note that I am not talking about a tab at a local store.  It was very common for merchants to put things on your tab and ask you to settle up at the end of the month.  They did this because there was no reliable money, and handling any transaction was very tedious.  Let me say that again.  There was no such thing as money, the way we understand it today.  Modern money, by which I mean a uniform currency issued and backed by the government, has only been a feature of our country since 1935.

There were two things that were used as money.  First, there was specie: gold and silver coins.  Humans have been using these for millennia.   But paying for something with a gold coin was not like sticking a quarter in a vending machine.  The value of the coin was the value of the precious metal it contained, no more and no less.  The markings of the coin were a claim by the government that the coin was of a certain weight and purity.  Governments sometimes tried to gain money by lying about this, which was the ancient equivalent of printing money and causing inflation. 

But even when the government was honest, as they usually were in the past few centuries, you had to be careful.  Coins would wear out over time.  They were softer and less durable than they were today.  An old quarter might only have 22 cents worth of silver instead of 25.  Also, people would sometimes shave the metal off the outside of the coin, lowering its value to gain precious metals for themselves.  As a result of this, all coins were valued based on their weight.  When you paid for something with coins, the merchant had to carefully weigh the stack of coins to figure out how much money you were really paying.

This problem was compounded by the fact that, in the early 1800's at least, the USA never managed to produce enough coins to keep up with the growing economy and the demand for money.  People would use all kinds of coins, from Mexican dollars to French, German, and English coins.  The merchants had to keep lists of exactly how much all of these coins were worth.  Simply paying for something in coins was a tedious process.

In order to deal with this and make life easier, they had bank notes.  A bank note was paper money issued by a private bank.  All paper money in the economy was printed by private banks.  Except during wartime, there was no government-issued paper money.  And the paper money was only as good as the bank.  If the bank went down, the currency became worthless.  Think about that for a moment.  Think about what it must have been like to live in that world.

Imagine that someone pays your wage by giving you a stack of paper notes saying "Citigroup will pay the bearer 20 dollars in silver on demand."  Now imagine that there are rumors of Citi going under.  Merchants will no longer accept the notes at face value.  There is a probability that they will not actually get their silver from the bank.  So they might only give you $15 worth of stuff for your money.

There were hundreds of banks in the country.  Merchants had to keep track of all of them, to make sure that nobody could rip them off by paying for something with the notes of a dead or dying bank.  There were entire newspapers devoted just to telling merchants how much the notes of all the different banks were actually worth.

If you were staying in your hometown, it was not a big problem, because everyone knew how the local bank was doing.  You could pay off your tab with your salary, and the merchant was fine with that because he or she could go right back to the bank to deposit it.  But if you traveled, especially across state lines, it was a nightmare.  They might not even take your cash, because someone would have to go back to your hometown bank in order to redeem it for specie.  You had to use coins, with all the hassle that involved.

So every time you pay for something with cash, remember how easy your life is compared to that of your ancestors.  We have a universally recognized medium of exchange that nobody has to weigh and everyone will accept without looking up a value in a newspaper.  That is a really impressive technology, just as important to our world as a car.  But unlike a car, it is very easy to forget that things were no so easy in the past.

Reality Versus Film: Movement

I saw our school's production of Rent last weekend with a bunch of friends.  I mainly went because one of the lead actors was a friend and we were all going to see him.  I didn't really enjoy the play, but that does not mean anyone did a bad job.  I always have trouble understanding song lyrics, so it was hard to figure out what was going on.

Also, the people were so alien to me that it was like watching some kind of National Geographic special about a strange primitive tribe.  The only character that I could relate to at all was Benny, the 'bad guy' of the play who has made good and escaped the life of poverty and misery and disease that the rest of the characters live in. ( This may have been partly due to the fact that my friend was playing Benny. )

But that is not the main point of the post.  I noticed, while watching the play, that the movements of the actors were quicker and more jerky than what you see on movies and television.  This does not mean that they are bad actors.  They were moving like real people do.  And in really old movies, people are shown as moving like that.

I have noticed a similar thing when comparing martial arts movies to the real-life videos that we shoot.  In real life and home videos, the movement is very fast, happening in a kind of flurry, like the fights of animals on nature shows.  By contrast, fighting in cinema seems so much more deliberate.  It seems that the actors are trained to pause dramatically for a split second after each movement.  This happens even in modern, fast-paced movies.  They may execute the techniques quickly, but there is always that pause.  Instead of a confusing flurry of movement, the audience sees the fight as a collection of discrete actions.

I understand why this cinema convention developed.  It makes things easier for both the audience and for the actors.  The audience has an easier time understanding what is happening.  The fights are easier to choreograph and practice, and are less tiresome.  It also allows the actors to show off their flashy movements; the audience actually has time to notice them, process them, and remember them.  By contrast, an accurate depiction of a real fight would seem fast, jerky, messy, and far less elegant.

The same thing is true for movements in things other than fight scenes.  Real movement is quick and jerky.  However, actors who move like this seem flighty or frazzled.  The audience seems to expect actors and actresses to move slowly and dramatically, far more than they would in real life.

It is interesting, and a little, scary, to think about how television distorts our expectations and our sense of reality.