This article talks about how all hints of racism disappear when people are assigned to a group together. This shows that the real problem is tribalism, and that racism is a small subset of that problem, one that can be eliminated fairly easily.
People are naturally hostile to anyone that they perceive as being foreign. But one of the best things about the modern world is that our concept if 'non-foreign' has expanded dramatically. In the ancient past, anyone outside your tribe of about 150 people was considered worthless, and you could do anything to them without any moral penalties from the group.
There are still places in the world where people think like this. But the remarkable thing about modern, developed countries is that even the most backward racist bigots will consider a vast number of people to be non-foreign. The impulse to consider outsiders less than human has been confined to others who have some obvious physical difference, with everyone of the same race being a non-foreigner by default.
Of course, the tribalism instinct is so pervasive that it often finds new outlets, even if people are trained to ignore color. Political affiliation and ideology often activate tribalism, with those who think differently automatically being seen as less than human.
We have made great progress in weakening the tribalism instinct. But we will never eliminate it completely unless we continue to attack it directly. Focusing on only one manifestation will simply cause the problem to mutate and reappear in some other form.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
'Chinese' Food
Some time ago, we all went to a local Chinese buffet on the recommendation of our pastor, who said it was a good place to get sushi.
The first thing I noticed when I stepped into the restaurant was that it was full of Mexican families. About half of the customers were speaking Spanish, and I heard a lot of little kids babbling happily.
The restaurant had made a couple of menu adjustments to cater to this clientele. There were Chinese tacos and tortillas on the buffet. The tacos were basically chicken stir fry in a taco shell, and the tortillas were basically Chop Suey with lots of sauce between tortilla shells. Both of them were good.
Also on the menu were apple pie, peach cobbler, pizza, and the kinds of simple meats and vegetables you might expect to find in a traditional Southern buffet. (This is actually the mainstay of traditional Chinese food from the northern and central parts of China.) And of course, sushi is Japanese.
So the 'Chinese' restaurant ended up selling a combination of Mexican, Japanese, Italian, European, and Southern American food, in addition to food from all of the regions of China. If this trend continues, 'Chinese' buffet restaurants will end up selling popular foods from all over the world.
This actually makes sense. The Chinese have always been traders, and their culture readily incorporates outside influences. They are the natural people to create these kinds of fusion dining experiences.
The first thing I noticed when I stepped into the restaurant was that it was full of Mexican families. About half of the customers were speaking Spanish, and I heard a lot of little kids babbling happily.
The restaurant had made a couple of menu adjustments to cater to this clientele. There were Chinese tacos and tortillas on the buffet. The tacos were basically chicken stir fry in a taco shell, and the tortillas were basically Chop Suey with lots of sauce between tortilla shells. Both of them were good.
Also on the menu were apple pie, peach cobbler, pizza, and the kinds of simple meats and vegetables you might expect to find in a traditional Southern buffet. (This is actually the mainstay of traditional Chinese food from the northern and central parts of China.) And of course, sushi is Japanese.
So the 'Chinese' restaurant ended up selling a combination of Mexican, Japanese, Italian, European, and Southern American food, in addition to food from all of the regions of China. If this trend continues, 'Chinese' buffet restaurants will end up selling popular foods from all over the world.
This actually makes sense. The Chinese have always been traders, and their culture readily incorporates outside influences. They are the natural people to create these kinds of fusion dining experiences.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Monkey Flossing
Apparently monkeys have better oral hygiene than most people.
If this report is verified, it would be an impressive example of animal learning.
If this report is verified, it would be an impressive example of animal learning.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Soviet Army
From a BBC article talking about Russian soldiers who remained in Afghanistan:
"Alexander deserted his unit to escape the brutality of his Russian officers. ... he remembered his walk into the darkness one night, believing he faced certain death. The Russians had warned - anyone who surrendered would be tortured by the mujahideen. But instead they took him in. He eventually converted to Islam and fought his former Russian comrades."
Why were we ever afraid of this military machine? Their soldiers hated them so much that they were willing to leave and go to what they thought was certain death at the hands of savages. If they ever tried to invade Germany, we could have caused mass desertions simply by dropping leaflets.
"Alexander deserted his unit to escape the brutality of his Russian officers. ... he remembered his walk into the darkness one night, believing he faced certain death. The Russians had warned - anyone who surrendered would be tortured by the mujahideen. But instead they took him in. He eventually converted to Islam and fought his former Russian comrades."
Why were we ever afraid of this military machine? Their soldiers hated them so much that they were willing to leave and go to what they thought was certain death at the hands of savages. If they ever tried to invade Germany, we could have caused mass desertions simply by dropping leaflets.
Production and Crisis
I apologize in advance for the length and lack of structure of this thing. It is kind of a ramble:
For almost 150 years now, people have been criticizing the capitalist system for producing too much stuff but not distributing it fairly. This is not usually an accurate or coherent analysis, but it does contain a hint of truth. Any change in production capability will cause society to be disrupted, as people try to adjust to the new reality.
In some ways, the current financial crisis can be traced to people producing more wealth than they know what to do with. I believe that the acceleration of technological progress and production efficiency will continue to cause disruptions in the future. Society will continue to struggle with the effects of the mountain of stuff that is being produced at an accelerating rate.
Business cycles were originally blamed on factories producing too much stuff for the market to bear, and then cutting production and laying people off when the demand for the goods decreased. This is not the true cause of business cycles, but it is true that people have a habit of making economic fluctuations worse by spending more money in good times and cutting back excessively when things turn bad. They increase consumption when they feel rich, and if something makes them feel poor, they suddenly realize that they were spending money on things that they didn't really need.
However, the roots of the current mess lay in a group of people who did not make that mistake. For the past decade or so, the people of China and other countries in Asia, as well as raw materials exporters, have been saving a lot of money as their economies were booming. For the raw materials exporters, this was entirely rational; they were saving for a future where the value of their exports would be lower. But for the growing economies, it seems to be a puzzle. Everyone expects that the Chinese will be richer in the future. They should theoretically be borrowing money against their future income and spending it today.
The high savings rate of Chinese is not fully explained, but part of the reason is that they live under a lot of uncertainty and do not have the ability to purchase reliable insurance. While the Chinese on average will be richer in the future, any individual person could easily face some crisis, like a medical emergency, that demands lots of cash on hand. And since they already feel a lot richer than their parents, and are living what they think is a lifestyle of luxury*, they don't feel the need to spend more money today.
But the Chinese don't have a reliable financial system to process all of these savings. In a rational world, Chinese savers would loan money to Chinese entrepreneurs in order to finance a new, more productive, business. But this would require a reliable system of courts and regulation, to make people feel that their money was safe. China doesn't have that, so the Chinese savers sent their money to a country that, historically, had offered save and reliable returns on investment: the USA.
In a rational world, this money would have been used to invest in research or technology or projects that would make more wealth in the future. But for a variety of reasons that I don't fully understand, American businesses did not do this. There were some new entrepreneurs and some useful projects, but the money required for these was less than the money available. So our financial system needed to find a place to park all of that spare cash, while earning a decent rate of return.
The result was a speculative bubble in real estate, as foreign money flowed into our housing market. This is not a productive investment. The Chinese money ended up getting spent by American consumers on houses, or consumer goods bought with home equity loans. American consumers should have been saving money; all reliable predictions show that our income relative to the rest of the world will decline in the future. But they just kept spending, aided by societal institutions that encourage more consumption and financial institutions that treated consumer credit as safe.
In short, the Chinese started to make lots of stuff, leaving them with more money than they knew what to do with, and that money ended up in American pockets. Poor people saved money, and rich people spent it. Much of that money was spent on the stuff the poor people were producing. This was not sustainable. It may be coincidence, but the financial crisis hit shortly after the average savings rate of American households dropped to zero. This post shows the correlation between debt and depression; it is not proof of causation but it shows that too much debt is associated with bad things.
This is one reason is why a lot of socialists say that we do not have a problem with production; we have a problem with distribution. Today, there are idle factories and unemployed people, resources going to waste because people are unwilling or unable to purchase the things that they are designed or trained to produce. But at the same time, there are billions of people all over the world who lack the basic tools needed to live a healthy life. We have the unused ability to make a mountain of stuff, but people are dying for lack of that kind of stuff.
I am surprised that no politician has suggested using government money to purchase pickup trucks and ship them to farmers or aid organizations in the third world. That would be much less of a waste of money than some stimulus projects that got funding, and it would be almost impossible to oppose politically. It would prop up the automakers while helping people who are much poorer than we will ever be.
That would not be a long-run solution. It seems that the world has too many automobile factories. Some of them should go away, preferably the ones that are least efficient and worst managed. In the long run, the only way to fix the problem is to put our resources to new uses, providing stuff that improves people's quality of life.
I don't have any easy answers. In times like this, we have to decide between the short run and the long run, and the short run usually wins. The time to invest in the long run is when things are going well, but we wasted the boom years on unsustainable, short-sighted consumption instead of investing in the future.
*A Chinese 'sweatshop' worker will usually have more disposable income than his or her entire family back on the farm, while working in more comfortable conditions.
For almost 150 years now, people have been criticizing the capitalist system for producing too much stuff but not distributing it fairly. This is not usually an accurate or coherent analysis, but it does contain a hint of truth. Any change in production capability will cause society to be disrupted, as people try to adjust to the new reality.
In some ways, the current financial crisis can be traced to people producing more wealth than they know what to do with. I believe that the acceleration of technological progress and production efficiency will continue to cause disruptions in the future. Society will continue to struggle with the effects of the mountain of stuff that is being produced at an accelerating rate.
Business cycles were originally blamed on factories producing too much stuff for the market to bear, and then cutting production and laying people off when the demand for the goods decreased. This is not the true cause of business cycles, but it is true that people have a habit of making economic fluctuations worse by spending more money in good times and cutting back excessively when things turn bad. They increase consumption when they feel rich, and if something makes them feel poor, they suddenly realize that they were spending money on things that they didn't really need.
However, the roots of the current mess lay in a group of people who did not make that mistake. For the past decade or so, the people of China and other countries in Asia, as well as raw materials exporters, have been saving a lot of money as their economies were booming. For the raw materials exporters, this was entirely rational; they were saving for a future where the value of their exports would be lower. But for the growing economies, it seems to be a puzzle. Everyone expects that the Chinese will be richer in the future. They should theoretically be borrowing money against their future income and spending it today.
The high savings rate of Chinese is not fully explained, but part of the reason is that they live under a lot of uncertainty and do not have the ability to purchase reliable insurance. While the Chinese on average will be richer in the future, any individual person could easily face some crisis, like a medical emergency, that demands lots of cash on hand. And since they already feel a lot richer than their parents, and are living what they think is a lifestyle of luxury*, they don't feel the need to spend more money today.
But the Chinese don't have a reliable financial system to process all of these savings. In a rational world, Chinese savers would loan money to Chinese entrepreneurs in order to finance a new, more productive, business. But this would require a reliable system of courts and regulation, to make people feel that their money was safe. China doesn't have that, so the Chinese savers sent their money to a country that, historically, had offered save and reliable returns on investment: the USA.
In a rational world, this money would have been used to invest in research or technology or projects that would make more wealth in the future. But for a variety of reasons that I don't fully understand, American businesses did not do this. There were some new entrepreneurs and some useful projects, but the money required for these was less than the money available. So our financial system needed to find a place to park all of that spare cash, while earning a decent rate of return.
The result was a speculative bubble in real estate, as foreign money flowed into our housing market. This is not a productive investment. The Chinese money ended up getting spent by American consumers on houses, or consumer goods bought with home equity loans. American consumers should have been saving money; all reliable predictions show that our income relative to the rest of the world will decline in the future. But they just kept spending, aided by societal institutions that encourage more consumption and financial institutions that treated consumer credit as safe.
In short, the Chinese started to make lots of stuff, leaving them with more money than they knew what to do with, and that money ended up in American pockets. Poor people saved money, and rich people spent it. Much of that money was spent on the stuff the poor people were producing. This was not sustainable. It may be coincidence, but the financial crisis hit shortly after the average savings rate of American households dropped to zero. This post shows the correlation between debt and depression; it is not proof of causation but it shows that too much debt is associated with bad things.
This is one reason is why a lot of socialists say that we do not have a problem with production; we have a problem with distribution. Today, there are idle factories and unemployed people, resources going to waste because people are unwilling or unable to purchase the things that they are designed or trained to produce. But at the same time, there are billions of people all over the world who lack the basic tools needed to live a healthy life. We have the unused ability to make a mountain of stuff, but people are dying for lack of that kind of stuff.
I am surprised that no politician has suggested using government money to purchase pickup trucks and ship them to farmers or aid organizations in the third world. That would be much less of a waste of money than some stimulus projects that got funding, and it would be almost impossible to oppose politically. It would prop up the automakers while helping people who are much poorer than we will ever be.
That would not be a long-run solution. It seems that the world has too many automobile factories. Some of them should go away, preferably the ones that are least efficient and worst managed. In the long run, the only way to fix the problem is to put our resources to new uses, providing stuff that improves people's quality of life.
I don't have any easy answers. In times like this, we have to decide between the short run and the long run, and the short run usually wins. The time to invest in the long run is when things are going well, but we wasted the boom years on unsustainable, short-sighted consumption instead of investing in the future.
*A Chinese 'sweatshop' worker will usually have more disposable income than his or her entire family back on the farm, while working in more comfortable conditions.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Chaos
People don't understand how chaotic and unpredictable the world is.
Suppose you made an absolutely perfect copy of our world, with every single subatomic particle having the exact same location and velocity. Most people think that these two worlds would continue on the same path. They would not. I am quite sure that, within one minute, there would be a human being who is alive on one of the worlds and dead on another.
The difference would come from quantum mechanical effects in the human brain. We know that the behavior of subatomic particles is random. If an electron moves one way instead of the other, it could mean the difference between a neuron firing and staying silent. That one neuron could mean the difference between someone successfully avoiding an accident and getting killed in one. There are millions of events every minute that could be pushed in one direction or another by a tiny change in the operation of someone's brain.
It doesn't even have to be a human brain. Quantum mechanical randomness could change the action of a mosquito or flea, making the difference between someone getting a deadly disease or not being bitten.
Within a year, there would be a noticeable difference in the life of everyone on the planet. Within a decade, the two worlds would be almost completely different.
Suppose you made an absolutely perfect copy of our world, with every single subatomic particle having the exact same location and velocity. Most people think that these two worlds would continue on the same path. They would not. I am quite sure that, within one minute, there would be a human being who is alive on one of the worlds and dead on another.
The difference would come from quantum mechanical effects in the human brain. We know that the behavior of subatomic particles is random. If an electron moves one way instead of the other, it could mean the difference between a neuron firing and staying silent. That one neuron could mean the difference between someone successfully avoiding an accident and getting killed in one. There are millions of events every minute that could be pushed in one direction or another by a tiny change in the operation of someone's brain.
It doesn't even have to be a human brain. Quantum mechanical randomness could change the action of a mosquito or flea, making the difference between someone getting a deadly disease or not being bitten.
Within a year, there would be a noticeable difference in the life of everyone on the planet. Within a decade, the two worlds would be almost completely different.
Good Thoughts
"Most people (ironically those deemed psychologically healthy) have an optimistic bias and generally assign too high odds of things working out well. The mildly depressed make more accurate assessments. I have often wondered which way the causality runs: do they make better assessments BECAUSE their unhappy state strips away the rose-colored filter, or are they mildly depressed because they keep giving more realistic assessments, which makes them a drag to be around, and they are depressed because they encounter social rejection?"
from Yves Smith (No reason to read the thing unless you are interested in finance and/or chaos theory.)
from Yves Smith (No reason to read the thing unless you are interested in finance and/or chaos theory.)
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