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Action at a Distance

2010-05-08T00:42:00.008-04:00

My imagination has recently been piqued by an explanation of Newton's law of gravity. For all that he contributed to physics, he famously did not bother to explain why gravity works. It's academically referred to as a black box theory, perhaps the most famous one. And today, why gravity works remains a mystery. Similar black box theories - those which forego describing any mechanism - are occasionally studied and occasionally derided depending on their context.

The Universe — Beyond The Big Bang — History.com Videos

That a theory - or more like a law, or set of laws - needs no explanation is counterintuitive but also strangely liberating.

When I learn something, my instinct is to wrap my head around it - to get a feel for it from all angles, to compare and contrast it to other bits of knowledge, and to try to grasp the underlying principles that make it fit together. Perhaps that's just the normal response: we seek to understand things.

Newton's curious depiction of gravity, on the other hand, separates learning from understanding.

And beyond separating the two, it suggests that understanding might actually set you back. His theory was largely resisted for some time because it lacked an underlying explanation. Its utility and predictive power overcame this hurdle.

Following Einstein, the current consensus is that some laws of the universe are so distant from our scale of experience that we can't be expected to understand their mechanism, much less intuitively grasp them. There's an intuitive appeal in this explanation about how difficult it is to grasp very large and very small things. But that doesn't make it true.

Returning to Newton, one question I've been asking myself is whether similar black box explanations may apply to things of an everyday scale. It goes against every fiber of scientific thought: Theories with meager explanations seem less plausible and poorly thought out. And yet it seems strangely plausible - that principles may be unfolding on a human-scale which we couldn't fathom - if only as a possibility.

At the least, this line of thought emphasizes the role of observation and empiricism. As 'theoretical' as the notion of gravity is, its proposal still required real-world observation - without that, it would have made absolutely no sense.

The scientific method suggests that we have our presuppositions and hypotheses about how the world works, and then data is used to either back them up or to falsify them. But perhaps the take-home message is that the reverse is at least possible, namely that we start with data and then learn how it fits together. And where a set of awkward principles - such as action at a distance, which, let's face it, sounds more like magic than physics - so perfectly consolidates the data, understanding might be ignored, be it temporarily or deliberately.

Chess & Go

2010-02-11T15:02:00.004-05:00

Combine mounds of snow and Chessmaster 9000 – a PC game – and I’ve been getting a bit too into chess.

Growing up I never really got chess. Go – widely considered chess’ Eastern counterpart – caught my attention for some time in college.

In Go, unlike chess, all pieces have equal value and the board begins empty. Players take turn placing pieces on the board, with the goal of capturing territory (and enemy pieces) by surrounding spaces.

The board is a 19 x 19 grid, and each piece is placed on an intersection, which gives you 361 spots for a piece. This accounts for much of its appeal – at the start of the game, the board is overwhelming and abstract, full of possibility. Go is also notorious for giving computer programmers a hard time – its open possibilities make it impossible to program a computer engine comparable to the best Go players.

Nonetheless, beyond the basics, learning Go was deceptively hard, and coupled with a determined friend who was also a beginner, we spent a lot of time making no progress.

Chess, by contrast, has recently struck me as full of personality and intrigue. Pieces take on their own persona, and it’s your job to make them collaborate. Rooks are bulky stabilizers of sorts, while bishops have a strong up-field attack. Both pieces have long-range control, as does the queen – yet her absolute power makes her overly prone to enemy attack. Most aspects of the game I’m still stumped on. Knights in particular have a whimsy movement, which makes them fun to watch until they’re suddenly staring you down.

Yet the strength of each individual piece is conferred mostly by their overall arrangement - their sum inevitably much greater than the total of their parts. In this sense, pawns are like football's offensive (or defensive) linemen - unglamorous and overlooked, yet providing a structure for success.

The fun perhaps comes from going back and forth between attack and analysis. Each move by your opponent requires pause to try to figure out what it accomplishes. Analyzing his potential lines of attack requires an almost Zen-like state of scanning opened lines and spaces. Similar to a geometric proof, the best moves are utilitarian, accomplishing multiple objectives at once. Not unlike life, you need a plan, coupled with knowledge of general principles, and flexibility to respond to the unexpected. You face intriguing interplay between ideas and reality, theory and application.

When stuck it can sometimes help to change your view. It’s not unreasonable to personify the pieces, especially the king – it can help to stand in his shoes and ask what sort of defense he might lobby for. Make no mistake, we're talking about a competition of intellectual prowess which calls for excruciating patience bordering mental torture, not a town-square with Dickensian chatter. But where Go is impenetrably cold and abstract, there is a warm center to chess.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Go Game #2 w/Ramon, 12/23/2005, eshm; (2)Untilted, 12/19/2009, Matthew Bradley; (3)White Knight, 11/31/2009, Mukumbara;

Ideas and Ego

2010-01-23T14:12:00.011-05:00

I’ll often approach things by assuming that the world is right and I am wrong. I just finished a powerful book by Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, which epitomized the role of humility in approaching ideas.

Sowell’s book is a backlash against a group of people he calls intellectuals – those whose professions begin and end in ideas. In many ways, battles between ideas are shaped more by emotion than by rational intellect. Much of intellectual debate rests upon empty arguments. Retorts you commonly hear in the media – “you’re oversimplifying the issue”, “you just have too much faith in the free market”, “you’re not seeing the complexities of the issue” – don’t hold much ground.

What begins as a simple and even-handed look at intellectuals, by the last chapter, turns into a rather acidic critique. But even this progression is rather fascinating, as it is the opposite of what we’re used to, which is a passionate and fiery introduction to a subject, later supported by facts, and ending in a call to action.

Sowell looks at intellectual's influence in the media – where events are skewed with such liberal bias that society hardly recounts Stalin murdering 6 million plus Ukrainians or Hoover’s interventionist and philanthropic ways – their influence in academia – where ideas are judged in an insular way by like-minded peers – and their influence in the law – where inconsistent calls for judicial activism and social justice seem to undermine the law’s purpose.

Sowell paraphrases Schumpter, writing how huge social catastrophes can kill millions of people without having the least effect on advancing theory.

The book culminates in two long chapters about intellectuals and war. If anything, Sowell shows that wars do have an effect on intellectuals, but it is more of an emotional effect than a rational one. French intellectuals widely adopted pacifism after World War I. School teachers went so far as to imbue it in the nation’s children, to the extent where Hitler decided to invade France based largely on their lack of support for engagement. His commanders advised against this – and later studies reveal France to be superior militarily – but Hitler attacked based on his views of the French morale. Such widespread pacifism in Europe also delayed England from mounting an effective response, and made the war much more costly than it might have been otherwise.

To a degree, the intellectual attitude before the war was that one must live and fight for one’s ideals. After the war, it was that men’s courage is a fickle thing, and war is a silly game. The point, however, in focusing so heavily on war is to show how such events go far in shaping intellectuals' emotional reactions without in the least sharpening their quality of thought.

The events that unfolded in the ‘60s were somewhat similar. America lost the Vietnam War not because of its lack of manpower – and not because of the difficult battle terrain – but due to its lack of support at home. The North Vietnamese intentionally made it a war of endurance, and despite their stunning losses – up to and through the Tet Offensive – their saving grace, as they later admitted, was the war’s unpopularity in America. Such lack of military backbone escalated the Cold War as well, which – despite intellectual calls for disarmament – was won by Reagan’s purposeful decision to make it an arms race rather than a traditional war.

Such examples chip away at the notion that pacifism breeds peace. More important than one’s conclusion, however, is the recognition that things like the of idea of pacifism are more like hypotheses – subject, to the degree possible, to historical support – than truths.

We all have values, judgments, assumptions about the world. But to hide certain beliefs from real-world scrutiny only does them a disservice. If one believes in a certain policy, for instance, because it reduces poverty, then certainly it behooves that person to see whether it actually reduces poverty.

Certainly not every idea or notion that has real-world implications need be supported by reason. One can go on acting kindly to their fellow men without necessarily needing a specific or good reason for doing so. Parents don't need to adopt an ideology to love their children. But it is a common mistake to assume that such ideas are based on a neat underlying logic, as if a pious Christian who says that he loves God because of all his beautiful creations might re-assess his love for God, should the evidence overwhelmingly suggest that his creations were in fact not beautiful, or that his creations were in fact not created by him. Such is often a confusion of induction and deduction. In all likelihood, one starts out liking God, and then finds a reason why. But that reason, then, is hardly useful for convincing others. This sort of confusion is much more common in discussions of social policy, where arguments are more often cloaked in objectivity.

To a large degree, the world has accepted the notion that many ideas need real-world verification. However, a deceptively large amount of arguments use reason, but are more like the example with the pious man, where the reason falls second to the conclusion, in turn revealing that the conclusion is more of an assumption. This has simply created a process whereby people look for whatever verification supports their theory and scrap the rest.

On the contrary, when one looks at the wealth of available real-world knowledge – ranging from history to news and the internet, from publicly available data to nationwide trends and scientific analyses, from society’s vast collections of mundane everyday experiences to the narrow yet advanced scope of select experts – one is rather awed by a sense humility rather than empowerment. Indeed, real-world knowledge does not exist simply to be cherry-picked according to one’s own beliefs, but to be made sense of, and to form one’s beliefs. I am often struck by it all with an overwhelming crushing of ego. But at the same time, ego is precisely not the point.

-KJ
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Media (in order of appearance)

Photos: (1)Thomas Sowell, Stephen Camarata; (2) Raising the Flag, 10/07/2009, P.E.S.H.; (3)radiotelecopen, radio telescopes HDR, 09/25/2008, Bram Reinders.

The Soft Science of Positive Psychology

2009-12-26T16:11:00.008-05:00

Modern philosophy – and more recently science and psychology – have shared the revelation that reality is all in your head. Change your head, goes one line of thought, and you change your reality.

In psychology this has spurned positive psychology: The study of the positive mindset is implicitly carried out in contrast to the study of negative mindsets, which consist of most of psychology’s history.

Positive psychology, however, remains more of a movement than an area of study. It has yet to prove itself, and most of the innovation has occurred in semantics – where, for instance, exercise might have been said to treat depression, positive psychologists would say that it provides a buffer against depression. (I wrote a bit more on the topic here.)

And it’s not as if the scientists haven’t been trying – positive psychology remains a well-funded area of research, considered in academic circles to be fresh and forward-looking. It’s just lacked many groundbreaking findings.

In all fairness, it’s still considered a new topic, with roots that go back only one or two decades. Researchers are just warming up. But as a movement, it’s already starting to outstay its welcome.

As might be expected from any movement, it’s now undergoing a backlash. Cancer survivor Barbara Ehrenreich recently railed against the infusion of cancer treatment and positive psychology. After being diagnosed with breast cancer

She discovered that a positive attitude was more or less compulsory. Most of her fellow sufferers thought it would help them recover. Some even said that cancer was a “gift” that helped one find life’s purpose. Ms Ehrenreich disagreed…She complained about the debilitating effects of chemotherapy, recalcitrant insurance companies and, most daringly, “sappy pink ribbons”…

More generally, Ms Ehrenreich sees an “ideological force in American culture…that encourages us to deny reality.”…At a confab for motivational speakers, she is told that anyone can achieve “infinite power” by resonating in tune with the universe. From a popular preacher in Houston, she discovers that God will give big houses and nice tables in restaurants to those who sincerely wish for them. After slogging through countless books and lectures, she learns that food doesn’t make you fat unless you think it will, and that you can solve many of life’s problems by avoiding negative people. (The Economist, 12/17/09)

Ehrenreich, along with a handful of other authors, have recently published books that mock positive psychology as a feel-good movement devoid of any true science.

Between the movement and the backlash, positive psychology has a very American feel: It has more connections to alternative medicine than to clinical science, and its practical pop-science-for-the-masses approach bears some resemblance to America’s 19th century Spiritualist and Evangelical practices.

Areas such as a positive psychology are why psychology is still – and will long be – considered a soft science. In almost any other area of science, the creation of a new field of study would be spurned by some scientific breakthrough. Not so in positive psychology. Here, the change has occurred in the researchers’ minds, where they have made a conscious decision to focus on the positive instead of the negative.

Yet in itself, explicitly redirecting your thoughts isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This is what you do when you're testing assumptions: You change them and examine the consequences. This process can be powerful. It has given birth to non-Euclidian geometry and to Godel’s incompleteness theorems.

But in positive psychology it has produced very little. Highly studied emotions in positive psychology include flow, elevation, hopefulness, and appreciation. But in the current state of the things, these remain empty constructs and definitions, with few empirical connections.

The insight of empirical science is that, when increasing knowledge, we turn to the outside world. Reality is all in your head, but that does not deny the existence of a very real, concrete, palpable world outside of you. The stubborn inability to learn from this world, in politics, has led to true suffering; in business, has led to bankruptcy; in personality, has led to delusion; and in psychology, has led to positive psychology.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Image: (1)Radioactive Happiness, 06/10/2006, Netsrot; (2) Woman getting massage, 12/08/2006, hop sungtrieu; (3) BP716 Rainbow and Bird, 07/14/2006, listentoreason.

Things Fall Apart

2009-12-13T16:17:00.003-05:00

England’s anti-drug department has spent the past two years denying a freedom of information request in regard to its domestic strategy to battle drugs. The Economist reported last week that this sort of behavior is symptomatic of England’s freedom of information act, passed in 2000, which contains 23 “get outs” in order to prevent bureaus from having to hand over classified information. Too often these requests get caught up in a legal quagmire and take up to a few years to grant. What separates this case, however, is the creative justification by the Home Office for not releasing the records:

The reason is that next March the National Audit Office (NAO), a public-spending watchdog, is due to publish a report of its own on local efforts to combat drugs. The Home Office says that to have two reports about drugs out at the same time might confuse the public, and for this reason it is going to keep its report under wraps.

The Economist calls this “the most inventive interpretation to date” with regard to the FOI act:

This is believed to be the first time that a public body has openly refused to release information in order to manage the news better. The department argues that releasing its internal analysis now “risks misinterpretation of the findings of the [National Audit Office] report”, because its own analysis is from 2007 and predates the NAO’s findings. The argument uses section 36 of the FOI act, which provides a broad exemption for information that could “prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs”.

It’s a bit ironic that a law passed to increase transparency is being enacted in a manner that’s anything but. Were this a bank hiding info from their shareholders, the public might be angrier.

But what’s more revealing about this case is the way in which laws breakdown overtime.

One of the most admirable accomplishments of the founders was to create a foundation that would stand the test of time. The constitution is in a sense radical, but it is also practical and realistic in its approach. A lack of long-term foresight is one of the largest underestimated factors playing into new legislation. Too often the debate surrounds the magnitude of the problem rather than on the solution.

The idea that we can fix deep problems like healthcare or the economy in one bill is not only unrealistic, but it underestimates the dynamic nature of the problem. A close analogy is found in large struggling firms which seek to rectify their problems with a silver bullet: They’ll hire an outsider CEO, pursue large mergers and acquisitions, or try extreme new strategies.

In a report this week on Toyota, The Economist discusses how often the best solutions are the least flashy and exciting. The subject of the report is Toyota, whose CEO worries they are on the path to failure and is working carefully to rectify the situation. He is reportedly working with tips from Jim Collins’ book, How the Mighty Fall. In the book, Collins

advocates old-fashioned management virtues such as determination, discipline, calmness under pressure and strategic decision-making based on careful sifting of the evidence. Often, the leader best able to halt a downward spiral will be an insider who knows how to build on proven strengths while simultaneously identifying and eradicating weaknesses.

In line with this, continues The Economist:

Mr Toyoda’s approach is not visionary. It is simple, incremental and requires painstaking attention to what the customers want. That is its virtue.

Occasionally I’ll be watching late night (or early morning) business TV, and news anchors will often ask CEOs “How did you do it? What’s your secret?” And by now it’s a cliché for the CEO to answer that there are no secrets and the only recipe to success is doing a good job, taking care of fundamentals, and perhaps an ounce of fortune here or there.

In a sense, the sentiment that there must be some secret to success is even more fascinating than the fact that there is isn’t. The sentiment is somewhat understandable, especially given how many perceived geniuses see the world in a radically unique manner.

But there is something different from such academic or theoretical smarts and business smarts. What distinguishes the latter is not clarity of mind and vision, but an ability to be completely in tune with the details of their products and with what people want. From this perspective, it’s obvious why radical shifts make the least amount of sense, particularly when it looks like they’re being done for the sake of change, rather than to alter the underlying content. Rather it’s a question of inspecting resources, using them to their full potential, seeing how they’ve worked in the past, and making the sort of detailed tweaks here and there that, say, an inquisitive public looking for an overarching secret to success wouldn’t be interested in.

It’s also, once again, an issue of focusing on the solution not the problem. A radical problem – even a crisis – need not always require a radical solution. An appliance that won’t turn might just have a minor wiring problem. Debilitating diseases are often rectified by targeting just one type of molecule.

Too often these sorts of small but effective solutions are confused with finding a silver bullet to solve a whole problem. The smarter solutions are distinguished however in their scope, their maximized use of available resources, and their ability to work within the system rather than to replace it. For instance, we do have an advanced healthcare system, and it can align patients’ needs with doctors. But we do not have enough doctors. An analogy is to a new computer which won’t turn on because it’s unplugged.

It is this sort of nuanced thinking which needs to be applied to legislation: An eye for the long-term effects – when deciding on item prices, Costco CEO Jim Senigal thinks about the effect they will have 20 years down the road – maximizing current resources, and a careful expert look at the details involved and how they work. Where these approaches can't be used due to the nature of politics - say, a lack of expertise in government, or an inability to be flexible - then the solution needs to be reformulated or dropped. A half-assed solution is the worst kind.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Toyota Camry, 02/26/2009, ogieabatillas; (2)Akio Toyoda, 10/24/2009, Shimoken; (3)Weird Al in Line at Costco, 12/26/2006, Vaguely Artistic.

Video: (1)Video, MrAlstec channel, of the song "Things Fall Apart" by Built to Spill from their 2009 album There is No Enemy.

Lateral Transmissions: Steam Engenious

2009-12-02T23:16:00.012-05:00

The Beatles got it right at the end of Sgt. Pepper, ending A Day in the Life – the contemplative fragmented waltz – with a dissonant orchestral crescendo.

I think that the next great step in pop music will be to integrate dissonance.

It’s almost ironic that The Beatles were the first – and possibly last – band to have such a famous song centered on dissonance. And even though it's only the end of the track that's notorious, the whole song really is structured around that climax.

Pop songs have clean melodic structures that are as condensed as possible. No one knew this better than The Beatles. From Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da to She’s Leaving Home, they had an uncanny ability to immerse you in a whole world in only a few minutes, catchy, compact like poetry, almost dense, like a song from a musical but better.

It’s fitting that on A Day in the Life, they went to such lengths to try to snap you out of their pristine songs, ending on a nightmarish almost unsatisfying crescendo, as surreal and dirty as their songs tend to be pleasant and sweet.

Wrote producer George Martin about that famous last chord:

What I did there was to write ... the lowest possible note for each of the instruments in the orchestra. At the end of the twenty-four bars, I wrote the highest note...near a chord of E major. Then I put a squiggly line right through the twenty-four bars, with reference points to tell them roughly what note they should have reached during each bar ... Of course, they all looked at me as though I were completely mad.

This proved to be only the start for John Lennon, who later went to absurd lengths to embody a sort of over-realism: his experiment with psychotherapeutic primal screaming – it sounds as odd as it looks on paper – and posing nude on an album cover.

Dissonance is an odd term, at once technical and completely subjective. It simply refers to a combination of notes that sounds unstable or unpleasant. You know it when you hear it, yet what is considered dissonant shifts across culture and time. Like all things when you study music, it’s about context, structure and temporal relation. When it’s employed well, it can provide a sort of driving force to music. Roger Kamien (quoted on Wikipedia) has a stimulating explanation:

An unstable tone combination is a dissonance; its tension demands an onward motion to a stable chord. Thus dissonant chords are 'active'; traditionally they have been considered harsh and have expressed pain, grief, and conflict.

You can hear dissonance here and there on the radio, but surprisingly few rock and roll bands have really integrated it into their songs. Used well and it’s as if an artist is harnessing a wild force.

Drake, Kanye West, Lil Wayne & Eminem |MTV Music

Used poorly and you have nails on a chalkboard.

Going back to Kamien’s definition, when I’m in the right mood – say, listening to the right song while driving my car at night – it seems like there’s an underlying dissonance which drives intelligence and clarity of mind. In a sense, the drive for knowledge is predicated on not being content with the current state of things. In a world of perfect contentment, there’d be no need to learn more. In this sense there’s a truth to the archetype of the happy idiot, though I’m not sure whether it says more about man or knowledge. The inability to just be content seems to have a biological correlate as well.

I just finished Robert Clark’s In Defense of Self: How the Immune System Really Works, and like the best of books it left me both satiated and thirsty for more. The first part of the book is theoretical – it lays down the general principles, introduces you to the main characters, etc. And the second, and longer, part is applied – it covers disease and immune conditions.

Naturally I assumed that the second part would build on the first, by applying the theory. On the contrary, the applied portion of the book simply went on and on like the theoretical portion. I doubt this is a shortcoming of the author, as it’s more likely a reflection of the beast itself. But I found it rather thought provoking that there should be such a sharp disconnect to begin with.

It was a bit like learning English – or what I imagine learning English must be like: There are principles, structures, and rules, but after you master them, you then spend even more time learning about nuances and exceptions.

Certainly there are theoretical principles and natural laws, but the impression that one gets is that based on some primitive defense-system, mother nature was just making shit up as it went along, constantly responding to new threats and stumbling upon new weapons, necessity giving birth some pretty wild inventions, a patchwork quilt of defense systems.

The analogy to dissonance of course is a stretch – but it’s not as much a stretch as one might think at first. Both lend creed to the a-posteri ever-changing being-at-work-staying-onself/coming-into-being approach to knowledge.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Album cover of Beatles' 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; (2)Moon up, 07/05/2009, [kane]; (3)Ralph Steadman, self-portrait.

Video: (1)Music video of the song Forever by Drake; (2)Music video, Two-Headed Baby channel, of the song Steam Engenious by Modest Mouse from their 2007 album, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank; (3)Music video, cdiamond channel, of the song A Day in the Life by The Beatles from their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Thru Fragments of Cinema: History

2009-11-08T13:50:00.010-05:00

The achievement of HBO’s miniseries John Adams is a visual one.

History can be difficult to portray on film. Too often what you get on screen is a display of technical prowess with characters that feel like toy soldiers and overdressed dolls.

On the other end of the spectrum is a backlash to this style – a sort of post-modern historical drama – which thrives by accentuating those aspects that are more likely to click with the modern mind. Most notably these include Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, Romeo + Juliet, and 300, all of which received mediocre critical reviews despite strong box office performances.

Escapism

Both styles – at their best – provide escapist entertainment, as powerful and fun as the made-up worlds of Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. But what makes this discussion about more than just aesthetics is the fact that these historical worlds actually existed. Their big-screen portrayals represent overlapping ways of looking back in time: That of immersing oneself in the past and understanding it from their perspective; and that of pulling distinctly modern lessons out of the past.

Real

The more traditional approach – deemed period pieces, costume dramas – take a prim and proper Jane Austin-like approach, with the tension emerging out of a patient, slow, and literary restraint. But what often limits these films is the director's inability to use more modern elements of filmmaking.

Another part of the problem is that, not only were many past societies more formal than the present, but our hindsight of them is crystallized as well. Once again, this reflects our inherent view of history as setting the seeds for today. As Henry VIII narrates in the opening to Showtime's The Tudors, we know how the story ends; the interest is in how it got there.

Surreal

The modern approach is often criticized for looking like a long music video. Critics, for instance, dismissed the use of songs by The Cure and Air in Marie Antoinette. But isn’t there something artificial about watching a period drama in a movie theater anyway? Mood music – be it pop, classical, or ambient – never existed in the real world to begin with, and neither did quick cuts or long takes.

Regardless of which style you prefer, the contrast betrays the value – and slight contradiction – of looking at history in the first place: That it is in the context of the past; that it is being scrutinized with a modern mind; and that it is informing a modern world.

History

I’ve recently been taking great joy in reading Paul Johnson’s History of the American People. Johnson capriciously flips between narrating the story of America and stepping out to discuss parallels to modern times. Afterall, it’s worthless – perhaps impossible – to analyze and not interpret. Interpretation without analysis, however, often comes off as empty opinion. The mix one employs is a choice of style, rhetoric, and taste, and it can make or break a non-fictional account.

Perspective

I’ve come to enjoy learning about history. In one sense, historical accounts make me feel lucky to be alive today, that I’m able to look back on such a rich history of man to take it in, as if I were sitting on a tall royal throne with the entirety of history at my disposal to learn from and hone my decisions. On the other hand it imbues me with a strong sense of humility that so many chapters of mankind have yet to be written, and that future generations will look back on our time with the same sort of curiosity, attention to detail, and awkwardness as Sofia Coppola looked back at Marie Antoinette. It reminds me of Pascal’s sentiment of being stuck between two infinite abysses.

In this context, HBO’s John Adams takes an alternate approach in which it is true to the details of the time –costumes, architecture, dialect, mannerisms, and all – while subtly eschewing the neat toy doll-look of films that do the same. It largely accomplishes this through a cinematography style that favors slanted planes and off-angles. The Constitutional Convention is held in an orderly wooden house with period furniture and right angles, but it is shot from an angular perspective, with camera tilted on tripod, to the point where it almost makes you seasick while remaining tasteful nonetheless. The characters, speeches, and passions seem set in time – they are just as what one might expect – but the visual style goes to length to remind the viewer that from their perspective, the future, along with its stakes, was just as unpredictable – if not moreso – as it’s ever been.

-KJ
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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Poster of John Adams, HBO Miniseries; (2)Shot from 1988 film, Dangerous Liaisons; (3)Poster from 2006 film, Marie Antoinette; (4)Seeeking Solace, 11/28/2009, anjan58.

Video: (1)MaKn channel, Opening to Showtime's The Tudors; (2)jaa2010 channel, Trailer for HBO's John Adams.

Academia, of Sirens and Irrelevance

2009-10-30T22:52:00.016-04:00

It is a self-governing and largely closed community of practitioners who have an almost absolute power to determine the standards for entry, promotion, and dismissal in their fields.

So writes Louis Menand of the academic institution. He continues

Since it is the system that ratifies the product…the most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the system.

Academia is a bittersweet institution. The cliché of the Ivory Tower pays testament to the pursuit of knowledge over superstition, dogma, and tradition, while at the same time being marred by the very same dogma it sought to remove. Nietzsche would have smirked.

Thomas Jefferson obsessed about creating a meritocracy. The backward aristocracy of Europe drove English colonists away, and despite our Anglo similarities with Europe, it still defines the primary difference between America and Europe.

The Economist drew out a practical example contrasting European aristocracy and American meritocracy. They write that Buffett’s inheritance wishes – after his death, he wants his money to be donated away from the family – would be illegal throughout most of Europe. These wishes by Buffett are completely American, intuitive, and they’re almost non-newsworthy; but as the Economist argues, they remain extreme when compared to the rest of the world, even Europe.

Academia is stuck between a few contrasting extremes. It’s attacked for its aristocratic structure – often by its very inhabitants – and yet it’s as American as baseball. The students being pummeled through it grow in number and yet tuition is constantly on the rise. It is oriented towards specialization and detailed knowledge, but it’s slow to adapt to real-time developments.

Imperfect it may be in many ways, however, history has borne out that one of America’s best strengths - like the marketplace – is its ability to self-correct its wrongs, no matter how extreme they may be. US historian Paul Johnson admires how time and again – from the Salem witch trials to the Red Scare – such ugly crises are marked not by the extreme and shameful actions that took place, but by the widespread guilt felt for years afterward.

Lingering examples of this are political debates over affirmative action; the heat of these debates makes it easy to overlook how uniquely American they are in the first place. In some cases, as in the Salem witch trial, those who carried out the heinous actions were the first to express their guilt; in others, like affirmative action, the guilt and reaction were much more insidious, extreme and long-lasting. In all, however, the underlying principle is a desire to right wrong.

Not to liken those events to academia, but the point is that its warts are correctable.

Oddly enough bits and pieces of it become more relevant. The speed of change in today’s economy – manifested by the accelerating frequency of personal career change – increases the import of basic knowledge, analytic skills, and a flexible mind. Euphemized as economic friction, these changes are the result of an odd marriage between technological improvement and material improvement, both constantly moving upward and one-uping the other.

My life often seems like a mixed bag of challenges and experiences. I sometimes try to make sense of their order, but whenever I do this it feels like I’m stringing together random beads, only to make sense of them later, so I can think they look nice and orderly. I imagine this is how Odysseus felt being thrown from one island and conquest to another.

I never enjoyed reading Homer that much, but I have to admire the historical progression from Iliad to Odyssey. The former is a primitive linear war tale, while the latter is a loose combination of fairy tale strands, one which – upon closer inspection – seems ready to unravel.

More and more this progression, from the former set of tales to the latter, seems like a parable for modern life, where academia is one of multiple strands vying for relevance. Multifaceted as its virtue and output may be, its future success – in way or another – will result from their merit, or lack thereof.

-KJ
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Thanks to Michael White at Scientific Blogging for turning me onto the topic here.

Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)The Great Hall -Christ Church, Oxford, 09/14/2009, Lyon; (2)Terry MacMullan Classroom10, 03/06/2009, EWU; (3)Kaleidascope of Minnows, 10/26/2009, hadartist;(4)Head of Odysseus.

Video: (1)Moby - Porcelain, 07/03/2009, video, by LTUcronus, of the song "Porcelain" from Moby's 1999 album, Play.

How You Play the Game

2009-09-27T20:04:00.018-04:00

I love the quick hook on a pop song. And I often pick up dinner at Chipotle or Quiznos rather than cook – or microwave – it. Such instant gratification is a part of us.

And yet I constantly find myself thinking that the only real value is long-term value, or more extreme, that the only thing that matters in the world is long-term value. This was my first thought upon seeing Redskin DT Albert Haynesworth facedown in the grass this Sunday afternoon. At a prime age of 28, 6 foot 6, and 350 pounds – mostly muscle – this made an impressionable image, albeit one that’s not uncommon in the NFL.

Albert Haynesworth

Redskins’ owner Daniel Snyder made Haynesworth his pet-project acquisition last summer, offering him $100 million for 7-years, the largest contract ever for a defensive free agent. And Haynesworth is an invaluable contribution to this NFC East defensive line – he is fast, huge, instinctive, and can plug the run and sniff out a QB.

As Haynesworth was carted off the field today, the broadcaster’s thoughts went to the "investment" made by Daniel Snyder, who is known for throwing around large sums of money, along with coaches and players as well. But it would do injustice to view the injury of Haynesworth – who arrived with a reputation for being injury-prone – as merely unlucky.

Dan Snyder

The problem lies not so much with unfortunate circumstance but with poor underlying philosophy. The real question is why Snyder put himself in a position where he was relying on one $100 million player, rather than 2 or 3 solid players who could build depth into the roster. It’s an issue of being myopic. Of foregoing long-term value for a short-term payoff.

George McPhee

By means of contrast the city of Washington has Capitals GM George McPhee, whose philosophy of building their hockey team from the ground-up may transform the way in which sports teams are run.

Hockey teams – unlike football ones – are much more prone to being transformed by one star player. And in 2005, that star player for the Caps was Alex Ovechkin. But underneath the media circus that followed him, McPhee focused on building his team from the ground-up.

In 2003, he scrapped the team’s premier line-up of aging veterans and fading stars. He acquired younger talent, particularly focusing on the Caps’ minor league team, the Hershey Bears. McPhee explicitly eschewed short-term success:

“For starters, I should say that rebuilding and talking about being patient is easier said than done,” said McPhee. “We had a plan. It was to tear down a team and build it back up.

“The program taken to ownership (Ted Leonsis) was a four-year plan. The plan was to be back in the playoffs by then and start to contend. We made it in three years, but we were prepared to need four.”

Snyder's Brand

Over Snyder’s first 4 years, he cycled through 3 head coaches; each acquisition of a new head coach brought promises of the start of a new era of Redskins glory. In reality, Snyder was merely taking potshots into the dark – as he did with new big-ticket players – hoping that one of his moves would hit the jackpot. Not only did that not occur, but the inconsistency only helped to further break down the franchise into a gathering of high-paid stars rather than a cohesive team.

The only break to his sporadic movements came in 2004 when he was able to lure former Redskins coach and local legend Joe Gibbs out of retirement for a few seasons. Following Gibbs’ second retirement, it is not clear whether we will see a return to Snyder's old ways.

The twist is that Snyder – a self-proclaimed longtime Redskins’ fan – is known as a shrewd businessman, his rise to the top marked by executive stints with Six Flags, Johnny Rockets, and Red Zebra Broadcasting. Over his tenure he has made the Redskins one of the most valuable football teams. According to Forbes’ yearly rankings, the Redskins are currently the 2nd most valuable NFL team; they are surrounded on the list by teams that actually win like the Cowboys (ranked first), Patriots (third), and Giants (fourth). And yet Snyder's attempts to build the Redskins are anything but business-savvy, resembling something like a series of get-rich-quick schemes.

Long Term Value

Buried in this expensive mess of a football team are a few life-lessons.

All too often, individual crises and incidents are mistaken as causes for subsequent misfortune, rather than effects of past doings. The collapse of the housing market – ingrained in the public’s head as a singular event – was seen as causing the financial collapse, just as the Great Crash is often seen as causing the Great Depression. Underestimated are the factors that led up to such incidents, such as poor housing regulation of the 90’s and irresponsible monetary policy during the 20’s. Some have blamed current circumstances on the government’s willingness to allow Lehman to fall. But as The Economist points out, a Lehman bailout would’ve strained some other part of the economy. An analogy can be made to medicine, which warns of mistaking symptoms for cause of illness.

Long term growth is particularly important in football, much moreso than in hockey. As player-size has increased, so has the frequency of injuries. A 350-pound QB-chewing gorilla on defense can no longer act as a franchise savior, particularly because the sheer size of his frame poses a threat to his own legs and joints.

Another piece of advice is that it is worthless to take individual pot-shots at one’s future. Playing the lottery everyday is never a sound strategy no matter how much money you have.

There is an intellectual component to this as well: Insofar as abstract intelligence contains any value, it should be used carefully and decisively to plan ahead, utilizing current resources as best as possible.

The phenomenon of the one-hit-wonder pop band epitomizes this view. On the one hand, it is possible to produce a singular piece, one moment of greatness, which can strike it big. On the other hand, there is social acknowledgment regarding the emptiness of a one-hit-wonder. A great band is distinguished from a one-hit-wonder in its ability to produce hit after hit after hit; their work comes from a novel group of artistic minds rather than an from an instance of luck. That’s why it is somewhat rare – but not unheard of – for a non-fiction writer to be a one hit wonder, as his art depends less on muses and spontaneity than on smarts and clarity of mind. It would have been rather odd – afterall – if following the publication of A Brief History of Time, Hawkins suddenly lost his pension for theoretical physics.

The discrepancy between luck and genius is often portrayed in movies like Oceans 11, where heroes will do anything for one last chance at greatness, one last opportunity to strike it big. Their failure in these stories is marked by their myopic view: If your whole future relies on one individual con operation, one publication, one game, one football player – or even just one decision, to be made by yourself or by someone else – then you cannot blame your failure (or success) on the outcome of that one event. Rather, you are to blame for putting yourself in the sort of situation in which so much rests on so little. This is why in the best of Aristotelian tragedies the fault lies with character, not with circumstance.

Inhibitions

Of course one cannot downplay the counterargument, particularly when it comes to living in the moment. People do win the lottery, corporations do get windfall profits, and individual athletes do save franchises.

Digging a little deeper, a primitive breakdown of the human brain reveals that its more advanced regions – the ones that distinguish human intelligence – are inhibitory in nature. In a sense, drug intoxication prevents these higher areas from functioning, leading to a lack of inhibitions.

The term lacking inhibition has cultural connotations, but it’s backed by science as well. It is a very awkward phrase when you think about it, as it implies that getting drunk or high doesn’t so much cause you to do stupid actions, as it prevents you from inhibiting those stupid actions. In the drunkard, inhibitory functions of the advanced brain are temporarily disabled; in an individual with brain damage, they’re permanently disabled.

This ties into constructs of depression and anxiety, which are often conceptualized as an over-activation of these parts of the brain: Stress is often caused by thinking too much and an inability to live in the now. Just as alcohol can turn off those advanced parts of the brain, so can other feel-good drugs, prescription or otherwise. This is all a simplification of course, but the point is to get a good look at principles that underlie long-term valuation.

Personally I tend to over-intellectualize things at times, but after seeing Haynesworth face down in the grass this afternoon, I couldn’t rid my mind of this notion of long-term value. Perhaps it is my way of not wanting deal with the Redskins’ pitiful loss to the worst team in the NFL.

'It's Not Whether you Win or Lose, But How you Play the Game'

This phrase is often seen as a euphemism to justify losing a game. And yet there is much about it that escapes the eye, such as its focus on process over outcome. The phrase usually refers to the team that loses a well-played game, but equally important is the team that wins a poorly-played game.

The latter was exactly the case last week, when the Redskins barely beat the Rams, a team whose mediocrity places them in the same class as the Lions. Embodying the phrase were the home fans’ boos to the Redskins following a touchdown-less 9-7 victory over the Rams, which was no less the home game opener.

Not unlike chess – albeit minus its us-them mentality – sound judgment and decision-making require a sober look into the future, combined with a gathering of relevant knowledge and resources, and a respect for dissenters. In many contexts - such as the price of a stock - current circumstance is only important insofar as it speaks to future value. In this sense, winning a poorly played game does more harm than good.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Albert Haynesworth; (2)Daniel Snyder; (3)McPhee Scowls Down, 05/01/2009, by cyldeorama; (4)An Angry Jim Zorn; (5)IH161460, 05/21/2009, chickhawkdown; (6)Arizona Lottery and Powerball, 04/22/2008, by Monte Mendoza; (7)Poster from 2001 movie Oceans 11; (8) 20060508 - Carolyn's MRI - Image 8 of 15 - Detailed Carolyn brain, 08/26/2006, Rev. Xanatos Satanicos Bombasticos (ClintJCL); (9)Depression, 05/18/2008, stillstressed; (10)Lombardi Pride, 08/25/2007, akahodag.

Video: (1)Video of the song Sunshine (Adagio in D Minor), from Space Ambient channel, song by John Murphy, from the 2007 movie Sunshine.

On Parables and Parabolas

2009-09-23T22:57:00.012-04:00

Maya Angelou recently spoke at the NIH, where she weaved stories of her life. The speech was well-attended, its topic nebulous (“An Afternoon with”), its tone heart-warming.

Science professors often advise their students to tell a story. This is meant to unstuck students’ spinning minds, to get them thinking on a human-level, and to get them to contextualize results. “What’s the story here?” is often asked in response to research proposals and developing ideas. The question works so well that it’s become a cliché. The presumption being that there’s always a story, it’s just a question of finding it.

But the deeper presumption is that research is akin to storytelling. This interpretation over-stretches the all-too-often well-intended “what’s the story here?”, but it also uncovers the underlying dissonance between stories and research: Namely that stories are experiential while science is analytic.

When discussing scientific findings with fellow human beings, telling a research story never hurts, and certainly stories can help us get a glimpse at nature’s hidden clockwork. But at the same time they remain relatively indifferent towards nature herself, whose eternal laws and associations are not so whimsical as to be formed upon experience.

In this sense, scientific truth – the pursuit of which involves upending paradigms, half-truths, and rigid minds, albeit with Heidegger’s vision of our convergence towards the truth as if it were just beyond the horizon, all making for quite a story – in and of itself couldn’t be further from a story. In handling such truths, we need be imaginative yet thoughtful and delicate, lest we crudely weld man-made constructs of nature to fit into man-made stories. The later unfortunately is done all the time, even in science, and after long enough it strikes reality with a harsh dissonance. It is called wishful thinking.

-KJ

The World's 2nd Largest Economy

2009-09-17T11:04:00.004-04:00

There are signs of what some call “a collective identity crisis” in Japan. Income disparity, growing numbers of impoverished pensioners and child poverty.

Tough economic times have highlighted the potential of developing nations, China in particular, while Europe is seen as bulky and traditional, struggling to keep up with the Jonses. Japan however is overlooked – still thought to be a victim of its ‘lost decade’ – and now – seen by some – as the setting for a modern portrayal of The Grapes of Wrath. The Economist goes on to say

Hamamatsu, a coastal town south-west of Tokyo, has its share of shattered lives. Workers were laid off right down the supply chain almost as soon as home-town outfits like Yamaha and Suzuki saw export orders slump last year. The lay-offs included many Brazilians of Japanese descent, who had flown to Japan because factories needed cheap, part-time labour rather than expensive Japanese workers on full contracts. The jobless Brazilians live with each other if they cannot pay the rent, and the church provides the neediest with food parcels. At a Catholic church recently, they were making soup to share among those, like themselves, eking out the last of their savings. That included homeless Japanese men, who, unlike the Brazilians, cannot face turning to friends or family for shelter.

Halfway through the feature, I was shocked to read that unemployment in Japan is 5.7%, “low by international standards but a record in Japan.”

Humans perpetually struggle to improve our lot in life – that’s half of the fun in living, at least half the time. When relating to fellow human beings, it’s unfair withhold empathy based on another's lot in life. Afterall, suffering is relative – no matter how bad things are they can always get worse – and suffering is subjective: Its existence cannot be denied.

And yet I could not get this 5.7 figure out of my mind. Unemployment in the US – considered dangerously high – is nearing 10%. The discrepancy points to the relative - perhaps subjective - nature of seemingly objective statistics. There’s a tendency to grasp for numbers as undeniable facts, as stable pieces of evidence which pin us to the ground in an ever shifting world. And used with care they're invaluable.

But consider now the size of this discrepancy – unemployment in the US being around 40% higher than in Japan – next to Japan’s parallel economic struggles and identity crisis: In some ways we are completely different from Japan and yet in other ways very like them. And don’t forget that Japan’s economy remains the second largest in the world.

KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Hamamatsu Castle, 11/12/2008, Pine 57; (2)Poster from 2003 film, Lost in Translation.

Video: (1) Music video, shpytahmon channel, by the Gorillaz of the song "Hong Kong" from their 2007 album D-Sides.

The Right to Eat Unfortified Foods and Health Care Reform

2009-09-06T00:08:00.013-04:00

Scientists have begun to question the benefits of consuming too much folic acid. Potential risks relate to new estimates on how long it takes the liver to convert folic acid (“56 times slower than previously thought”); its ability to mask particular types of anemia; and an increased risk in “accelerating the growth of existing cancers.” Unlike strained arguments for health care reform, this really is an issue that affects us all: The FDA requires folic acid fortification in staple foods like breads and cereals.

The FDA’s original report on the matter (from 1999) reasons that folic acid fortification prevents neural tube defects among pregnant women. Even if the risks of over-consuming folic acid are all made up, the logic still escapes me for why everyone’s daily bread has to be modified.

The controversy regarding folic acid is just unfolding, and in all fairness it remains on the fringes of mainstream medicine. But you can feel a strong uneasiness on both sides of the issue: The conventional medical opinion says that folic acid fortification is a miracle of public health and you shouldn’t scare the public into believing half-truths. The opposing view, well, implies that poor regulations actively poison us through our food.

It’s too soon to jump to conclusions, but the fear of scaring the public with new info is almost always unfounded. We’re smart enough to figure things out for ourselves. If there is true skepticism about the benefits of folic acid, then we need to hear it. Afterall, we’re the ones who are being forced to consume it.

The debate raises more fundamental questions however about medical regulation, the role of government, medical science, and the rights of food consumers. It is somewhat ironic that we scrutinize new prescription medications given to subsets of the population, and yet gloss over widespread regulations such as this one, which asks the entire population to eat a synthetic diet as if they were all expecting babies.

As the health reform debate rages on, expect similar shortcut solutions, which attempt to lower health care costs through such non-conventional interventions. Already we are seeing calls to increase vitamin D and folic acid in our diet, while decreasing other ingredients that medicine deems harmful, at least at the current moment. Such actions need to be scrutinized carefully and at all levels of action, including the chance that fortification will help those who need it most, and that it'll insure that the vitamins and minerals are actually metabolized. Large-scale epidemiological studies need to make sure that negative health correlates to low levels of vitamins and minerals aren't confounded by low consumption of products like orange juice and enriched flour.

In fixing health care, there's a strong push-and-pull between ensuring that patients have the personalized attention they need, and treating everyone the same. The solution however needs to err on the personalized approach, because treating everyone the same is no way to give people what they need. Indeed, the more we try to treat everyone the same – be it by putting us all on the same medical plan, or force-feeding vitamins and minerals – the more unintentional consequences will result.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)[Wonder Bread], 02/21/2009, Werklife; (2)Big Brother, 01/03/2008, Ian Geldard; (3)Vitamin water + energy, 05/25/2007, Ryan.

Reagan Revolution 2.0?

2009-09-02T19:28:00.009-04:00

Repetition of history is often a given. The question is not so much whether, but how and when. To the latter, our accelerated technology driven world might answer: “Sooner than you think.”

Of particular interest is the similarity between today’s pattern of economic-political events and those of the 1970’s and 80’s: Both involved broad Republican power leading to their by overreach and loss of power; the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression; England's return to conservatism. In the late 1970's, the last event preceded America's return to the Right as well. We've yet to see if the same shoe will drop today.

In 1974 Nixon left office on the heels of the largest political scandal in American history. He left the economy in sharp recession, and although you can’t blame a recession on any one person, his poor economic policy certainly didn’t help. Bitter aftertaste from Watergate allowed the Democratic Party to take charge with Jimmy Carter. The economy continued to slump over Carter’s term, while England grew restless and the conservatives took charge. Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979, and shortly thereafter Reagan was elected in 1980 – their combination sparking the “Reagan revolution”.

Today’s sequence of events, although not the exact same, shares some uncanny similarities: W Bush left office in 2009 widely unpopular. It was not due to scandal per se, but there was a palpable sense that, similar to what occurred under Nixon, the Republican Party had gained a whole lot of power and under his lead shot itself in the foot, a blow from which it’s still recovering. Similar to Nixon, Bush also left the economy in a state of disrepair; and although you can’t blame a recession on any one person, Bush’s previous policies (particularly on housing) certainly didn’t help.

England is also witnessing a hard and abrupt shift towards Conservatism, one of historic proportion. The immediate cause of this is the expenses scandal, but that can only explain for so much. It is important to view such developments as non-coincidental, particularly in a democracy: Sometimes people need a reason to turn against a party on a dime. Sometimes parties in power become complacent. In following sequence, it is worth asking whether, similar to the late 1970's, England's conservative shift will precede the same in America.

Although one shouldn’t jump to conclusions, it’s difficult not to compare today’s events with those of the 1970’s and ‘80’s. The speculative implication, of course, is that a conservative Reagan-like personality will emerge come next presidential election.

Avoiding such fantastical speculation, the analogy further likens Obama to Carter, a president who is frequently conceptualized as a failed idealist: Perhaps one with the right mind, but in the wrong place at the wrong time to use it to address crisis after crisis.

It is still too soon to judge Obama – and the public, likewise, is giving him his due time to perform. But emerging recently – and well written in a series of Economist articles focusing on areas in which his efforts have been stifled by poor execution and lack of detail and foresight – is a lingering suspicion that Obama will leave the country in no better shape than when he entered office.

This seed of lingering suspicion grows much bigger in light of the soaring popularity with which he entered office, particularly among young people. Such a failure should it occur would be seen as widely symbolic as his election. And such a failure should it occur would no doubt leave the Oval Office wide open for a rising Republican star (perhaps along the likes of Bobby Jindal).

At present Obama’s legacy remains to be written in stone. But time is running out. Much of it will rest on his performance over this upcoming year: “Crunch Time” as The Economist puts it. In the meanwhile Americans continue to hold their breath.

Judging from output alone, it took over 10 years for the US economy to return to pre-1974 levels. These sorts of recessions have a way of working themselves out but only in the very long run. Such is often the time required for an economy to unwind and reposition itself, a process which arguably took the whole of Reagan’s first presidential term. That the rate of job and capital loss will slow down is a given, but it’s very unlikely that we’ll see the economy prop itself back up over the next few years. The speculative implication is that the recovery won’t begin until at least the next presidential term.

The worst of the crisis is likely over. And yet we still find ourselves at a crossroads with little indication of where we might be heading. Only history will be able to tell us if we’ve been here before.

-KJ
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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Richard Nixon; (2)Jimmy Carter; (3)Ronald Reagan; (4)The Economist, April 1st 2009 Cover; (5)Hazy Trees, Katwingz20.

Video: (1)Carter Crisis in Confidence Excerpt from 1979 speech, 11/11/2008, metbans.

Reality Check

2009-08-23T01:33:00.009-04:00

For perhaps the first a time, a foreword to a book prevented me from buying it. I was pretty close to buying it. In fact, after thoroughly browsing it, I was bringing the book down the escalator to purchase it. I usually don’t even read forewords, but this one caught my mind. What follows is a discussion about my distaste of that foreword, proceeded by a wider discussion of what matters in life and what doesn't.

The book was Guy Kawasaki’s Reality Check: A compilation of his best work, intended to serve as a comprehensive business start-up manual, an update of his previous publications, and a scattered best-of writings collection.

Kawasaki was one of Macintosh’s first marketers, famous for creating Apple evangelism through ads such as his 1984 spin-off.

His idea, in a nutshell, is that you should try to change the world with your product. Don’t hold back. Don’t be modest.

Moreover, simply from browsing his work, he is undeniably quotable and insightful, a sort of philosopher for ADHD-driven capitalism.

Riding down the escalator, I couldn’t help but notice the foreword, titled Foreword 1.0 followed by Foreword 2.0, both written by “Daniel Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs”.

Explaining the reason for publishing an updated Foreword 2.0 for the first edition of the book is a sort of foreword to Foreword 2.0:

What follows is the best foreword in the history of business books. It came about because shortly after Dan wrote the first foreword, he announced that he was discontinuing Fake Steve Jobs. I begged him to write one last piece as Fake Steve Jobs – what an honor that would be for my book! Fortunately, he agreed, and so Reality Check has not one but two forewords.

As you can imagine, I was intrigued, and proceeded to read the 2 forewords. At first they seemed somewhat interesting. Lyons (or whoever) opens by describing Silicon Valley as “the American dream on Red Bull and steroids.” He proceeds to discuss how unique Kawasaki is, essentially asking the reader to take his word that he’s a great guy.

It was Foreword 2.0, however – “the greatest in the history of business books” – that thoroughly turned me off. In it, Lyons brags to the reader that he hasn’t read the book because he doesn’t read books. Elaborating: “I wish this book had been around when I was starting Apple in 1976. I’m sure I wouldn’t have read it, but still it would have been nice if it had been around back then…”

A more played out joke in Foreword 2.0 is that Lyons associates Kawasaki the person with Kawasaki the motorcycle company. In fact, this takes up the majority of Foreword 2.0’s two and a half pages, as Lyons tries to applaud Kawasaki but keeps coming back to motorcycles.

I’m not one to take life too seriously, but there is an underlying current to everything intellectual – I’d expect, least of all, a marketer such as Kawasaki to realize this: That you may glamorize or skew the presentation of any product, but the central piece nonetheless remains the product.

The foreword left a particularly bad taste in my mouth because too often in life people are prone to overlook the underlying content due to less important factors – like when people are more concerned about their ego than the truth, or when leaders become more concerned about power than their driving mission. Had Stalin really been pursuing communism for the common good of his people, then he would have remained in tune with their condition. Bill Gates is not famous because he harnesses the strength of thousands of employees; he is famous for his insight that personal computers may be of use to the average individual, and then acting on that. People come and go, and controlling them is easy; but the truth stays the same.

The distinction between such matters – although hardly clear-cut – is widely recognized in society. It’s reflected in the Biblical distinction between the wheat and the chaff:

He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. (Luke, 3:16-18)

There’s a sense of not only superficiality, but tragedy when one gets lost chasing the chaff, which is merely the outer cover of the kernel that humans inevitably seek.

Underlying the notion of marketing evangelism, or the bit that I understand of it, isn’t making your product out to be more than it is; rather, it is convincing people of its true worth and its wide-reaching potential impact. The point is not to do this in a kitsch manner – “buy this Hallmark card, it’ll change your life” – but to remain genuine, albeit while pushing the envelope. Afterall, insofar as typing on and programming a computer maybe a daily extension of one’s mind, an alternative operating system really might get you to “think different”.

But opening a book with a person joking around about how he hasn't read the book, but loves the guy, even though his name sounds like motorcycles, certainly does the exact opposite for Kawasaki what “think different” campaigns did for Apple.

I hardly need to expound on the tongue-in-cheek idea of evangelical capitalism - with it's implication being that rifts between commercial operating systems rival those between religions. But in the spirit of not selling ideas short, good products really can change lives for the better, even if they don't quite live up to the salvation of the human soul. Such ideas, if they are to be one's focus, deserve to be treated with a fair amount of respect.

-KJ
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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Cover of Guy Kawasaki's 2008 book, Reality Check; (2)EC-24MAR08 [103], 05/24/2008, by HYPE; (3)After the harvest, 10/08/2007, Lincolian(Brian);(3)Apple_logo_Think_Different, 12/16/2008, Ballistic Coffee Boy; (4)Baptist Church, 11/18/2006, Thomas Hawk.

Video: (1)1984 Apple's Macintosh Commercial, Sean Collier's channel.

Catharsis in the Middle East

2009-08-15T00:34:00.018-04:00

Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude...in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions. (1449[b])

-Aristotle, Poetics

Conflict in the Middle East will probably end in violence. It is difficult to see it going down any other way.

The Economist declares that the Arab World is awaking from a slumber to find itself in the modern world. Such views, common among Western thought these days, are poorly thought out. They may offer some insight, but they ignore the scope and intensity of the underlying problem. More importantly, they offer no solution to it. But however you conceptualize things, ignoring the problems won't make them go away.

The Patronizing View

The Economist writes in a special report on the Arab World:

Imagine an Arab Rip Abu Winkle who had fallen into a deep slumber some time in the early 1980s. If he woke up now, he would rub his eyes in disbelief at how little had changed.

Coming off of Iran’s recent election protests, the magazine’s writers see the Arab World as ripe for political and philosophical change. In the face of the region’s common religious-political charges of heresy, they challenge a Middle Eastern academic to spark an intellectual revolution. Jestingly they conclude:

It turns out the French thinker Voltaire probably never uttered the words so often ascribed to him: “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” So the way is clear. Let some Western Muslim sage be the first philosopher to make that pronouncement, and mean it.

The Economist is right to point out the region’s state of transition, but it’s hard to see how the solution lies in a philosophical breakthrough. Furthermore, it's tempting to view the region as absent from the world’s rapid changes over the past 20 years, but the first half of the 20th century saw a similar stagnation in Europe.

Contemporary History

A European Rip Van Winkle who went to sleep after the First World War only to wake up during the Second undoubtedly would’ve had déjà vu. Many of the direct causes of the First World War can be traced further back to the late 1800’s, and its proper resolution lay in the Cold War - all of which arguably stretches the period of European unrest to just shy of a century.

During the years leading up to World War I, Europe has in retrospect been called a powder keg, waiting to explode into violence. It would not be far off to call the modern Arab World a powder keg. And despite the region’s residual violence and ongoing tensions, it doesn’t seem to have exploded yet.

The Arab Rip Abu Winkle who wakes up today should be gravely concerned, similar to the European Rip Van Winkle waking up around World War II. From an outsider’s view – such as The Economist’s – it’s tempting to conclude that nothing has changed in the Arab World; but this cannot be correct from an Arab’s perspective. Dealing with the same issues for nearly 50 years has likely built a huge amount of tension, which has only been released in small doses of short wars, border conflicts, and mini-massacres.

The Arab Rip Abu Winkle who awakes this year, unlike his European counterpart, is unlikely to think that little has changed, as if all of the strife is a trifle annoyance preventing him from getting on with his life. He is more likely to think, "Why do my bloodsucking neighbors still roam the earth?"

What Has Changed

In the meanwhile, the West has thrown all the resources and diplomacy into the region that it can, none of which has had appreciable effect. If the definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again without meaningful results, then working on yet another treaty is certainly stupid. By this point wishful diplomacy further carries the risk of alleviating violence in the short-term while failing to solve the underlying problem. Indeed, the longer the underlying problem persists, the more powder is added to the keg.

Disregarding meaningless diplomacy or the rise of an Arab Voltaire, there are a few key factors at play that will determine whether the region falls into bloodshed.

First, the region is getting younger. The baby boomer phenomenon in the West has been echoed throughout the world through dramatic jumps in the average lifespan. Older generations throughout the world are yielding to younger ones. This transition is even further delayed in developed nations, where average lifespan is longest. But it has already occurred in 2nd world areas like the Middle East, where over half the population is entering their 30’s.

The world is just beginning to witness this transition, as seen in Iran’s election protests. The near future of the Middle East rests in the hands of the young. If the region erupts in bloodshed, it will be their doing. If nations lay down their arms, it will be their doing as well.

The protests might signal that the new generation is growing tired of the old regimes, and may consequently be less violent than their ancestors. Moreover, Israel’s culture, in many respects, is known as being surprisingly secular.

But forgetting such violent past grievances is easier said than done. Contemporary history doesn’t suggest that peace will do a good job at burying the hatchet.

A second but less critical factor is the global recession. The Middle Eastern economy is disproportionally reliant on oil, making it overly sensitive to fluctuations in world demand while eschewing other forms of internal economic growth (a phenomenon known as Dutch Disease). Unemployment is particularly high among Arab youth, which further worsens its prospects for peace.

Looking Forward

In a famous piece, American-Egyptian columnist Mona Eltahawy called Israel the opium of the Middle East; the statement was made in the same sense that Karl Marx called religion the opiate of the masses. She claimed that the conflict has blinded the region from pursuing more virtuous goals by influencing each nation to play the victim.

The conflict certainly has taken their gaze off of more noble aims, but the region is hardly in a pain-free euphoric state, even be it artificially induced. The conflict with Israel is hardly intoxicating, and it hasn't trumped more noble other pursuits simply because it's easier. It's trumped these other pursuits because it has remained red hot with intensity for nearly half a century.

All hope is not lost for a peaceful solution. But whatever that solution may be, it will have to genuinely come from within the region; patchwork external solutions merely risk making things much worse. The greatest source of hope lies in the new younger generation, who are just beginning to take power. At the same time, their young hubris remains an even greater risk for volatility.

Catharsis

Modern day relations between European nations might not seem like anything special, but it's no coincidence that Europe's current peacefulness arrived off the heels of almost a century of cyclical violence and tension. The devastation of two World Wars, followed by the bitter taste of the Cold War, thoroughly purged Europe. The world will have to wait and see whether the Middle East need undergo a similar purging of her own.

But again, tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design. (1449[b])

-Aristotle, Poetics

-KJ
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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Issue cover for July 25th Economist; (2)Montage Main Page; (3)WWI ChartX: A diagrammatic illustration of European political alliances in the period leading up to the First World War, depiction of Europe's preWWI "powder keg" from Wikipedia; (4)Will it ever stop?, 06/28/2009, Clar@bell; (5)TL032318, 06/03/2008, Ava Pearl; (6)Oedipus at Colonus by Jean-Antoine-Theodore Giroust 1788 French Oil, 11/10/2006, mharrsch. for the World War I Wikipedia.

Music: (1)Video, 10/30/2007 Basketballerke, of the song "Broken Chord Can Sing a Little" from the 05/27/2000 album He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corners of Our Rooms by the band A Silver Mt. Zion.

Healthcare: Time, Money, and Details

2009-07-27T21:41:00.024-04:00

Capitol Hill is filled with buzz about Obama’s rushed health care proposal, intended to overhaul the current system. But as politicians portray healthcare with broad rhetorical brushstrokes, they continue to overlook a plethora of details that unnecessarily inflate its cost. A less publicized news item from last week was the annannouncement that the FDA will delay their final decision on Ampligen – the leading drug for the treatment of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) – until this fall. The FDA announced that the delay was due to staffing problems.

Submitting Ampligen’s application is Hemispherx, a small biotech company that has researched the drug for nearly 3 decades. Like a handful of similar companies, their future solely depends on the FDA’s forthcoming decision. All of the clinical trials are complete. The drug’s application was accepted for review just over a year ago, which would make the FDA’s turnaround time over a year and a half. Judging from Hemispherx’s annual operating costs, the FDA’s delay by itself will cost them a total of approximately $15 million.

The FDA’s mission is largely to protect the public from harmful drugs, however critics demonstrate that their overcautious ways do more harm to the public than good. Their delays have cost the public thousands of more lives than they have saved, along with making them unpopular among most practicing physicians.

Even if you believe in the FDA’s mission, then it is hard to overlook the sheer inefficiency and waste that they introduce to healthcare. Clinical trials for new drugs take about 10 years, but even after all the data is in – as is the case with Ampligen – it often takes up to 1 more year for them to make a final decision. FDA delays are not-too-unexpected, but they have still hit Hemispherx hard.

Following each FDA delay, Hemispherx announced new efforts to raise more cash. Currently they are operating like a bear in hibernation, placed on life-support.

Given the millions of dollars lost due to FDA "staffing issues", one strategy might be to give them more staff. They might have applicants pay directly for these staffing issues, but the FDA already receives hundred of millions of dollars worth of fees; supplemented with more money by Congress, fees from private companies consist of half of their drug approval budget. Why these fees aren't enough to reduce the decision time to under 12-months isn't clear.

But the real problem, as discussed above, is with the structure of the FDA and the responsibilities placed on them. As drugs like Vioxx prove to be more dangerous than people could have guessed, the FDA has taken part of the blame; in response they have received more money and power, but this hasn’t led to marked improvement, accuracy, or efficiency.

Determining the safety of drugs can be particularly tricky, but there is only so much that you can ask for: Did the clinical trials meet their endpoints? Were there side-effects? Is there any reason to believe that there might be additional risks? Even if it takes 10 years of research to answer these quesitons, it should not take an additional year to intrepret the results: Either the end points were met or they weren't; there are side-effects or there aren't; there are reasons to consider additional risks or there aren't. These questions are not black-and-white, but following 10 years of required research (and often more), an additional year to make the decision - supposedly filled with heated internal regulatory debate - is not likely to find anything new.

As with most jobs, the problem lies not so much with the staffing, but with the structure of the organization. The main question is whether their mission – to approve and oversee every single drug (and many foods) on the marketplace – would be feasible, even if they had a large army of scientists at their disposal.

Science, like anything in life, obeys laws of diminishing returns: Beyond a certain threshold, the more you study one particular thing, like a drug, the less return in greater knowledge you'll receive for your efforts. Going back to the Voixx example, how many more years of clinical trials, and how much more power and money granted to the FDA, would have better assured its safety?

The assumption being placed on the FDA is that more research and regulation is better, regardless of the specific types of research and regulation being carried out. This is the same mistake that has been applied to the SEC for years, whose added regulations over the years tends to favor red tape, paper work, and superfluous committee-creating over investigatory manpower.

Currently drugs like Ampligen wander through a maze like patients lost in the healthcare system, knowing where they want to go but not being able to get there. And likewise they incur quite a cost – in the case of Ampligen, an added 18 months and about $15 million, assuming, of course, that the drug is even accepted. On top of decades of research and piles of paperwork, does it really take an additional 18 months and $15 million to judge a drug? The frustrating part is that much of this could be avoided either by cutting back on new drug requirements; somehow lowering the cost to big pharma of drug approval; or at least greasing the FDA's wheels in any manner that would make them more - not less - efficient. As it is, patients along their way are forced to pay for these costs, which are often more attributable to regulatory stuckiness than to added value.

Any improvement in healthcare requires us to look at the factors driving up its cost, rather than further re-distributing costs that already exist. In this environment, small companies like Hemispherx - who can survive 30 years researching just one drug - exist not because of the current healthcare system, but in spite of it. Indeed, in what other private industries is it common for a company to go decades without a product? Such gargantuan human efforts are testament to our need for better healthcare, not for better government intervention.

-KJ

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Note: Long position held in HEB.

Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Day 20, 1/20/2009, Richard; (2)Ampligen PR; (3)Healthcare, hospital, doctor, 04/22/2009, Anoto Group; (4) corridor, 04/10/2005, sumit.

The Future of News

2009-07-12T23:51:00.012-04:00

So much for Objective Journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here - not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail

I recently started getting magazines again. Specifically, The Economist and Consumer Reports. Both have proved to be surprisingly insightful.

Leading up to this decision, I had been on a 10 year magazine-hiatus since my teens, when I received Reason and Sports Illustrated. I never read the issues with any regularity, and this left me with a trifle of guilt upon their arrival. When I started college I left behind magazines for good (along with TV) and I completely lost touch with current events. It was embarrassing at times. Like when I wondered why Jim Carey was challenging incumbent president George Bush.

But my real beef with magazines was that I didn’t care about the news. What I craved was insight.

News is temporal, it changes with the scenery. I was reminded of this whenever we visited my grandparents at their Floridian retirement community. The poor residents of that community were barraged with reports of murder and petty crimes. Local news channels invariably resembled Cops, with scenes of police car lights burring at night. Undoubtedly this all appealed to the worn out memory and attention of the elderly, who might as well have been watching reruns of the same broadcast over and over again.

After I decided to return to magazines, it took me months to make my first decision. I ended up going with The Economist, and then Consumer Reports, and I couldn’t be happier with them.

The 2 magazines reflect upon each other in a unique manner. Whenever I go from reading one to the other I feel a nice dissonance.

The Economist is filled with 15-page world and topical surveys. Articles regularly include sweeping statements like this one:

De Tocqueville, in his optimistic phase, said that “the greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” America has succeeded brilliantly in repairing the ancestral fault of racism. Thirty-six years after Richard Nixon casually remarked that “there are times when an abortion is necessary…when you have a black and a white,” America elected the child of a black father and a white mother to the presidency. The new administration is trying to correct some of the excesses of the Bush years, much as Ronald Reagan corrected the excesses of the Carter years. (Lexington, July 09)

As noted in a recent Atlantic article, the genius behind The Economist lies in synthesizing, interpreting, and digesting current events, rather than barraging the reader with breaking news or unique scoops.

The Economist prides itself on cleverly distilling the world into a reasonably compact survey….As a result, although its self-marketing subtly sells a kind of sleek, mid-last-century Concorde-flying sangfroid, The Economist has reached its current level of influence and importance because it is, in every sense of the word, a true global digest for an age when the amount of undigested, undigestible information online continues to metastasize. And that’s a very good place to be in 2009.

Such a style of non-objective journalism is certainly prone to pitfalls, but at its best it can be truly enlightening. In The Economist, news is not simply reported for the sake of being news. The best stories link news items to grander constructs and themes. World leaders and CEOs are portrayed as human characters on the world stage. Modern themes playing out are tied to their semi-distant historical roots. Overall trends are elucidated, regardless of whether they are obvious or not. Sometimes the best things to point out are those which are obvious. A friend of mine once commented that what he loved about John Madden’s style of football broadcasting is that he’s not afraid to hark on the obvious. The Economist often excels at doing just that.

Permeating its writing is a supra-macroeconomic perspective (laid out imperfectly in their publication, Making Sense of the Modern Economy). For a while this approach struck me as too unfocused and general. Unlike magazines that are topical, niche, or partisan, it’s difficult to describe. But over time it began to click. The effect is similar to the historian who cries that history repeats itself, only it pulls not from history, but from disparate areas of the world, discussing the sorts of trends, similarities, and contrasts that you might expect to hear from a small group of smart and well-experienced travelers. One example was their insight, critical of America’s drug war, that Mexican drug violence is largely caused by Clinton-era success against Colombian drug czars (On the trail of the traffickers, 05/05/2009)

Consumer Reports in contrast is an expose of detail. Issues feature 20-page specials on kitchen appliances and cars. The advice is so concrete that you can taste its utility: “Stainless [steel refrigerators] might look inviting at the store. But it smudges easily and requires frequent wipe-downs. Clear-coated stainless or faux-stainless vinyl coatings are easier to keep clean.” (p. 27, August 2009 issue). Or “Toto’s Ultra Max II [water-efficient toilet], $510, is among those that use just 1.28 gallons per flush. But clearing the blue dye in our liquid test took two flushes, or a whopping 2.6 gallons.” (p. 47, same issue).

The magazine is geared towards that shopping maven side of you who is looking to make the wisest consumer decision. But its real value comes in teaching you how to think on a very basic level.

The death of news media - many fear - will lead to the end of the well-informed American citizen, who is now more likely to get free news on the internet that to tune into a TV station or buy a newspaper. Following Iran's election protests, The Economist declared, "Twitter 1, CNN 0". Yet we are not witnessing the death of the news industry, so much as its reformation. Gone is the demand for late-breaking news at ones fingertips or on the TV screen. In its place, however, is the need for a more interpretive spin on the news - one which doesn't tell us everything that is happening in the world, but rather is more selective by telling consumers only those news items that they need to know, and perhaps why they need to know it.

For now the media industry - particularly newspapers - is running scared, and no doubt many journalists will lose their job due to lessening demand for such broad coverage. But taking their place are slimmer media outlets that have the capability to not only inform their customers, but to sharpen their wit while they're at it. The mind of the average American news junkie won't so much be an encyclopedia of miscellaneous facts - ranging from local carjackings and rape trials to state elections and abortion debates - but rather it will need to become more discerning, organized and fluid in its abilities. In response to the current adrenaline pocked ADHD news industry, this change will be for the better.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)magainze pile, 05/30/2007, quietjenn; (2)Clocked at 67 mph/124km, 07/23/2006, runswithscissors; (3)Blue Marble, 11/28/2007, acbo; (4)Hard drive clock, 02/16/2009, Jack AZ; (5)Consumer Reports Testing Facility, 01/22/2009, ZRec.

Video: (1)Toilet Paper Testing from Consumer Reports, 03/30/2009, Consumer Reports channel.

The Future of the Economy

2009-07-03T20:47:00.012-04:00

The untold story of the financial crisis is the transition from manufacturing to services. This won’t mean the death of the economy – as some skeptics proclaim - and it shouldn’t even come as a surprise.

Historical View

To gain some perspective, the Great Depression had a similar underlying theme as the country transitioned from farming to manufacturing. Agricultural products were considered tangible necessitates; the rugged American farmer was seen as a cornerstone of the economy; and, it was argued, the country’s best interest lay in keeping the farmer alive. Supporting the farmer was considered patriotic – the same sort of pathos which, ironically, we currently see in the manufacturing sector.

The sequence of events was remarkably similar to that of America’s car companies – a former leading industry begins to falter during an economic boom, depression hits, and it suddenly implodes.

Looking back, we can at least feel some comfort that, as useless as our current attempts to bail out the Big 3 have been, they pale in comparison to the damage caused by trying to salvage the farming industry. Leading the way was the Federal Farm Board (FFB), which was setup before the crash.

The FFB began with $500 million dollars dedicated for loans to farmers. After the Great Crash, prices for agricultural products, like most consumer goods, took a nose-dive. Farmers complained that they couldn’t turn a profit. The FFB was then placed in the awkward position of trying to keep farmers alive while raising the prices of their goods. In order to accomplish the latter, they tried to limit farmers’ output by buying and storing huge quantities of agriculture goods, encouraging farmers not to farm, and going so far as to encourage the destruction of farmland. In 1930 it even tried to raise cotton prices by seizing 1.25 million bales of cotton for 1 year; this had no effect on the price.

Tangibility of Services

I imagine that before the Great Depression, one could make the same argument against the foreseeable manufacturing revolution as one can make today against the upcoming service-based economy: Services are non-essential and an economy cannot be built on such intangibles.

On the contrary, the only tangibles in any economy are supply and demand. This holds regardless of how concrete a given product is.

Part of the confusion has to do with what, exactly, we mean by services. At times its distinction from manufacturing is blurry. People are also quick to point to failing service sectors – advertising can be lucrative, but its success is strongly tied to that of the overall economy; journalism, another quintessentially American industry, has received a heavy blow; and IT support is overly prone to outsourcing.

These smaller service sectors may reveal some clues, but the central veins of a service-based economy – as key today as auto making became after the Great Depression – are healthcare and education. As intangible as services may seem, the modern American cannot live without these 2 services. They are the bread-and-butter of a service economy.

Healthcare & Education

The rising cost of healthcare and education is heavily debated. Regardless of where you side, it can be agreed upon that a large portion of the cost resides in systematic inefficiencies linked to public policy. At the same time, the mere fact that Americans continue to pay such high costs for healthcare and education is testament to their growing importance.

The importance of these services is forgotten when pundits speak only of the rising “costs” of healthcare and education, although it is forgotten for a good reason. In the final quarter of 2007, for instance, Apple reported revenues of $3.4 billion from iPod sales; and yet you wouldn’t say that during those 3 months the iPod cost the nation $3.4 billion. Yet by means of contrast, what remains alarming about healthcare and education is that, however you look at it, we haven't found a way to let them thrive. Some sectors do flourish, but on the whole the industries really do “cost” the economy quite a lot of money.

Our current problem is that we haven’t figured out a way to integrate these areas into the economy. The question is not “how do we minimize the costs health care and education upon the economy?”, it’s “how do we make them a part of the economy?” Lots of government regulation and subsidies, I suspect, aren’t the answer. But either way the debate is too focused on minimizing their negative impact.

The success of the automobile industry hinged on not only better cars, but on cheaper cars as well – this was the famous recipe to Ford’s success, that he was able to tap an economy of scale. In contrast, healthcare and education in the US are, by any measure, diseconomies of scale. And yet as national employment continues to decline - with manufacturing taking the biggest hit - service-based employment is growing substantially, and projections suggest that it will continue to accelerate with healthcare and education leading the way. Looking forward, it’s hard to imagine a successful future economy without these 2 industries on board.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photos: (1)CROP CIRCLE MAKER - Matthew Williams, 06/07/2007, Mark Berry; (2)USA 2005 (October 1st) Nevada, Reno, National Automobile Museum, 02/25/2008, by Paraflyer; (3)The Causes of the Great Depression/FDR Memorial Site, 09/15/2008, Tony the Misfit; (4)2008AUG121654, 08/12/2009, bootload; (5)Gesundheit, 04/01/2009, by Gunnar Ries; (6)iPod Family, 02/09/2007, by CokeeOrg; (7)Class, 12/04/2007, by Nik Lee.

Honing Capitalism - BAC vs. Fed

2009-06-12T22:56:00.025-04:00

Political rhetoric has moved beyond socialism vs. capitalism. Instead, it centers on how to best hone capitalism for the common good. This insight comes directly from Barrack Obama’s autobiography. And in that context, it might just be semantics, replacing the term “socialism” with “honing capitalism for the common good”. The main difference, however, is that people will often have a definitive stance on socialism; but no one quite knows how to hone capitalism for the common good. This is why the Bank of America / Federal Bank scandal has emerged as bar none the most fascinating subplot of the financial collapse.

The basics of the scandal have been unfolding for some time: In September, BAC announced plans to acquire Merrill Lynch (ML). As the crisis worsened in the winter, BAC considered backing out based on ML’s projected 4th quarter losses. Paulson (previous US Treasury Secretary) and Bernanke (current Fed Chairman) pressured BAC to go through with the deal, threatening to withhold bailout should the economy worsen. BAC complied completing the deal around New Years. 2 weeks later, ML announced astronomical quarterly losses of about $20 billion. This outraged BAC shareholders who blamed CEO Ken Lewis, and Lewis in turn blamed Paulson and Bernanke. On top of all this, recently uncovered emails from the Fed show that they applied much more pressure to BAC than was previously thought, going so far as to threaten to remove Lewis. In the meanwhile, BAC, unsurprisingly, has received upwards of $50 billion in bailout funds, along with guarantees of twice that should they face future losses.

Bernanke and Pualson justified their actions as necessary to avoid widescale financial collapse. Afterall the failure of The Bank of the United States catalyzed the Great Depression in 1930. And it is thought that in order to avoid another Great Depression, we must prevent such large scale failures.

There is one view of history that says it’s determined by large-scale historical events. If you could’ve prevented the event, this line of thought goes, you’d have prevented its consequences. A more subtle view sees large historical events as the effect, rather than cause, of underlying social movement. Going by the latter, it doesn’t matter which large scale events you might prevent, because the underlying problem stays the same.

The BAC/ML merger didn't benefit the greater good at BAC's expense. In some ways, it has made the whole system worse. Going into the crisis, BAC was not only the healthiest bank in America, it belonged to a rare breed of successful commercial banks doing business with tens of millions of everyday people. Loading it up with ML's debt was the equivalent of further dragging down our banking system's best fruits with its worst apples. (Ironically, in 1933 the Glass Stegal act attempted to hone capitalism by doing the opposite, forcing the separation of commercial and investment banking.)

The underlying story of the financial crisis is that institutions which were too big to fail misread their risks and were too interconnected to each other. Fair enough. But to the degree that separate institutions are indeed separate, forcing BAC to merge with ML is simply perpetuating the original problem (of interrelated systemic risk) albeit to the nth degree. Instead of cutting our losses with ML and maintaining one great bank, we have a formerly great bank forced to remain on life-support from the government.

Public bewilderment towards the financial crisis stems partly from the fact that no one quite knows what to do. It makes one nostalgic for the 1980’s when things were as simple – at least in retrospect - as Reaganism and Thatcherism vs. Socialsim. Current economic debate - in contrast to the public’s partisan divide on Obama approval ratings - has become less polarized and ideological, more ambiguous and murky, and more important all at the same time. As Greenspan – a self-described Republican-libertarian - pointed out, his job was similar to those of communist central planners, only he was controlling a relatively smaller piece of the economy.

It’s a point worth repeating that the current depression is more complex than most of us can wrap our minds around. And it reveals one of democracy’s flaws, which is that running a country requires more detailed knowledge than is commonly held by the public. Our successful economic recovery - similar to the post-WWII recovery following the Great Depression - is likely to leave the public with few lasting insights about the economy or how the world works. It’s in this panicked context that we see such strange behavior as the Fed’s pressure to force the BAC/ML merger – a scandal occurring at the main nerve of the crisis, the lasting effects of which are unlikely to be well known by the public and experts alike.

What makes this scandal unique is that it's not quite a financial one, and it is a political scandal but not in the regular sense. What, in the end, did Paulson and Bernanke have to gain by forcing the merger? It wasn't money, votes, or even popularity. It didn't spark public outrage like the Madoff or AIG bonus scandals. And the perpetrators weren't guided by partisan or ideological grounds as in the case of Acorn's voter fraud. Unlike any of the previous examples, the perpetrators' motives are not immediately obvious; you have to sit back and think about it before understanding why Paulson and Bernanke felt the need pressure BAC into the merger. And you also have to sit back and think about it before understanding why Paulson and Bernanke's actions were wrong.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Obama at the Texas book festival, 10/28/2006, by Mr. Wright; (2)Bank of America Logo, 08/19/2007, by Neubie; (3)fail, 09/29/2008, by rin3y; (4)Joan of Arc, 08/23/2006, by dbking;(5)Aghast, 08/28/2008, by Daveness98.

Complexity vs Simplicity...and Specialization

2009-05-09T15:31:00.005-04:00

Since I was a kid I’ve had an ongoing debate in my head about whether the world is complicated and hard to understand or whether it’s actually quite simple and straightforward.

I know, it’s a silly question, and of course, the answer is relative to your perspective, or to the question you’re asking, or to what you’re trying to get out of things. Still, though, whenever my head goes down that road of thought – the one that deems the question silly – it’s clearly coming from the analytic – maybe read complex – part of my brain that wants to break everything down and attach qualifiers to everything it sees. That’s the pro-complex side in the debate talking. It deems not only that the world is complex, but, more importantly, that this is whole question is worthless and unfocused because we have to get back to work and figure more things out.

Nonetheless, this little debate has stayed with me for quite some time – almost in a nostalgic sense, like a pop song that you like when you’re young, and as you return to it throughout life it takes on new meanings. I’m not sure what’s fueling it. I think it’s a nagging feeling that life is pretty simple, but we just make things artificially complicated for ourselves. That’s the pro-simple side of the debate. Recently I’ve been erring towards the simple side. Maybe it’s because I need to think less and do more.

But as I think about it more, the problem seems to be that when you look into phenomena, you can either raise more questions or consolidate phenomena. On some level many of us are familiar with both of these outcomes, and at times they go hand-in-hand. The ability to raise more questions is what drives knowledge – it’s that section at the end of a research paper that states future directions for your research; more importantly, it’s that intuitive feeling that the more you learn, the more you discover you don’t know.

And yet we’ve all had that feeling where we solve a problem, life is better, and, well, that’s that.

Although if the drive for knowledge ever became complacent in its footsteps – as if it were to accomplish some new feat, and say to itself, “That’s just what I was looking for. We’ve made such great progress that I feel like I can take a break for a while and bask in the glory of my achievements” – well, then it would have stopped a long time ago.

At the same time, this endless drive forward produces a more fragmentary and disconnected picture of things, where further endeavors become more exacting and less relevant. We’re back at the complicated side of things.

The saving grace is that all of these bits of explanations will eventually be consolidated, somehow sometime. The individual study of such disconnected areas as the color of pigeons, speciation of dogs, beaver dam-building, and barnacles might leave one with an incoherent view of things, but it left Darwin with the puzzle pieces to propose evolution by means of natural selection. For every system of Ptolemaic complexity I presume there must be a Copernican revolution waiting on the other end to fix things. It’s just that the turnaround time can be slow, and that the whole thing only becomes obvious in retrospect.
Most importantly however different fields are more or less open to change, and this is where that nagging pro-simple feeling – that we’re making the world artificially complex – returns. On the one hand, the modern sub-division of scientific fields might actually reflect true scientific progress along with the real nature of the things. On the other hand, there may be artificial or economic reasons for keeping things so complicated. Afterall, the time-consuming credentials required to practice science or medicine inherently pushes those professions towards further specialization. This specialization might not be a bad thing, as per Adam Smith the modern economy is based on it, but it can become suspect when – unlike private or less regulated areas – the costs of entry are greater than the out-going benefits, creating diseconomies of scale like our health care system (or, more questionably, like science...I'll have to think on that one some more).

From another perspective, the pro-simple side of me keeps wondering what that Copernican revolution – or even just a bit of genuine scientific consolidation – would look like in various fields. Its benefits I’d think would have to outweigh the pressures pushing towards specialization.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1), (2), Metamorphosis series by MC Escher; (3) S'more Peeps!, 03/03/2008, by Rory Finnerman;

Video: (1)Music video, from The Beatles 56 Channel, of the song "We Can Work it Out" by The Beatles, released as a 1965 single.

Peep Diorama

2009-04-19T20:48:00.013-04:00

The Washington Post recently had their 3rd annual peeps diorama contest. It consisted of over one thousand artistic renditions of peeps placed in human-like situations. See the gallery slide-show here.

The kitschy Easter marshmallow treats, dressed for the Washington Post contest like humans and placed in culturally resonant context, are surprisingly entertaining. I can't quite put my finger on it. And I hesitate to spin too much interpretation as to overkill the impact of the art. But I can't help but mention in passing of how it speaks to something unique about human perception; to the smallness of our existence pitted against the grandness of our imagination; to our ability to laugh at ourselves; and to the way that inspiration sometimes comes from such strange unpredictable sources - as in this case, from Just Born, a traditional candy manufacturer in Pennsylvania.

On a tangential note, I'm reminded of Virginia Postrell's thesis that there is less of a dichotomy between substance and style than modern society would have you believe. Our modern economy strives to tailor products to willing consumers; and it does this in an infinite number of different ways. The traditional intellectual view is that such is the result of society's vain materialist excesses. Yet it's easy enough to criticize the establishment when you're talking about other people's tastes in general. But in reality, true value is created when you buy a product that is particularly suited to your needs and tastes.

This forms the argument of Postrell's light 2004 book, The Substance of Style, which suggests that people of modern Western society are more developed, sophisticated, and enlightened than our social critics would have us believe. This isn't so much in spite of our materialist nature; rather, in one sense, it's exactly because of it.

Beauty afterall is truth, and truth beauty; and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And though you've probably heard those 2 cliches a million times, they fit together quite well to form a line of inference. In the meantime, I entreat you to view beauty and truth from the brown-speckled eye of the peep.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)another peep on the wall, 02/09/2009, by specialkrb; (2)Cover of Virginia Postrell's 2004 book, The Substance of Style.

Thru Fragments of Cinema: Southwestern Sunshine

2009-04-11T01:41:00.019-04:00

The new movie Sunshine Cleaning is a real Southwestern film: Comedy, drama, slice-of-life, it can’t quite make up its mind, but it all kind of fits together. It’s well-made, but more than anything it made me miss the Southwest.

It’s weird how some places can carve themselves into your heart. It might have been the time and circumstance under which I was in the Southwest. There’s always an understanding that life is an inward journal – that when you experience some new place you’re finding something about yourself. But it is strange how places - being external - can etch themselves upon your personality as if they were people themselves.

That’s how Santa Fe hit me, for the few years I was there. Growing up in the East, each summer we visited one portion of that part of the country for a week, but living in one of them was completely different. I expected that after living in any given city – particularly in America – that after some time, it would just be the same as every other city. Maybe I had that impression from Kerouac’s On the Road - in which lively characters impetuously zigzag across America, searching for something, settling in, getting restless, and moving on, and devouring the American highways in the process.

That might've been a misread of On the Road. To my surprise Santa Fe never quite wore in as I expected it to. The sunsets were one of the first things I noticed. You could see far over the land. The flat dessert and lack of buildings was somehow easier on the eye. I expected to get used to the sun setting. But so many evenings it was completely unique and beautiful as if it was God’s blank canvas. Its wonder might have sunk in some, but never completely.

Around then it struck me – at first explicitly through conversations with people from that side of the county - that America’s landscape is one of its prominent characteristics. At the time I was accustomed to conceptualizing America as a political construct, delineated by Democrat, Republican, and GDP. It was as if it never occurred to me that it was a country as well. The diversity of the American landscape really is one of its most beautiful and unique features.

There were other more subtle differences out West. No one was quite so worried about being on time. Where I grew up, mileage markers on the side of the highway are often posted every tenth of a mile; makers out there are posted every mile. Driving on the interstate you might see signs for your final destination when you have over 500 miles to go.

It’s not bad just different. You learn that sometimes there’s something to be said for a lack of precision. Afterall, when you're in the desert there’s no need to mark the highway every tenth of a mile . Things seemed different when the horizon appeared endless. There was a different sort of beauty. I noticed a different sort of beauty to women as well.

Sunshine Cleaning captures a small piece of that: the wind-swept prettiness of the lead; the way the plot doesn’t wrap up perfectly, but still feels adequate; the loose connections between the characters.

Other films capture the Southwest too. Or, it’s not that they capture it, but they depict it, and think like it. These sorts of films have solidified in my mind as belonging to their own genre. Paris, Texas remains my favorite, which includes more panoramas of the scenery. The Tao of Steve is another. They’re not all great films. Others like Off the Map have struck me as too loopy. Sometimes the Southwest was as well. It’s just open, that’s all. Even Scorsese’s classic Casino gets at it.

I visited Las Vegas once and was awe-struck by how this area of lights, entertainment, and mischief seemed plop in the middle of desert. But I guess where else are you going to put it?

Centered around gambling – you can lose your lifesavings all at once if you’re so inclined - the city almost has a magical feel, until you stay out late a couple of nights and see the intensity of some of the losing ones. You can see it in their eyes. It was uglier in the smaller hotel-casinos located in neighboring Death Valley. There you don’t even have any of the lights and show. And the whole casino would be empty at 1am except for sometimes one or two desperate gamblers who are still pissing away all they’ve got. That side of it all made me feel dirty for just being there.

The city lies opposite – figuratively, and almost geographically - of the Mormon Salt Lake City. It’s almost as if it's there so that when the Utah citizens feel a bit too religiously pure they can soil themselves a bit, or when the gamblers are too in a rut then can cleanse themselves a bit among the Mormons. It’s probably not really like that.

Still though the most impressive aspect of the city is its location – as if an oasis of bubbling human life and distraction and sin in the middle of an infinite nowhere.

-KJ

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Media(in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Promo from the 2009 film Sunshine Cleaning; (2) Jack Kerourac, 01/13/2008, tompalumbo; (3)Santa Fe 2, 08/22/2007, by Javier ST; (4)On the road...., 12/17/2008, by Spejo Blano Negro; (5)Highway sign; (6)Hammock IV, 07/09/2008, also by tompalumbo; (7)Vegas at Night from the Sky, 07/15/2006, by Starr Gazr.

Video: (1) Trailer for the 2009 film Sunshine Cleaning; (2) Trailer, from AustralianRoadShow channel, for the 1984 film Paris, Texas.

Lateral Transmissions: Creationism & The Scientific Tower of Babel

2009-04-02T22:26:00.021-04:00

A few days ago I ran into the grocery store just to pick up some milk. I realized I could also use cereal, and juice, and a few other items. Since I hadn't picked up a bin, I stood at the checkout line straining to carry each individual item, looking like a buffoon. If I'd have just picked up a bin, it all would've been much easier to carry. It would’ve saved me so much energy. And you know, I do this all the time, which merely doubled my feeling of buffoonery.

On the ride back, I was chewing on a creationist argument (that an anonymous had posted here at Scientific Blogging) linking God’s creation of the world to the laws of thermodynamics. The argument seemed to rest on a loose and anthropomorphic interpretation of “energy” as something more akin to “life-energy”.

That’s an understandable mistake. “Energy” can be ambiguous. We have a subjective sense of energy, but then there’s the more objective scientific construct. In the grander scheme of things, picking up a bin in the grocery store wouldn’t have created new energy in the world. But by allowing me to optimize my muscles in accordance with the laws of physics, I would've saved energy; and for all practical purposes, I would've created it too, at least for myself, because then my muscles would've been less tired. I might’ve used the energy for some other purpose.

The flaws in creationist arguments lie in this type of confusion between subjectivity and objectivity. We’re all grateful for human life. This is a subjective feeling, though it's present almost universally. But there’s a desire to then frame the origins of life in a manner that’s as magnanimous as our gratefulness for it. Science, on the other hand, is explicitly built upon a strict separation of subject and object.

Creationism's objective/subjective mistake is understandable. The desire to commit it is as tangible as my feeling of “creating energy” had I simply grabbed a bin ahead of time at the grocery store. Afterall, to me that energy is quite real, and I could’ve spent it any number of more productive ways. But the act of picking up a bin is in no way magnanimous, or of a degree of grandeur proportionate to its subjective value to me. In this sense, the creation of life may be as "arbitrary" as the action of shifting multiple grocery items into a bag.

Beyond Creationism

The paragraphs above account for creationism's starting points or axioms, which almost always stem from man’s subjective amazement of being alive, sometimes explicitly sometimes implicitly. The rest of the creationist account can be summarized in the words, “From this, it follows”.

Herein lies the deeper mistake, which is significant because it’s shared by science as well. Godel’s refutation of logic set the most important tenant for contemporary philosophy. He proved that any completely logical system is inherently either non-complete or self-contradictory. “From this” it rarely does follow, but even if it did follow, and completely logically at that, then we still have little assurance that the account is correct.

Volumes of theology are filled with the rigid application of logic on top of these sorts of religious axioms. Parallel to this in Western intellectual history is the confusion of rhetoric for logic. Going back to Ancient Greece, Socrates commonly refuted his peers by asking questions like, “What are your definitions? And how does your argument follow from them?” He would then poke dialectical holes either in those definitions, or in the inferences that were made atop them.

This sort of debate appeared so solid that it stuck for centuries. The enlightenment championed the use of reason over all else. And logic, it was assumed, was an integral part of reason.

Ever since Godel’s theorem, logic has quietly slipped out of mainstream thought, leaving a void that has yet to be adequately filled. This is partly responsible for the rise of empiricism and the need for researchers to dirty themselves with collecting data – which is likely a step in the right direction, but these data are still analyzed using similar logical systems that aren’t immune to Godel’s diagnosis. Results to empirical studies are often given an undeserved air of objectivity, as if they were irrefutable. But fundamental errors are still often made, and they can be drastic. I elaborated more on some of these concrete errors in this comment (at the Chatterbox), and in a previous post.

All of which is to say that science starts with more objective and thought-out axioms than religion, but its flaws in logical deduction might make it just as - or only a little less - wrong in the end.

The Scientific Tower of Babel

Look at history from the rule of the Church to communism. The former rule was based God, the latter based on carefully thought-out central planning. The Soviets went so far as to embrace a scientific precision in their flavor of communism, individually setting prices for up to 24 million different items. Communism was worked to almost an exact science, and it all worked in theory – and beautifully in theory some said - not unlike some of the scientific theories we have to today. Its axioms vastly differed from religion’s, as did its glorified intentions. But both failed – and drastically, and with blood on their hands – for similar reasons.

The stakes in science today are certainly milder, but each year science plays a larger role in society and policy. The difficulty in modern day science is that there’s no funding for dissenters, which leads to a lack of proper reflection. Much of science is marred by confirmation-bias, often unchecked by the peer-review process, which has just as many holes as science itself. Without the restraints that other business endeavors have, accountability is quite difficult, and experts simply argue that the scientific results justify themselves. The picture is eerily similar to that of creationism, especially when you look at basic science, which is less chained to real world results. The more I look at it, the more I've come to question its correctness. For now it certainly seems like the most logical method to advance mankind's knowledge. But I can't shake the suspension that - similar to pedestals formerly held by religion and logic - a large portion of the scientific endeavor might prove to be an understandable mistake.

Arguments from both sides of the creation/science debate – and when you look at the rhetoric used, it really is creationism vs. science – are partisan and acidic, with each side claiming higher ground. I’ve come to the point where I unquestionably side with evolution and science.

But I admit unease, however, when I turn back to look at modern-day science in and of itself. It’s not that it’s “just a bunch of theories”; it’s our awkward pursuit of science; the basic assumptions that are often left unquestioned; the centrally dispersed funding (which artificially steers science in this or that direction); the non-role of dissenters (and the lack of meaningful dialogue that it creates); and in some cases, I guess it is just a bunch of theories. In compiling all these factors, I worry that we maybe building our own scientific tower of babel. And while I in no way presume to have the solution, a suitable place to start might lie in an attitude of humility, not unlike the sort characteristic of the pious Christian.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photos: (1) 2005_062_17, 01/16/2006, by chuckp; (2) thε allεgory oƒ Camεra & Obscura . . , 09/23/2007, by Jef Safi; (3) Portrait of Godel, 1906-1978; (4) 2009/365/4 Non-Euclidian Geometry Snow Paths, 01/04/2009, by cogdogblog; (5) I had to stop and look up..., 11/27/2006, by Jasmic; (6) cheese making, 11/25/2008, by cdine; (7) The Tower of Babel, 1563, by Peter Brueghel the Elder.

Video: (1) Music video, 08/24/2007, by steffi51, music by the band Godspeed You Black Emperor from the song "Terrible Canyons of Static" on their 2000 album, Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven.

"How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?": On Teaching Evolution in Public Schools

2009-03-28T14:41:00.011-04:00

“See the trees outside the window,” my high school English teacher once told us. “Aren’t they just so…beautiful? Trees are good for the environment. But I think they’re just pretty to look at. If people cut down trees then our city would look so …dreary.” She went on to tell us that our city had been named Tree City USA for a number of consecutive years. “I feel honored to live in Tree City USA,” she concluded.

I attended public high school in a liberal area. In English class we learned about the virtues of planting trees and recycling. In biology we learned about compost piles. In government we learned how Hoover’s lassiz-faire philosophy worsened the Great Depression, while FDR’s New Deal brought down unemployment through public works programs like the massive Hoover Dam.

It was a secular and tolerant area of the country, so we were never told that evolution was just a theory. But since then the debate over how to teach evolution in public schools has grown exponentially. As evolution becomes more ingrained in mainstream science, there's a stronger push to teach it at lower levels of education. Just recently the Texas education board narrowly decided that teachers of evolution didn’t have to present the theory’s weakness. The debate is cast as a strange hybrid of science versus religion meets separation of church and state. The real problem lies not with science or religion, but with the state. The debate is borne out of the awkward institution of public education.

Public education is argued to be a lofty institution. And as with most lofty endeavors, its proponents use all sorts of arguments to back it: It’s a human right. It leads to social mobility. It’s a foundation of democracy – how are the people supposed to vote on issues when they’re uninformed? The truth afterall will set you free. How can we have a country where people are ignorant of the truth?

Pink Floyd - New Music - More Music Videos

These principles might sound good in theory, but they don’t translate into practice. Our government is good at supplying everyone with the same services, but it’s dreadful when it needs to tailor services to individuals with different needs. Nowhere is this more evident than in public education, where you have some parents arguing that they don’t want their children to learn about evolution, others arguing that their children need to know about evolution in order to compete among the world's intellectual elite, while inner-city schools continue to fall apart regardless.

Evolutionists and creationists each think that they can solve the debate by debunking the other side – that the debate is somehow about evolution versus creationism. Personally I strongly suspect that the evolution-side is "right" in every meaningful sense of the word, but that's not what's fueling the debate. It’s not about who’s right and wrong, because neither side should have to pay for the others’ education.

The argument is sometimes made that evolution shouldn't be seen as stepping on religion's toes. But it does. If it didn't, then religious parents wouldn't feel like their values are threatened by it. Creationist parents are then pressured to use scientific arguments against evolution. But since they're not scientists, those arguments always fall flat, and then scientists mock creationists as both wrong and stupid. But scientists fail to see that it's not about science, it's about values. It's one thing for a scientist - after years of higher education - to call someone else with only a bachelor's, or God forbid, just a high school degree, as ignorant of science. But it's another thing for the scientist to then take control over how their children are educated. The scientist might know more about science, but what does he know about raising a child?

The strain, once again, falls on the fact that most of our schools are public. If more areas transitioned to a voucher system, then the debate would cool down; and if all schools were private, it would be a moot point on the national scene. The flaw in the current system is that everyone’s education becomes everyone’s businesses.

The evolution debate continually brings me back to my liberal high school lessons. Of course, being biased is no crime. But the notion that public education is this pure untouchable right which produces well-informed democratic citizens doesn’t match up with reality. Rather, public education leads to national conflicts of interest about how to best mold the minds of our youth. The debate over evolution is just one of many manifestations of the problems inherent in a public school system.

-KJ
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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Tree City USA, 04/22/2005, by Tracy Lee; (2) Hoover Dam, 10/22/2007, by chalkie_colour_circles; (3)Bryan Adams High School Hallway, 06/10/2005, by Dean Terry; (4)E, Brobee and Dino, 10/10/2007, by Shawn Anderson;

Video: (1)Music video of the song "Another Brick in the Wall" by Pink Floyd from their 1979 album The Wall.

Vitamin D & The Dark Side of Science

2009-03-22T20:33:00.018-04:00

In case you missed it, Vitamin D is currently a food-group. In 2005 the Harvard School of Public Health revised the food pyramid to include, among other things, multivitamins and in particular Vitamin D.

Controversy over the traditional food pyramid – which was ingrained in my childhood memory from cereal box spines – was getting out of hand. Its large base of “bread, cereal, rice, & pasta” placed heavy emphasis on carbs, while the meats and protein section failed to differentiate between less healthy red meats and leaner sources of protein. Other complaints included questionable influence from special interests - particularly those of the pernicious potato lobby - on the original pyramid, which was formed by the USDA. Between the alarming rise of obesity in America, and those confusing dots on the old pyramid that make it look like it’s from Star Wars, many thought that the food pyramid was overdue for a makeover.

Enter the The Harvard Food Pyramid, which was formed using the very latest in peer review scientific research. And yet it’s a mockery of science and public health all the same.

You’ll notice that its base, instead of “bread, cereal, rice, & pasta”, consists of “daily exercise & weight control”, featuring a collage of cartoony clip-art sneakers, dumbbells, a ping-pong paddle, feet standing on a scale, and, at the right, a plate consisting of some of the very same foods that, above, it says to use sparingly. The food pyramid is also fiber-heavy, going so far as to place white bread in the use sparingly category. The mid-section has a whole box for “nuts, seeds, beans, & tofu”. And salt is included in the “use sparingly section”. From the pyramid’s inedible base to its strange emphasis on Vitamin D, it represents much of what is wrong with science today.

The next bit focuses on two specific criticisms (Vitamin D & salt) before returning to larger issues covering science and national policy in general.

Vitamin D

Vitamin D has very few empirically demonstrated benefits, and yet medical researchers seem to be all up in a tizzy about it. A large group of scientists has hailed that the general population’s Vitamin D deficiency is of epidemic proportions, but it’s not clear whether supplementation is the solution. And it's not like we haven't been trying. For years, almost all milk, most cereals and many juices have been Vitamin D fortified, and yet this epidemic persists. Their response is to recommend massive (up to 2x for children) increases in the amount of recommended daily intake, which is typical of what happens when you combine bad medicine with bad government: If at first you don't succeed, try doubling the dose.

Skepticism about these recommendations, however, should come from previous treatment research with Vitamin D. Deficiencies have been empirically correlated with numerous conditions – from obesity and multiple sclerosis to schizophrenia – but treatment studies have found null or inconsistent at best results using Vitamin D.

As we all know, correlation doesn’t equal causation.
And furthermore, Vitamin D correlates with sun exposure & outdoor activity, which can create all sorts of confounds.

In lack of sound theory, studies using Vitamin D as a treatment are highly speculative, and the push to expand guidelines for the public mirrors this: The results might be spurious; they might be tied to how Vitamin D’s metabolized; they might be due to poor lab testing (an issue that was raised just this week); or the original guidelines might have been wrong. The potential harms of these recommendations range from Vitamin D toxicity to wasted money and effort. While the potential benefits are speculative at best.

Most importantly, these efforts lack supporting treatment studies and sound theory – which might just cover a few basics, like why the levels are off in the general public, and how correcting them will help. Without such information, public health experts can’t afford to guess and experiment with the public at their will. For all we know, Vitamin D might be off for a good reason. That may sound silly, but the bottom line is that we just don't know, particularly in lack of any plausible & semi-backed theory. We can't just go around using correlations to dictate public policy.

Salt

Proponents of the war against obesity have declared salt as part of the axis of evil. And salt does make you fat by retaining water (although this is just temporary as it’s urinated out like most minerals). But it’s a key mineral. It’s essential for food digestion, hydration, and other basic functions. Furthermore it has a laxative effect, which may offset some of its water-retention effects on weight. Salt likely increases food satiety by aiding digesting. Long-term salt deprivation is a real concern, and insofar as it hinders absorption, it might even lead to overeating. And further, hydrating with extra fluids won’t offset the effects salt deprivation, because it’ll just cause you to urinate more of it out.

You could hear the cry of public health from the beginning of the previous paragraph: Sure, we all need salt. But in our modern diets of processed foods we generally eat way too much of it. In this context, eating too much salt is a much greater danger than eating too little salt. This sentiment may have a kernel of truth (assuming it's correct, & it might not be, given the plethora of low-sodium options that’ve popped up). But note that’s not the same as using salt sparingly.

The essence of the argument, then, is that modern diets are too salty, so experts have to over-compensate by telling people to err on using too little salt. This gets at the heart of the problem.

Telling People What to Do

What, then, is the role of the updated and scientific food pyramid? Is it to give people the correct amounts of food to eat, or to steer people away from eating supposedly unhealthy foods that are deemed by experts to be too prevalent in our society? It’s clear that the latter is the case, and the guidelines aren’t meant to be followed absolutely. Further evidence for this is seen in the foundation of the new food pyramid, which isn’t even food at all, but includes exercise and weighing.

What we're dealing with here is a food pyramid whose foundation, in no figurative or uncertain terms, is not food. Unfortunately, this sort of scientific double-speak extends beyond food policy.

Spiraling Further Out

The points I bring up aren’t a hot controversy because the food pyramid itself is relatively worthless. People might follow a few recommendations, but they generally eat what they want. The obesity “epidemic”, if you want to call it such, wasn’t caused by a bad food pyramid, and it won’t be corrected by a good one.

My frustrations, however, are more directed towards the source of such inane self-gratifying efforts, which include science and academia, whose recommendations and prescriptive science often overstep their bounds. This is a particular problem in this day of age, as Obama campaigned on a platform of giving “enlightened” science its due place in society. I worry that this “due place” may border on implementing a totalitarian state for the public, guided by the dimly lit headlights of power-hungry scientists and Ivory Tower academics. This paints a grim picture, particularly when combined with Obama’s socialist-leanings. With the push for universal healthcare, the individual's business will become a lot more of everyone’s business, as we’ll have to pay the price for our unhealthy citizens – a problem that I’m sure many individual researchers will claim that they can solve given enough funding and power. Global warming science and policy, which rests on an equally shaky foundation, has promulgated, & will continue to, in the much the same manner. In the meanwhile, we have the power of Vitamin D (bolstered, perhaps, by man-made global warming) to cure our existing ailments.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Strange Attractor, 04/21/2007, by Steve Jurveston; (2) USDA Food Pyramid, 1992 (3) Harvard School of Public Health, Healthy Eating Food Pyramid, 2005; (4) Comic from xkcd.com, A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language; (5) Milk Shelves at Whole Foods, 06/01/2008, by Stephanie Booth; (6) Cat Conspiracy, 09/04/2006, by Craig Elliott; (7) salt and pepper, 06/13/2006, by Hobvias Sudoneighm; (8) Joseph Stalin, 10/27/2006, Freedom Toast;

Video: (1) Music video, 03/04/2007, littlewonder80's channel, of the song "The Guns of Brixton" by The Clash from the 1979 album London Calling.

Turbulence

2009-03-14T15:00:00.030-04:00

The Age of Turbulence abruptly begins with Alan Greenspan on a flight across the Atlantic. The captain brings him up front and tells him that the World Trade Towers were hit, and the plane had been redirected back to Zurich. It was 9/11, and he recalls his racing thoughts about what this would mean for the new world. Second to his wife, his obvious concern was for the economy. It was clear that the terrorists weren’t directly after the financial system, or else they would’ve hit the banks, but everyone knows that a sound economy abhors such instability.

“The mood in the cockpit was somber,” writes Greenspan. “’You’ll never believe this,’ the captain said, ‘Listen.’ I put my ear to the headset but couldn’t hear anything other than static. ‘Normally the North Atlantic is full of radio chatter,’ he explained. ‘This silence is eerie.’ Apparently nobody was out there.”

Greenspan recalls the likewise eerie aura on Capital Hill over the next year. Everybody kept insisting that America was safe and her citizens should stay calm, but there was no concrete evidence for this; and in contrast to their words, it looked like White House officials were bracing for a second large-scale attack, as if it was more of a question of when, instead of whether, it would happen.

Amidst the chaos and the aftermath, however, Greenspan was rather surprised about how the economy managed to get itself right back onto its feet. While it did involve some minor tinkering with air-travel and communications, for the most part, business as normal resumed rather soundly.

The lesson that Greenspan took away was that it reflected the rigidity of the economy. 9/11 left a political and social gash on the country, but from the eyes of the economy, it was just a blip on the radar. For Greenspan 9/11 was a testament to the strength and independence of the US economy.

It borders on irony that less than a year after publishing his monumental autobiography – 544 pages long, and with an $8.5 million advance from Penguin Press – his book is already outdated, with the banking system on the brink of failure and the US potentially facing the worst depression since the 1930's. Indeed, the economy is sound and it is rigid. But it seems to be a beast onto itself - strong enough to bear external blows as heavy as 9/11, while anything but immune to its own internal writhing and convulsions.

The Blame Game

Jim Cramer recently had a comedic, and quite frankly shameful, run-in with Jon Stewart, in which Cramer blamed his interviewees for lying to him. No doubt the blame game has just begun.

Bernanke, Greenspan’s successor, recently came out with his most emotional statement yet, in part blaming AIG’s irresponsible risk-taking for the collapse.

“If there’s a single episode in this entire 18 months that has made me more angry, I can’t think of one, than AIG,” he said. “AIG exploited a huge gap in the regulatory system. There was no oversight of the financial products division. This was a hedge fund, basically, that was attached to a large and stable insurance company, made huge numbers of irresponsible bets, took huge losses. There was no regulatory oversight because there was a gap in the system.”

Of course what Bernanke partly overlooks is expanding credit in the economy – largely through the rise of credit default swaps – which AIG was in part responsible for backing up. Credit-expansion during a boom is one thing, but similar to investment banking it crumbles when the economy falters in the least. Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns can blame their falls on the stock market; creditors can blame their problems on the lack of funds to repay debts; and Bernanke can blame it all on those who were responsible for backing the expansion of credit. But what’s shortsighted is a thorough examination of the system in and of itself.

Communism, after all, would work perfectly if only the laborers worked hard. Yet blaming the fall of communism on laborers' laziness is futile, because they’re not working for a reason: No incentives.

Every society has its screw-ups. Shit happens as Forest Gump might say. But society banks on the fact that these screw-ups remain small in number and are randomly dispersed. When their numbers grow and their mistakes become more apparent, then you have to start looking for other answers. In other words, you have to dig deeper when shit starts happening in a frequent and consistent manner.

Which is why the notion of an "insurance" company that backs credit defaults is absurd, because the frequency of credit shit happening is non-random and inter-dependent. Other types of insurance depend on the fact that the covered averse events occur randomly and independently. If all of GEICO's customers, for instance, crashed their car on the same day, then it would surely go out of business, but that's not how car crashes work. However, such is how the credit business works, with one default often linked to another in a chain of events, having a similar effect as a massive car collision pile-up spanning the entire country would have on GEICO. Third parties can't feasibly "insure" credit contracts; you can't hedge the risk of credit defaults with successful creditors, because both events are tied to eachother. That's also why Bernanke's anger towards AIG is misdirected.

Indeed, AIG acted irresponsibly, but why were they in a linchpin position to aid in the collapse of the entire economy? Where were the corrective forces that should’ve come into play?

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Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression (which I’ve just started) opens with a similar point regarding business cycles and failures: Just like screw-ups and bad-apples, they’re seen throughout society. What’s rare is when a nation experiences a string of failures – each tied to the other – and the economy as a whole (rather than any particular company) lacks the corrective forces to get back on track. The Great Depression, similar to current times, has been blamed on various individual enterprises, such as Galbraith’s 200-page rant against speculators of the 1920’s, or the accelerative properties of the capital goods sector. But these explanations ring hallow insofar as they’re always present, and, if true, are relatively non-specific to a particular time period.

Rothbard continues that the largest tragedy of the Great Depression wasn’t the pain forced upon the nation, but the dearth of literature explaining it. Most commentators on the subject agree. Indeed previously the country had seen various mini-crises, but they proved to be self-correcting within a year or two. The Great Depression was shocking, not because of the panic of 1929, but because of the huge length of time it took to be resolved.

Part of the dearth of study, Rothbard contends, is because few theories account for the business cycle. Recessions are conceptualized as the exception rather than the rule, and when they last for more than a few years, this is generally true. But that’s no reason to shy away from studying them. Insight can be gleaned from them, similar to an extreme medical case. Phinneas Gage – the railroad worker who had his frontal lobes shot through with an iron spike – was also the exception, but it was the extreme and curious nature of his state that kick started modern brain science as we know it today. Advances in neuroscience have only increased our understanding of Gage’s case, even a century and a half after the event. Such aberrations have proved invaluable to neuroscience and to medical science as a whole; and likewise economic aberrations should be a natural starting point for inquiry into economic theory. Unfortunately, the later is rarely the case, and we may have to wait much longer to understand current economic events.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Greenspan, 09/15/2007, by chickenhawkdown; (2)President George W. Bush address to the nation and joint session of Congress Sept. 20; (3) Plane, 02/20/2007, by ores2k; (4) Cover of Greenspan's 2007 book, The Age of Turbulence; (5) Ben Bernanke, 03/06/2006, by Simon; (6) Mad Money, 08/16/2007, by Carlos Gomez; (7) Murray Newton Rothbard, 02/01/2009, by Taylor; (8)Phineas Gage (Lesioni), 09/28/2008, by epanto.

Video: (1) Daily Show interview with Jim Cramer, of CNBC's Mad Money, 03/13/2009.

Thru Fragments of Cinema: Objectivism Questioned

2009-02-23T19:45:00.016-05:00

At 43 Jean Bauby suffered a stroke and awoke to find himself with locked-in syndrome – a rare condition, as terrifying as it sounds, in which the patient is almost completely paralyzed yet remains fully conscious and aware. Able to blink one eye, Bauby was taught to communicate one letter at a time with the help of an aid who recited the alphabet until he blinked. Using this system, Bauby authored the memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; I recently had the pleasure of seeing the movie based on it.

“I decided to stop pitying myself,” wrote Bauby, “Other than my eye, two things aren't paralyzed, my imagination and my memory.”

As the narrative digs deeper into Bauby’s trapped mind, it becomes increasingly sensuous, marked by bright colors, strong breezes, swirling cinematography and score.

He’s also visited by various friends. Some of them, like his elderly father, go so far as to compare their condition to his - one of a soul locked within the body. He’s visited by a distant friend who was held prisoner under inhumane conditions for 4-some years. You can lose your body, he advises Jean, but nothing can steal your humanity.

The film has an unfortunate tendency to wander, but its impact remains. Its underlying tragedy is universal: that of not knowing what you have until it’s gone. The narrative goes in 2 figurative directions corresponding to the metaphors in the title: The diving bell sinks further underwater and the butterfly flies effortlessly up.

The film strikes a chord with me, similar to the book Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Mainte nance, which attests to the hollowness of objectivism. My political beliefs are generally libertarian, and in high school I enjoyed a few Ayn Rand novels. They seemed empowering at the time. But despite their food for thought, the ideas lacked staying-power with me. From the start, I never understood why her novels were so much more famous than her essays. Novels teach through experience. They’re a perfectly suitable way to get a lesson across, but they’re anything but an objective medium. After reading other authors in college, Rand seemed shallow in comparison.

Rand is often associated with libertarianism – even Alan Greenspan (who describes his views as libertarian-Republican) was deeply influenced by her in his youth. But aside from individualistic values, I’m not sure how much Rand overlaps with libertarianism.

I hate to throw around such intellectual jargon – as if they were interesting in and of themselves – but to come back down to the real world, undue objectivity can often pose more harm than good. Nowhere is this more evident than in the economy.

A frequent myth is the belief that the value of money is objective - that it's fixed. This mistake has led to hundreds of years of mistrust against certain ways to use money. Money-lending is almost universally despised, across cultures and religions, as a greedy way of using money to make money. Despite this hatred towards money-lending, using money to make money, in almost any other endeavor, is considered the norm. This is why the economy is built upon money-lending. Banks play an integral role by distributing money to be used for its greatest potential. Their distributive actions run contrary to liberal concerns about skewed distributions of income; however, trying to “fix” their distribution of money has as dire consequences as toying with income distribution.

Value is subjective. This is why banking works – the value of a small business loan to a businessman of great potential is greater than the value of that loan to someone who won’t know how to use it. Likewise, the value of lending money for interest is worth more to a rich man with no use for that money than to a poorer man. The value of receiving lent money is worth more to someone who needs it and has a reliable credit history. The value of giving a loan to someone with reliable credit is greater than the value of giving a loan to someone of poor credit. Viewed purely objectively, the whole economy – perhaps even freedom - really makes little sense.

Another danger of unbridled objectivity is the use of statistics. This is bared out in the common concern about lying with stats – obviously stats don’t lie themselves, it’s the people who use them that lie. Numbers are of course very objective. But their use – both in gathering and making sense of them – is considered more of an art.

Even Greenspan wrote that he supplemented statistics about the macroeconomy with more subjective measures. During the oil crisis of the Nixon years, he created measures to estimate weekly fluctuations in GDP, which included surveying small business owners about their present difficulties and concerns. The later were of comparable value to objective numbers. During the internet boom of the 1990’s, Greenspan noted that despite rises in GDP, surveys showed that workers were becoming more skittish about the economy, largely due to increased employee turnover. This discrepancy led him to conclude that the rising GDP & stock indexes gave the public an overly rosy depiction of the economy.

The takeaway point is that when the stats don’t seem to match reality, the fault is more often found with the former than the latter. This has vast implications, particularly for medicine, which alienates whatever it can’t explain as psychological or somatic. A large chunk of medical progress in the 20th century consisted reclassifying phenomena from psychological/somatic into medical. The fallacy however is that, at any given time, the categorization of conditions as psychological or somatic is thought to reflect the nature of the conditions rather than the progress of science. This has led to many misunderstandings between doctor and patient, and between researcher and object of study.

The vast difference between a human and a computer attests to how off objectivism is. It’s almost a tautology to say that we live in a subjective world. Objectivity is simply one tool among others. It can be a useful tool to help us crawl out of our locked-in subjective holes, but it can also lead to as many misconceptions as truths.

Even emotions – one of the cornerstones of subjectivity – evolved for useful objective reasons. Ignoring your emotions because they’re too subjective would be to block yourself off from one of your most carefully honed tools. I find them useful for intellectual discourse: When an idea just doesn't feel right (or wrong), you can use that as a springboard for further inquiry, and guide yourself in the right direction. Of course you can’t say that something is wrong because it feels that way. But you can use those emotions to then identify objective explanations. Objectivism's distinction between reason and irrationality is meaningless; as both reason and supposed irrationality can have the same utilitarian purpose in their proper contexts.

And what role do dreams play in a purely objective world? Consider what occurs when wake up and feel you've had an incredibly moving dream, but you try to describe to a friend to little avail. The dream's objective content somehow can't stand up to its subjective impact.

Objectivism’s biggest mistake is focusing on the “bottom line”. Because life occurs in everything above the bottom line. Humans come and go; they’re born and they’re dead; they consume calories and they expend calories; that’s the bottom line, that’s the objective perspective, as if from a disinterested party observing us from the moon. Obviously that perspective does injustice to the value of life. Robert Pirsig’s solution to the discrepancy between objective and subjective reality was to meld the two by focusing on the point where they meet. That’s quality, he believed. It's the value gained in voluntary exchange. It’s life. It's the loss that Jean Bauby suffered in the objective; the gain he won in the subjective.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Movie poster from the 2007 film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; (2)Photo of Jean-Dominique Bauby, 1997; (3) curving, swirling, 04/09/2006, by David Pham; (4) Logo from book cover of Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; (5) Portraits of Ayn Rand and Allan Greenspan; (6) Movie poster of the 2004 film The Merchant of Venice; (7) tools, 08/30/2006, by Striatic; (8) Blue Marble (Planet Earth), 01/25/2008, woodleywonderworks; (8) M.C. Escher's 1948 lithograph Drawing Hands.

Video: (1) Music collage, 02/08/2009, filmlasse with music from the 1959 film The 400 Blows.

Restoring Economics

2009-02-21T23:32:00.020-05:00

In a sense, no one really knows what’s going on with the economy; and even if they do, they don’t know what to do about it. But academia is partly responsible for the public mystique about the economy. In formalizing learning, academia has the unfortunate result of making some subjects overly complicated. There are no in-built checks to make topics simple; and I’ve come across many egotistical professors, who, in an attempt to exploit their power, relish in making concepts more difficult than necessary.

Yet the following class discussion with a professor, from an undergrad course on corporate finance, demonstrates how people can approach economics without that much formalized knowledge. It was quoted at the start of a book review for The Ethics of Money Production.

It was one of those rare moments when the entire class listens attentively and participates in the discussion. That it occurred with this particular class was even more instructive to me personally. This was a principles-of-finance course, required not only of finance majors, but of all students pursuing either a major or minor offered by the school of business at my institution.
While the typical principles class contains some highly motivated students who aspire to careers in finance, banking, and accounting, it is also filled with a fair number of students who look upon the course as a sort of dreaded, compulsory disruption to their nonfinance curriculum. But on this day, they were unified and engaged. A rare moment indeed!
At this point, the reader might consider this a strange way to begin a book review. The anticipated segue is provided by a voice in the back row of the classroom, where a rather quiet and normally imperceptible student began the following exchange with me:

"You know, we hear all about these bailouts and stimulus packages coming out of Washington."

"Yes, I know."

"Hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars, right?"

"That's right."

"They don't really have the money, though, do they?"

"No, they don't."

"And so they are just going to print it, aren't they?"

"Yes, the banking system is going to print it and loan it to the government."

"Out of nothing, right?"

"That's right."

"But that's not right, is it?"

Just to be clear, the student was not suggesting that the premise was not right, as in not correct. He was asserting that this massive production of money out of thin air was not right, as in not ethical.

(from The Right & Wrong of Money Production, 2/18/2008, by Michael King)

Although not everyone might agree with the student, it doesn’t take much background knowledge to follow the discussion. We all know what he’s getting at.

In contrast though, you do need a lot of background knowledge in order to take such an economics course. Specifically, you need strong math skills and you have to be prepared to apply them. One of the first concepts you’re likely to learn is that of the production possibility curve. This is touted as a useful concept early on, because it can be used as a theoretical model to map the economy on both the macro and micro-scales. At the same time, you’re hit with such boring and dry explanations as the following (from Wikipedia)

The move from point A to point B indicates an increase in the number of computers produced, but it also indicates a decrease in the amount of food produced. Assuming that productive resources do not increase, making more computers requires that resources be redirected from making food to making computers. If production is efficient, FA of food and CA of computers could be made (as Point A shows), or FB of food and CB of computers could be made (as Point B shows).

In reference to figures like these

This is just the start of the long and arduous journey that the undergrad takes to complete his intro to economics. Is it any wonder then that the public at large seems to be grossly ignorant about economics? After all, if they didn’t take one of these boring courses, they most likely heard horror stories from peers who did.

The frustrating part is that, as the above dialogue demonstrates, economics doesn’t have to be boring. We all deal with money, prices, and incentives. Add a little guided thought on top of that, and it’s not hard to teach economics in a wholly engaging manner. Thomas Sowell accomplished this in his book, Basic Economics.

Sowell can be divisive and you might disagree with him on points, but all he asks of the reader is a hint of interest into current events and he’ll get you thinking about the wider economic role of actions like banking, risk-taking, measuring the macroeconomy, and investment. He uses everyday news articles, along with common sense, to build upon the reader’s intuitive understanding of economics.

The phrase intuitive understanding economics may seem a little odd. After all, what’s intuitive about the something like the production probably plot? Very little, and that’s why it doesn’t belong at the front of an introductory course. But insofar as everyone engages in the marketplace, intuition - not math - is a rather suitable place to start.

You’ll often hear the argument that education is an integral aspect of a democracy; and without it, our citizens can’t make informed decisions when they go to the polls. Nonetheless, those who subscribe to such notions tend to be more liberal, and it shows in their quality of education. In high school you’re more likely to learn about FDR’s New Deal than the Federal Reserve; and in college, economics is presented as a dismal mathematics model while courses in political science are more welcoming and palatable.

Part of this, I suspect, is because universities err on making things overly complicated and verbose. If mathematics can possibly be integrated into a major, then it absolutely will. The university has nothing to lose by erring on too many courses and prerequisites. And when there are a plethora of potentially interested students, this can be a way to weed some of them out.

Insofar as public education has a social obligation to produce informed citizens (and maybe it doesn't, but this is presumably why it exists), it's partly to blame for the public’s current ignorance about the economy. Few citizens can readily grasp the importance of banks and the Federal Reserve to the economy. This has a two-fold effect: It shrouds economics in a veil of unnecessary complexity hidden to the public's scrutiny; and it allows public policy experts take advantage of this ignorance. Such a rapidly growing ignorance can even be considered dangerous in the same sense that many would consider an ignorance of politics dangerous.

The Washington Post, for instance, just had an editorial which urged consumers to spend rather than save their hard-earned money. The author tries to guilt-trip the reader into spending based on the presumption that saving money would cost the economy some 53,000 jobs. It doesn’t take very sophisticated knowledge about economics to see the fallacy in that one – namely, that you can’t have a sound economy when each individual household is living beyond their means. But without such knowledge, what do you say to the family that sympathized with the author’s points, and spent their way into years of debt in order to help the American economy? And then encouraged their neighbors to do the same? Afterall, the author does sound pretty convincing when he writes:

Borrow and spend, borrow and spend is what got us into this mess. Apparently, borrow and spend will get us out of it.

He then goes so far as to encourage individuals to glue together their torn up credit cards. I couldn’t believe what I was reading! Even if you subscribe to the (Keyensian) view that spending on consumer goods fuels the economy, what good would come from spending on increasing interest from credit card debt?

Although I’ve never been a fan of public education, economics is an area in which it has utterly failed. And for this the nation has suffered.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance):

Photo: (1) Production possibility curve; (2) Sleepy, 06/13/2008, by Barbcalie; (3) Grocery cart, 11/30/2007, by Buxmama; (4) Federal Reserve Building, 05/20/2006, by Dystopos; (5) NYC National Debt Clock, 06/24/2006, by WallyG.

Video: (1) Stimulus: Because all economies have performance issues., 02/04/2009, Reason TV.

Restoring Science

2009-02-12T21:46:00.021-05:00

Many who work in research implicitly agree that the truth will set you free. And in one way or another this has driven a lot of us to science. But it's counterintuitive - the truth being thought to be objective and all - that the truth is so different depending on who's asking for it.

What then are we to make of Obama’s repeated desire to “restore science to its rightful place”? Josh Witten (over at Scientific Blogging) wrote a stimulating piece in which he contrasted a recent finding from efforts in federal Chinese science with Obama’s treatment of science. The former employed data on social disturbances, which was generously – almost surprisingly – released by the Chinese government. Looking at 51,000 social disturbances in 2007, sociologists were able to find patterns in the disturbances, which allowed them to successfully predict future ones.

Witten brings up the poignant question, to what end?. Would they use it for good in order to prevent civil unrest? Or would they use it to suppress their billion-plus citizens?

This concern, although hypothetical, is certainly valid for a government with such a corrupt history as China’s. In contrast, our government’s corruption - although not as oppressive as China’s and much smaller in degree - is more implicit and hidden. It's decentralized, just like the structure of the government - hidden away in an infinite amount of special interests, which collectively serve to chip away at the general interest. Indeed, to what end? is the question that we must ask about our own government’s science as well.

Conflicts of Interest

If economics has taught us anything, it’s that people respond to incentives. Almost anyone these days would be quick to point that out when discussing privately funded research. And over the past decade, scientists and academics have become sensitive about their own sources of funding. Scientific conflicts of interest these days are thought to arise mostly from private funding, in the form of corporations hiding negative findings so that they can profit at the public's expense.

But what about publicly funded research? Certainly it still abides by these same incentives, only they’re coming from the government. Hidden agendas in public research are not as explicit – there’s no CEO or central board pulling the strings – but this can make them all the more dangerous.

For instance, you can be certain that environmental scientists who have thought hard about global warming, and don't believe that it's man made, aren't going to receive much in the way of public funding, particularly under Obama’s new administration.

Or what about medical researchers who disagree with the CDC? Many claim that studies on the links between vaccines and autism are marred by confirmation bias - namely their conclusions are simply attributed to the objectives of the authors rather than to good science. Furthermore, vaccines are widely supported by public health officials who are associated with the government. Why would they fund any researchers who genuinely wanted to assess the negative effects of vaccines, when they not only disagree with them, but have everything to lose should their hypotheses be supported?

Every scientist has a unique perspective on the world, but how can we be assured that committees of them who disseminate funding aren't forcing their views onto others? If a researcher concludes in a study that government intervention in his field is ineffective, how is he going to be funded in the future?

A concrete example I recall is from a Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) researcher I once heard. To give a brief background, the CDC & NIH combined have espoused the view that CFS is no different from depression, although this has produced little in the way of useful research. The researcher was of the opinion that CFS wasn't very related to depression, and he wanted to run a well-devised study comparing different patients' etiologies. The study was eventually funded by the NIH - and his hypotheses were supported - but only he said, because after his grant application was rejected a few times, he re-focused it as if the study was meant to show that CFS was the same as depression, which was more in line with the opinions of the lead researchers at the NIH. It was a funny little anecdote when he told it, but then in all seriousness he said he would probably never receive NIH funding again.

The Doublespeak of Special Interests

Many people in the scientific community are joyful about Obama’s promises to science. And with good reason, because this gives them renewed vigor, along with added job security. But Obama’s vows to the scientific community are at best your average appeal to another special interest and at worst a hint at a more centrally planned scientific future. The web of the conflicts of interest portrayed above are not unique to science. They arise whenever the government overreaches into any special interest area.

Take the phrase “restore science to its rightful place”, and replace the word science with any other political buzzword: religion, agriculture, education, national highways, mail delivery, broadcast television. In this context, the statement’s meaning slowly becomes hollow to ears jaded from meaningless political promises. It does imply that money will be taken from other areas for the sake of science, but that’s about it.

But society thrives on science, where would we be without it? is the retort coming from a few people at Scientific Blogging, and I think it's the feeling generally shared by the scientific community. Once again, however, this argument rings hollow when you consider how many people have said that exact same thing – but for everything in addition to and on top of science, usually covering fields that they work in. Just the other day I heard a reporter say that federal mail service is integral in a democracy, as if to imply that we’d fall apart without it. This is essentially the same argument being espoused by the scientific community for more public science.

Any rigorous argument in favor of more public funds for science has to go beyond its import to society, and cover why it's more important than other specific areas that the government funds. Lobbyists and politicians, of course, act as if you can spend money on everything at once. When that power is abused society as a whole feels the ramifications, either directly through taxes or indirectly through poor monetary policy. Imagine for one moment that the government, just like a person or corporation, really did have a limited budged. Sure it would be necessary to spend money on some things, but why science and not some other thing?

The answer very well might be to spend on science, but it needs to be answered ahead of time and in this format (eg, in terms of opportunity costs). It can't just be assumed that the benefits outweigh the costs because science is good - or even because it's really super good. In the event that science is not the best thing to spend money on, then society as a whole loses (and at the expense of well-paid scientists). Even if all of those funds lead to very fruitful discoveries later, it doesn't automatically prove that they were still worth it, or that they were better than other investments. You would think that such fans of objectivity as scientists would embrace objective assessments like cost-benefit analysis. And they often do, but not always when it comes to their own work.

Well they're already cutting us the check, so why complain?

Academics and scientists feel they have an enlightened view of the world, and in a sense I agree. That's why it bothers me all the more that somehow many of them fail to see that the dirty politics and doublespeak of special interests applies to their discipline as well.

Free-market economist Milton Friedman argued that special interests tear apart the moral fabric of society. They're particularly dangerous because of the covert nature of their corruption: They don't lead to an outright abuse of power, but they create the incentives for many smaller ones. Take from the individual examples above - the scientist who is skeptical about man-made global warming, the doctor who wants to thoroughly assess vaccines, or the CFS researcher who disagreed with the NIH - none of these examples alone attests to the extent to which government funds can harm science. You have to look at the combined effect of such individual missteps, across every field affected, and multiplied over time. The overall picture is not unlike communism in its waste, inefficiencies, moral decay, and potential for corruption, the only difference being that the process is slower and more subtle - but nonetheless real - in regards to special interests.

Even with its extra funding, what is science’s rightful place anyway? Is it just to be well-funded? What does this place look like? Will we shuffle our focus in science - alternative energy for a while, then say obesity - just like 5-year plans in Soviet Russia? Obama strikes me as confident and intelligent, but there's a subtle Orwellian tinge to his promise, if only because science is so important and can be used for so many different ends. Unfortunately this is the last question people seem to ask of Obama’s promise - to "restore science to its rightful place", alright, but to what end?

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Essay: Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy(New York Times), 01/26/2009, MashGet; (2) "We need a president who believes in science.", 03/21/2008, Snil Garg; (3) Crowd Policing, 08/12/2006, by Dom Dada; (4) Poster from the 2006 documentary about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth; (5) USPS Logo; (6) Rockefeller Research Building: Example of a building constructed over a highway, 01/01/2008, by Zachary Korb; (7) Berlin Wall, 03/20/2006, by David Hunter; (8) 柏林墙 - The Berlin Wall - Berliner Mauer, 11/12/2007, by siyu.

"You must realize," I said, "that we've found the main nerve."

2009-02-07T12:54:00.011-05:00

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps 50 feet down to the lawn ... pauses briefly to strangle the chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness...toward the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying desperately to remember which one of those 400 iron balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell's apartment.

Ah...nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season.

That’s Hunter S. Thompson on Nixon (He Was a Crook, 2005).

I’ve been getting into Hunter S. Thompson recently. His brand of writing is refreshing. My mind has 2 reactions, the first is of rejection: If you read the above, it’s clear that Thompson was just looking at Nixon’s physical features, combining it with a prejudicial bias, and letting his imagination take over. And in a sense anyone can do that.

But Thompson’s work stands out with a brutal honesty. He took rational concepts and warped them with a part of the brain that’s not used to tackling them. Consider the following on the American Dream:

"Nonsense," I said. "We came out here to find the American Dream, and now that we're right in the vortex you want to quit." I grabbed his bicep and squeezed. "You must realize," I said, "that we've found the main nerve."

"I know," he said. "That's what gives me the Fear."

The ether was wearing off, the acid was long gone, but the mescaline was running strong. We were sitting at a small round gold formica table, moving in orbit around the bartender.

"Look over there," I said. "Two women fucking a polar bear." (Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971).

You might have a different opinion about the American Dream, but how are you supposed to respond to that?

The problem is that we’ve all become so used to arguing with the rational part of our brain that we rarely take the time to consider our first impressions. Of course first impressions rarely provide the answer, but overbearing rationality can have just as dire consequences.

A similar thing might occur in scientific paradigm-shifts. The ancient Greek astronomer Ptolemy, for instance, set up his model of the universe such that all the planets were rotating around the earth. For centuries, this was the prevailing system. Similar to any astronomer without advanced equipment, he built his system off of geometric proofs, resting on axioms, and accounting for what could readily be observed in the sky. His volumes of work, at the outset, are only mildly complicated, but as he accounted for more phenomena, things got uglier. He created epi-cycles - cycles of cycles - based off of certain stars and alignments; and then he brought in epi-epi-cycles; and then he brought in equalizers in order to represent the ratios of various epi-cycles to each other; and then the equalizers arbitrarily applied in some situations and not in others. The pages in his work go on and on to no end, as the proofs get longer and longer to tackle less important phenomena. You can get lost intellectualizing the world, but it didn’t take a genius (or maybe it did) to see that his system of the heavenly bodies was surprisingly complicated, tedious and ugly. The model was corrected, of course, after Copernicus suggested that the sun was in the middle of the universe, if only because it created a system about one-tenth as arduous as Ptolemy’s. Copernicus has since been credited with kick-starting the Renaissance by suggesting that natural phenomena, in more ways than one, don't revolve around the human mind.

But the point is that the rational parts of people’s minds can lead them just as far astray – if not further - as the irrational parts. Nietzsche attributed this to the artificial power of objectivity. When an argument is cloaked in rationality and objectivity, it’s given an air of superiority which is often undeserved.

Perhaps the largest blow to the purely “rational” approach came from Godel who proved the inherent fallibility in purely logical systems, and he achieved this nonetheless by building his own purely logical system as well. Although a few modern authors have capitalized on Godel’s message and updated it for modern times (particularly Douglas Hofstadter, in his book Godel Escher Bach) it has yet to fully be incorporated into much of empirical research – be it in medicine, economics, psychology, or social science – where theories live or die in accordance to how they align with purely mathematical models, particularly the generalized linear model. The concern, just as with Ptolemy, is that even if a model is comprehensive and internally consistent (or non-contradictory), it can still have no correspondence with reality whatsoever.

Sometimes rationality is achieved at the expense of reality. Economist Mark Skousen, for instance, claims that theoretical models of the marcoeconomy have likely done more harm than good for the national economy.

The problem with Nietzsche however was that he took his ideas too extreme and – as is common with the human mind – painted the world in black and white; it came to the point where he was almost building his own objective model based on his criticisms of the nature of such models. His criticisms of other systems seemed somehow to not apply to his own.

Hunter S. Thompson in contrast wrote with a humility that suggested that he didn’t have any of the answers, but instead was simply a crazed observer who couldn’t shut his eyes:

But what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism. (Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971).

Most of all Thompson saw that at the bottom of all of his subjectivity and irrationality taken to the nth degree wasn’t a new vision of the world, but simply chaos and self-destruction. He portrayed this rather well in his criticism of Timothy Leary and the whole hippie movement, all of whom were convinced that their new-found notions of free love and a world without boundaries somehow argued for a harmonious peaceful vision of the world.

Anyone who has experienced hallucinogenics I think can attest to the falseness of Leary’s vision: When you break down the barriers to reality you come across a dissonant chaos at the center of all things, equal parts innocent, joyful, revelatory, and frightening. You see just how fine-tuned the human mind - in its normal state - needs to be in order to make any sense of the world whatsoever. The hippie movement was as optimistic as Nietzsche was pessimistic, but broth broke down on the same accord. Wrote Thompson:

What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create...a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody-or at least some force-is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic...a blind faith in some higher and wiser "authority." The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister...all the way up to "God."

One of the crucial moments of the Sixties came on that day when the Beatles cast their lot with the Maharishi. It was like Dylan going to the Vatican to kiss the Pope's ring. (Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971)

What we can get from all this isn’t so much yet another model for how the world works, but it maybe just as important. It hints at a sense of humility and awe necessary to make any sense of the world – at just how disconnected our rational minds may be from it, and how we need to keep in mind that the further we depart down the path of abstract theory the more we have to ensure that our feet are planted just as firmly on the ground.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance):

Photo: (1) Nixon?, 01/19/2006, by Michelle Aquila; (2) Hunter S. Thompson, 05/13/2007, billypalooza; (3) Bat Country, 07/15/2006, by Aaron Booth; (4) Portrait of Ptolemy; (5) Ptolemy's cycles; (6) Buy the ticket. Take the ride., 04/25/2008, by Ratticus; (7) Timothy Leary; apathy's hunter s thompson, 12/21/2008, Zen Sutherland..

Video: (1) Music video, from afiendishthingy, of the song "A Day in the Life", by The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. from their 1967 album

Starbucks vs. Harley Davidson: What you see and what you don't

2009-01-30T23:50:00.022-05:00

We live in a consumer-driven economy, liberals often say, and how much more can we produce until we’re too chock-full of gadgets and gizmos? This concern is easily manifested in a company like Starbucks: How can they grow when they’re already located on every street corner in every city? Such concerns, like so many misunderstandings about the economy, come back to Henry Hazlitt’s single lesson about economics: What you don’t see is often more important than what you see. We’ll begin by talking about what we see, which is too many Starbucks stores.

What you See

Starbucks originally hooked me on coffee. I was in 8th grade and a location next to my school was giving out samples of their new Frapuccino with brownie bits. Since around that time, Starbucks expanded to over 16,000 locations worldwide. Its horizons seemed endless, as numerous books popped up about the genius idea behind the business, no doubt perhaps conceived in the cozy intellectual confines of the coffee shop’s atmosphere.

But in 2006, way before our current recession, it was clear that Starbucks had over-expanded itself. Since then, it’s closed over almost 1,000 stores and has plans to close hundreds more. In the meanwhile, Starbucks has certainly lost its edge. The issue seems simple enough, and the conversation almost one-dimensional: They need to open more stores. More stores means more money. But the economy - maybe even the world - isn’t big enough. They can only open so many stores in the same city before there’s no room left to expand. Companies rely on growth. What are they to do? In the meanwhile, they’re worried that the Starbucks brand has become stale and too expensive for a society in recession.

What you Don't

The solution to the path that Starbucks should have taken struck me while I was reading about The Harley Davidson Company in Motley Fool’s recent book, Million Dolla r Portfolio. The following quote summarizes a bit of the history of Harley Davidson before getting into their success:

In 1901, a 21-year-old William Harley designed a motor to put onto a bicycle. He was soon joined by his good friend Arthur Davidson, and together they started a company that would eventually build motorcycles. Over the next 70 years, the company was private, surviving the ups and downs of the American economy, with major contributions to the war efforts of both World I and World War II. By the 1950’s and 1960’s, though, the company saw its reputation diminished, as it was associated with the Hell’s Angels and other less savory characters.

In 1967, the company was bought by American Machinery and Foundry (AMF), which produced leisure equipment such as snow skis, golf clubs, and bowling balls. AMF mismanaged the company to the point of near death, and sold it for $80 million in 1981 to a group of private investors, including Willie Davidson, a descendant of the original Davidson family. They rebuilt the company, placing a new emphasis on quality that had gotten away from them for decades. Customers returned. In 1987, Davidson and Friends took the company public.

That was the beginning of a spectacular ride. Shares of Harley at the end of 2007 were worth roughly 110 times what they traded for when the maker of the Fat Boy first went public…(p. 85-6)

What was responsible for this turnaround?

For the better part of two decades, Harley had the opportunity to do the right thing with its profits – sink them back into the business, making new and better products, and reaching out to loyal customers. In fact, the true glory years for Harley’s stock were those when management limited how fast the company made bikes. Rather than make all the hogs it could sell, Harley increased production at a rate of only %10 a year, lower than what the marketplace could bear. The ensuing scarcity of bikes raised the value of those machines that did make it to the market. For the better part of a decade, customers were willing to pay more than the manufacturer’s recommended price. (p. 86)

Something clicked when I read this, as I realized that Starbucks’ problem was not over-expansion, but a lopsided view on the meaning of growth.

Certainly more locations is one way to increase profit, but did it never occur to them to improve their product, similar to Harley Davidson? Starbucks' extra cash placed them in a position to improve their product, or at least to make it more efficiently. Or they could have experimented with real cappuccinos, which are generally thicker and have less foam, rather than switching to automated machines. Or they could have lowered the price of their products, which would have enabled them to compete more effectively with McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts. Instead, they’re stuck with too many stores which need to charge an arm and a leg for a cup of coffee in order to make a profit.

None of these strategies were guaranteed to work, but they get at a very basic aspect of economics: Differentiating between what you see and what you don’t see. Starbucks chose to err on the former by expanding everywhere, rather than the latter. However, the alternative strategies – which err on what you don’t see – were certainly viable, as seen in the success of Dunkin Donuts. In a very real sense, both were strategies behind growth. Yet do you hear liberals decry that Dunkin Donuts is taking over the world with their expansion of quality and lowering of price?

As Harley Davidson’s history shows, companies don’t just grow by getting physically bigger and taking up more space. As Hazlitt proclaimed in 1946, growth in areas that you don’t physically see right in front of you are often the most important types of growth.

The More Important

I want to end on this concept because I’m entranced by it.

Mankind necessarily begins with the concrete and what’s right in front of him, and over generations he forms laws of nature, which get at what Plato called underlying forms. Plato believed that the forms behind the manifestation of reality are inherently more important than physical objects, because the forms govern their existence. In other words, the law of gravitation is more important than the objects which are being gravitated, because the law allows us to understand the objects.

Hazlitt was saying something very similar, only in relation to economics: What we don’t see is often more important than what we see. We visually see Starbucks everywhere, but we don’t visually see the quality of coffee increasing. Hazlitt elaborated with an analogy to a broken shop window: If a shop’s window breaks, we see extra business go to the repair man. Judging just from what we see, broken windows are good because they produce business. What we don’t see, however, is more important. We don't see the foregone opportunities given up by shop owner. Perhaps he now has to make his goods more expensive, or he can’t expand his business. Economist John Maynard Keynes - whose influence has exceeded Marx in determining liberal economic policy - was notorious in his inability to grasp Hazlitt's law. He once famously suggested that we should bury money under ground, so that industries can form by digging holes to get them out.

I’m fond of intellectualizing issues, often to a fault (see this post and every other). For this reason, though, I’m often amazed at how intellectual liberals fail to grasp anything about the economy that's not in plain sight in front of their eyes; because Hazlitt’s law is the bare essence of intellectualization, by moving the discussion to the underlying principles, rather than just what’s out there in front of you. How can you be intellectual and fail to grasp that there’s more to the world than just what you see?

Nonetheless, liberals often chide at attempts to get at the underlying forms of the economy, such as Adam Smith's notion of the invisible hand, under the presumption that it's an oversimplified attempt to avoid reality. On the contrary, however, discussing physical economic things without reference their underlying economic form is like trying to move a rotating object without thinking about gravitational forces. Stated more succintly, its easy to change something's outward physical appearance, like an item's price, but its not easy to alter the form, like the information that a price conveys.

Of course, applied to the economy, this mistake is not specific to intellectual liberals. Many economists and politicians, in the tradition of Keynes, overemphasize consumer goods and end-products, which we see, over investments and savings, which we don't see. One instance of this was when former President Bush urged Americans to go shopping after 9/11 upon the assumption that this would stimulate the economy. Contrary to Bush's intention, buying random things when you don’t need them is pointless, and spending beyond your means is in fact harmful for the economy. When you buy a product that you need and can afford, you’re signaling to the manufacturer – along with anyone involved in its profit – that the product is valuable. You're telling them that you enjoy their product more than you would have enjoyed your extra money somewhere else. You're signaling them to make more of that product, or to keep doing what they were doing. Buying useless products that you can’t afford just adds noise to that signal, and it depletes from your savings. Savings again represent what you don’t see: They don’t just sit in a bank vault. They’re loaned to businesses or people, or are reinvested into the economy. That money is given a purpose, and in line with Hazlitt, that purpose is arguably more important than your consumption, particularly if you don’t need or want that consumption.

This misconception is magnified in the use of GDP – gross domestic product – to measure the macroeconomy. GDP is the total measure of exactly what you see: product. It doesn’t include what you don’t see, particularly savings and investment. When a window breaks, or another Starbucks opens, GDP increases, regardless of any depletion in savings; when a company like Harley Davidson focuses on making better motorcycles (and spends on R&D), GDP suffers.

Economist Mark Skousen, among a few others, hotly debates the usefulness of GDP. Using a statistic called gross output, he estimates that end-product consumer goods account for only a third of the economy. And this makes sense, because changes in the GDP usually lag behind changes in the stock market by a few months. It takes money to make money, and it also takes money in the right hands as well. That's why savings and investments are more important than consumption.

Right now most every company is in trouble, although to varying degrees. Starbucks used one strategy for expansion, though it certainly wasn’t the only strategy, and in hindsight it probably wasn’t the wisest. Harley Davidson management has recently turned south as well, as they’ve somehow managed to pile on a huge amount of debt while being aware of their shrinking baby-boomer customer base. But the important lesson is that these companies had options, as growth doesn’t always occur in areas that you see. Often the best things in life – love, joy, happiness – you can't see directly at all.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance):

Photo: (1) Careful, 11/10/2006, by Carlos Aldana; (2) Fuel, 09/30/2006, by Nathan Makan; (3) 1907 Harley Davidson, photo by Rmhermen; (4) Harley Davidson Heritage Model 2004; (5) DUNKIN' DONUTS, 12/03/2006, by Paul Downey; (6) Concave modular origami : collection so far, 11/17/2008, by fdecomite; (7) Shattered Lens, 03/06/2006, by kandyjaxx; (8) Westfield White City, 11/25/2008, by Manuel.

Obama and the Post-Baby Boomer World

2009-01-23T23:27:00.005-05:00

Look at the tears of the cold-hearted Jessie Jackson.

We all know that Obama’s inauguration marks a new age of race relations in the US. I was even tempted to vote for him solely because of his skin color (this coming from a Caucasian). The political race card isn’t superficial: Imagine if every black person in the US felt just a bit more “welcome” here with a black president. Just think about the economic implications.

Obama’s presidency comes at a time when America’s demographics are changing. America is becoming less white. It’s no coincidence that our first black president was elected when he was: The baby boomers are moving on. The passing of the baby boomers, I suspect, will mark Obama’s presidency more than anything else in the US, even more than race relations. The baby boomers are the largest age cohort in the US. It’s not just that they’re more white. They’re also wealthier. And older.

In 1969, Nixon claimed that he appealed to a silent majority of constituents – hard-working older Americans who didn’t protest the war and who had real American values. That silent majority was in fact the baby boomer generation. And they’ve been skewing politics ever since. Young liberal protesters – some even the children of baby boomers – have been dumbfounded by them, ever since protesting the Vietnam War.

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
To have a thankless child (King Lear, Act I, Scene IV)

But you have to hand it to the baby boomers. They were born right after one of the scariest times in history, and America’s post-World War II growth in opulence is mostly attributable to them. In their time our economy has shifted even further from being based on physical labor to skills. This shift allows individuals to have longer careers. It gives women a larger role in the workplace. It puts a premium on education. Most of all, it puts a premium on experiential knowledge. Unlike previous generations, it allows the older to be wealthier. The baby boomers’ passing – both literally and figuratively – will be like the loss of a father or a mother to society.

The economic effects are just being realized, and barring any major changes in immigration policy, it will likely extend far beyond weighing down an inefficient health care system. Competent older workers are the most valuable people in our economy. Think about how their loss will have idiosyncratic effects in every industry in the economy.

I can’t help but suspect that the world will have a new feel to it. Maybe this is just because I’m in my mid-20’s and I’ll be experiencing that world in the fullest. But I suspect that the election of Obama is merely our first taste of the world after baby boomers. I suspect that there have been cultural shifts and movements that have been stifled because society has disproportionally more older people, who carry much more economic weight. I wonder whether our economic growth in previous decades was fueled by the disproportional size of the baby boomer generation. I wonder whether we’ll still be one of the wealthiest countries in the world. I suspect that the we’ll become even more technology and internet-oriented.

I think part of it might be a little like the shift from Microsoft to Apple. See, a few years ago my mom bought an iPod, and she still can’t figure it out, this following multiple lengthy lessons from myself. But that’s understandable, because iTunes originally made the most sense for people with large CD or digital music collections. Nonetheless, Apple has become one of the world's largest tech companies in spite of all the people like my mom who aren’t attracted to it. Just imagine what the world will look like when everyone can use an iPod.

Maybe we were all so amazed that we elected a black president that we didn’t catch onto this. But in retrospect it’s obvious: Barack Obama is the first president to be elected by primarily non baby-boomers. It’s not just that lots of young people supported him – young people have always leaned liberal – it’s that those people finally outweighed enough other people. Looming large is the question: what will the post-baby boomer world look like?.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Rev. Jesse Jackson in tears, 11/05/2008, by Andrew Mager; (2) Richard Nixon in the Oval Office, 1972; (3) BlackAppleLogo, 07/25/2008, Ken Fager; (4) Crowds on 18th Street - 2009 Presidential Inauguration, 01/20/2009, by Agnostic Preachers Kid; (5) Obama Poster Painted on Brick..., 05/03/2008, by Hattie Page.

Video: (1) Music video, 05/28/2008, Penguuinz, of the song "The Long Day is Over", by Norah Jones, from her 2002 album Come Away with Me.

Lateral Transmissions

2009-01-20T14:43:00.029-05:00

Dog-breeding, the colors of pigeons, beaver dams, and beehives. These were culled from the wide array of examples Darwin uses to propose evolution by means of natural selection. Typical of former renaissance writers, Darwin wrote with long sentences and erred on the side verbosity. In order to get into his work, you have to slow your mind and get it into a certain flow. Similar to many great writers, his volumes of work now might seem to the modern reader overbearing and archaic, overweighed by infinite trivial examples. But on the contrary, his examples demonstrate how evolution is all around us, in the everyday and in the mundane. And furthermore, where was Darwin supposed to start?

You see, since reading Robert Pirsig, I’ve become absolutely hung up on this notion of lateral truths. We often try to construct our lives in order to move straight forward, but Pirsig argued that there’s more to be gained from lateral movement. The movement straightforward, he argues, simply produces more and more things – be it facts or products – atop a weak edifice of previous things. Whereas lateral movement seeks to strengthen such edifices before going forward. I think that’s why I’ve been hesitant to write about the same topics both across blog posts and within them. Unfortunately I often stop and stutter in my writing, both in the typing and in my thoughts, going back and forth and checking my ideas in various ways. I apologize for any inconvenience, as it's anything but convenient for myself. But the point is that it’s not about adding on top, it’s about consolidating seemingly disconnected pieces across a wide array of phenomena. That’s where my mind seems to be gravitating so that's where I'll go.

Darwin began his scientific career as a barnacle expert, supposedly based on the advice that in order make any scientific contribution to the world you have to narrow your focus. He was heavily influenced by geologist Charles Lyell, who set forth similar principles as Darwin’s in his study of rock-formations across the world. On Darwin's formative Voyage of the Beagle, he inspected various islands and peninsulas. Supposedly Darwin brought 3 books on the trip: Lyell’s Principles of Geology, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the bible. In piecing together The Origin of Species, he also met with dog breeders and a London-based pigeon-watching society.

When you look at all the separate pieces of evidence that yielded Darwin’s conception of evolution – of which the above are a small sample – you have to ask yourself where you don’t see evolution. It’s uncannily similar to religious arguments for the existence of God – just look around you, can’t you see that there's evidence of Him everywhere?

Darwin’s theory of evolution – and maybe even people's belief in God – both serve to consolidate seemingly disparate things. It’s atop these edifices that we’re then genuinely able to move forward for some time.

Adam Smith also had an uncanny ability to construct theory atop the seemingly mundane. In a stroke of literary genius, he began his multi-volume work by discussing pin-manufacturing in Europe. This topic would certainly seem pointless to most people, particularly ivory tower theorists, but that was exactly the point - that even in such a small everyday example, you can see the workings of the division of labor. Shakespeare achieved a similar feat of specificity in his line:

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
To have a thankless child (King Lear, Act I, Scene IV)

As a professor once told me, consider how that line would've fallen apart if you replaced "teeth" for "tooth". But if Smith's pin-making example was merely a rhetorical gimmick or a literary hook, then he would have dived straight into abstract theory with little or no return to the real world. Instead, Smith constantly goes back to the real world to support and test his developing ideas. And this gets at the heart of the study of economics, which is to pinpoint the wide-ranging and long-term effects of policy decisions on areas as specific as pin-making. (Pun intended, but it's not really a pun due to the shared meanings of 2 words).

Evolution and capitalism are unfortunately often discussed in platitudes as ideologies. But what I love about Darwin and Smith is that in their writings you can see their theories organically growing out of their observations of the world. Not that this makes their theories automatically correct, but it reveals an honesty that’s too often missing in intellectual discussion.

A lot of writing these days is reactionary and steeped in hatred – this is particularly the case in Karl Marx, whose writings have succeeded more as a polemic against the upper-class than an applicable economic system. Whenever I detect too much spite in a book or an editorial I get a sense that it has little to teach me. All that Darwin and Smith were reacting to was nature right in front them; Thomas Sowell has a similar honesty in his writings as well.

In a few passages in Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig will be talking to someone who disagrees with him, and the 1st thought that will come to my mind will be, “Oh that other person is so wrong.” This is because Pirsig builds his case so well in the book. But Pirsig will go on to say, “And in a way they were completely correct.” It’s not just another rhetoric gimmick, because in time you come to see how in that way they were completely correct. When you can see how everyone is correct in their own sense, then you can really get to the bottom of things. It harks back to using Aristotles' law of non-contradiction to your advantage. The law states: "It is impossible for the same thing to belong and not to belong at the same time to the same thing and in the same respect". What you have to realize, however, is that one person's opinion in favor of something is not the opposite as someone else's opinion against it: They're both true in their own sense, what differs is that sense. And it's that sense that you have to drag your mind to.

What I love about all these authors is that they’re not writing with an axe to grind. The benefit of reading such original sources like Darwin and Smith isn’t that they presented the perfect the version of their theories, it's that they truly saw their theory manifested throughout nature over and over and over again. They were thinking in the right sense. And in doing so, they consolidated phenomena, made the world simpler not more complex, and laid the groundwork for others to build upon. They weren’t moving up, they were trying to get to the bottom of things. There's an aesthetic appreciation for this as well; it's why repetition, used correctly, can be so powerful. Consider the role of repetition in learning or in music. Choruses in songs aren't just effective because they're good in and of themselves, they're effective because when you return to them your mind is slightly different from when it last experienced it.

This is what I’ve been trying to do recently. It recently struck me that the solution to most problems in life – be them intellectual or personal – is to stop and think to yourself, “What’s really going on here? What’s underlying the manifestation I’m seeing in front of me?” It’s a sort of analysis, or a division of labor in the mind so to speak. In my day-to-day life, when I face personal problems, I realize that my mind goes off and I forget to analyze, or I’m not analyzing correctly. Maybe I’m just over-thinking things. But it seems like the world's problems are all just due to a lack of clarity.

Ironically I realize that the last sentence may be vague, unclear. Pirsig expresses a similar sentiment when he describes an instructional manual he's saved over the years. The manual begins, "Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind." Pirsig describes this instruction as both the best and the worst instruction he's ever seen: It contains nothing specific to putting together the bike, but it's a great, perhaps even essential, piece of advice for piecing together the bike, and in that sense, it has everything to do with putting together the bike. Pirsig goes on:

Peace of mind isn't at all superficial, really...It's the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate test's always your own serenity. If you don't have this when you start and maintain it while you're working you're likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.

So it’s not just analysis in the classical sense. Sometimes you have to ask yourself about general impressions that you get, make deductions based on them, and then follow those paths down to analysis. Like impressionistic art, you’re feeling a feeling, looking at a whole, and then diving down and asking yourself about versions of meaning. Which is why there's little to gain when at the bottom of things is an emotion like hatred, spite, or an attempt to maintain one's opinion rather than to learn about the real world, the latter of which should always be the focus. I’m sure that Darwin thought of evolution before he actively sought many of the examples in his book; it’s just that after he thought of his theory, he still kept his feet firmly planted on the ground.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Dauschund evolution, 01/03/2006, Colin Purrington; (2) Paloma, 06/30/2008, by Jaoa da Luna; (4) Barnacles, 01/27/2007, by Alanna@VanIsle; (5) lateral pass in football; (6) Shark tooth fossil, 08/27/2007, howzey; (7) Impression, soleil levant, 1872, by Claude Monet; (8) water lilly pads, 11/25/2005, Sarah Macmillan.

Video: Music video, 09/18/2007, gatojph4, of the song "Somthing" by The Beatles from the 1969 album Abbey Road.

Healthcare: A Diseconomy of Scale

2009-01-18T00:44:00.011-05:00

Economic recessions offer the benefit of making inefficiency more costly. During times of plenty, we can tolerate mediocre businesses or bad public policy; but during a recession they come under heavier scrutiny. This appears to be the case for medical care. The Washington Post reports that

For years a booming economy camouflaged the burden of medical debt. Patients borrowed against their homes or whipped out credit cards, including some specially designed to pay medical or dental bills. But falling house prices and tightening credit have eliminated those options for many.

It’s long been recognized that medical care in the US needs improvement, it’s just that when the economy was good we could afford its extra costs. Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko – a polemic rant about our lack of universal healthcare – was released in the summer of 2007, which was one of the decades’ most prosperous economic times. Only now, with money tight, are we forced to do something about it. An estimated 78 million baby boomer retirees are thought to further weigh down the future of medical care. However, I’ve always been baffled about the inability of our medical care system to take advantage of economies of scale.

What are economies of scale?

An economy of scale refers to the advantages a business gains from an enlarging consumer base. It’s a piece of economic jargon, but don’t let that throw you: Knowledge in modern times is heavily fragmented, so fields of study are constantly adopting new idiosyncratic jargon-terms, with the unfortunate result of often alienating outsiders and novices. Economy of scale however is one of the most valuable concepts in modern times – even outside of economics – because, by any scale of measurement, the world’s stage is getting larger. The future of truth and knowledge itself – epistemology – is likely to be interwoven with this principle of economy of scale.

The principle is pretty simple. At its heart is an exchange of capital for economic security. For instance, a full-time job that pays $10 an hour is often more valuable than a temp-job with erratic hours that pays $20 an hour. In accepting the full-time position, you’re trading the potential extra earnings of the temp-job for the economic security of knowing your salary for certain. Likewise, when you buy large quantities of goods, you’re guaranteeing a supplier economic security; suppliers often offer discounts in return. That’s why products at stores like Best Buy or Costco are inexpensive.

Ford’s M odel T car is the classic example: By marketing the car towards the general population, Ford Motors drew in large quantities of capital, which made it cheaper for them to buy supplies and hire permanent workers. If Ford only bought enough supplies for 1 car and hired a temp to construct it, then the Model T would have been unaffordable for most people; on the other hand, if Ford mass produced the Model T and it turned out to be a flop, they’d have gone bankrupt.

The Model T was of course a hit and the investment payed off over many times. Inventors were playing around with cars long before Ford, but Ford’s ability to tap economies of scale made cars accessible to the population at large. The automobile went on to revolutionize our economy more than any other single invention. Likewise, Microsoft popularized the computer by marketing an operating system accessible to non-geeks.

Economies of scale have fueled such transformations, which would’ve been impossible without enough capital and without enough people. People – in both quantity and quality – are an economy’s best asset.

That’s why international trade sanitations against foreign nations are so harmful: When a nation is left to fend for itself it can’t take advantage of economies of scale. The harms of trade sanctions are escalated as the world population grows: If there are only half a billion people in the world, and a nation is cut off from four-fifths of them, then they’re not missing much; but if a nation is cut off from 5 billion people, then they’re missing much more.

A similar effect occurs when groups of people cut themselves off from the rest of the world in order to become “self-sufficient”. Self-sufficiency will always be difficult regardless of the world’s population, but as the world population expands, the drawbacks of self-sufficiency become more obvious. The Amish for instance weren’t so different from the original American settlers; but today their differences from mainstream America are magnified tremendously.

Self-sufficient groups such as hippie communes lack any economy of scale. In fact, you might even say that their isolation makes them anything but sufficient. It’s not just that they miss out on this or that technology, they also miss out on all the opportunity created by technology: The time saved through efficient transportation, or a PC’s computing power.

Likewise, protectionist international trade policies, or the push to make the US "independent" from foreign oil, isolate us from economies of scale. The costs of such policies often outweigh the benefits. And these costs extend beyond the extra money we're forced to pay; they retard progress as a whole.

Healthcare's "impending crisis"

…all of which is why a predication such as the the following would be a blessing to almost any industry except for medical care:

We face an impending crisis as the growing number of older patients, who are living longer with more complex health needs, increasingly outpaces the number of health care providers with the knowledge and skills to care for them capably. (CBS News, 04/2008, quoting John Rowe)

Say, for instance, we find out that, without a doubt, in 10 years, a quarter of all 18 year-olds will purchase a new MP3 player. As early as possible, Apple would plan to mass-produce more iPods at more competitive prices. As the leader of the industry, Apple’s stock would soar immediately. And as a direct result of the expected economy of scale, the price of iPods and other MP3 players would fall significantly.

But in healthcare an influx of customers is a crisis not a blessing. This maybe because health care is different: It’s a service industry, and it relies on insurance and risk. But at the same time, other service industries – such as IT support - have adapted to increasing demand. Now is in fact the best time in history for your computer to break down, since so many other people own computers. If there were only 500 other computers in the whole world, and yours broke down, you’d be SOL. Likewise for your car. Yet the point remains that health care lacks such a safety in numbers; on the contrary, it has a danger in numbers.

The problem is that advances in healthcare haven’t been applied to economies of scale. It’s like in the early 20th century, after the car was invented, but before it was mass-produced. I suspect that the difficulties in boosting health care through economies of scale are due structural inefficiencies rather than a lack of technological advancement.

Consider for instance the costs involved in becoming a doctor or in producing drugs, which include huge sums of both money and time. These costs are inevitably passed onto society at large. Additionally, anti-competitive practices such as social security and medical care leave no incentives for cost-cutting or increased efficiency. Some liberals might shiver at the prospect of business profiting from elders' health problems. But the costs of our present system are too great. Indeed, the current system benefits much more from high-cost solutions to medical problems than from low-cost solutions. Similar to trade sanctions or hippie communes, the flaws of poor healthcare policy only become more apparent as the world gets bigger.

And herein lies economies of scale’s epistemological import: As populations continue to grow, advancements in cost-effectiveness will become more important than other types of scientific or technological advancements. This is somewhat counterintuitive because we tend to think in categorical terms. Medical science seeks cures, not ways to save money. But with more people in the world, the benefits of less expensive treatments are more pronounced. It’s not just that they save lots of people lots of money, it’s that they free up lots of money for society to pursue other problems.

The debate on healthcare in America is backwards because it’s from the perspective of who should pay the bill, not how we can lower it. From the perspective of society at large, at any given moment, it doesn’t matter who pays off patients' debts – it still costs society the foregone alternatives of applying that capital elsewhere. In other words, the expensive cost of medical care will wreck havoc on society regardless of who foots the bill.

Thomas Sowell points out that modern times are unique because for the first time in history the poor and middle classes combined have more capital than the wealthy class. This is why economies of scale are important. And it’s why – if you measure time by the quantity and impact of significant events each year – time is exponentially speeding up. Unfortunately, sometimes we’re forced to advance by learning from bad policy, which can take years to start reaping rotten fruit. But properly harnessed, economies of scale will propel us into the future. We have the requisite capital, know-how, and gumption. Most importantly we have the people.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Crowds in Hong Kong, 12/22/2008, by LipJin Lee; (2) Costco, 12/16/2004, by Ryan Ozawa; (3) Old but not forgotten, 05/19/2008, chisdonia; (4) Life in Orange County, Indiana, 02/28/2007, by Cindy Seigle; (5) Ginza 銀座, 09/16/2006, by Nathan Duckworth; (6) Medical insignia; (7) faster than the speed of light, 12/28/2007, by Via Bulatao.

Music: Music video, 09/22/2008, from KERAKO's channel, of the song "TNT" by Tortoise from the 1998 album TNT.

Keynesian Economics

2009-01-15T08:58:00.002-05:00

Lil Wayne - New Music - More Music Videos

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Video: (1) Music video of the song "Got Money" by Lil Wayne from the 2008 album Tha Carter III.

MW vs. Syms: There are more things to heaven and earth

2009-01-08T00:27:00.016-05:00

It’s funny how you can think yourself into a hole. It’s especially common in analysis, which is the breakdown of a whole into its component parts. I recently did this when I was playing the addictive stock market stimulation, TMF Caps, where thousands of players rate stocks that they predict will out- or under-perform the S&P 500. You’re then awarded points based on whether your favored stocks out-perform the S&P and your un-favored ones under-perform the S&P. The next few paragraphs delve into 2 picks I made on Caps with the dual purpose of talking about the companies and then portraying my analytic rut. Then we’ll pop out and look at the nature of the rut itself.

One of my first picks was in favor of The Men’s Wearhouse (MW). MW sells discounted formal men's clothing and rents out tuxedos from hundreds of stores across the country. Here were my thoughts at the time:

Shopping is predominantly a female experience. Men’s sections at department stores are a joke. They’re at best a third the size of women’s sections and they’re always overpriced. My hunch is most men only find themselves in these stores because they’re brought in by their female counterparts. Which is fine, because expensive department stores can sell plenty of $80 ties to absently wandering men who are waiting for their women. But if a young man suddenly needs a bunch of formalwear - say, a whole new job’s worth of clothing – then he’s not going to fumble around at an overpriced department store.

Across the range of brands, prices for men’s formalwear increase exponentially. It’s not like cars, where there are plenty of discount, standard, and luxury items. Rather, the distribution of prices is heavily skewed with large price-jumps as you get just a bit fancier. On the one hand, you might expect this for any luxury good: You won’t find many cheap gold watches, because gold is expensive by nature. But at the same time, for many men, formalwear is an occupational necessity rather than a luxury.

MW is the biggest national company offering discounted men’s clothing, and this niche has a promising future. Consider 2 inescapable trends: Our economy continually shifts away from physical labor, and the baby-boomers – who are the wealthiest and most skilled workers – are retiring. The shift away from physical labor means that more occupations require men to wear suits; while retiring baby-boomers means that the remaining population will be younger and less wealthy, which makes them more likely to seek clothing discounts.

Based on this argument, I went ahead and placed my vote of confidence for MW on Caps. A few weeks and about 10 stock picks later I came across Syms (SYMS) which appealed to me for the same reason: Cheap men’s clothing. Syms is a much smaller company (with 30-some stores), and I’d frequented a local one, where the customer service was stellar. Their stores are physically bigger than MW’s, kind of like a Burlington Coat Factory but with suits instead of coats. And the store by me constantly has many ethnic minorities (both shopping and working there), which is a good sign because America is becoming less white.

But it didn’t take long for me to realize that Syms is a dreadful stock option. The stores make hardly any money and management has remained mostly in-family, to the point of concern. More disturbing were rumors about the company’s desire to go private. They delisted from the market for 4 months due to extra costs from new burdensome accounting laws, and during that time they expressed the desire to go totally private, but shareholder pressure persuaded them to reenlist. Yet just a few months after their return to the NASDAQ, they started touting the value of their real estate, and shareholders suspected that this was a ploy from the management to raise the stock's value just enough to buy it back and go private for good. Again, shareholder pressure prevented this. In response Syms’ PE ratio jumped to over 100, and it's suspiciously remained at that level for months. So in sum you have an extremely overvalued retail company, which is underhandedly more in the real-estate sector, and which is run by family management who’ve had to keep the company public against their will…and all of this is during a recession. The situation was so ugly I was compelled to vote against them on Caps (e.g., that they would under-perform the S&P).

Over the next few weeks I researched different companies and watched my score fluctuate. MW rose a bit, making it look like a nice recession-proof stock, and Syms dipped a bit, convincing me they had it in for them. However the problem was that whenever MW rose, Syms seemed to rise as well, and whenever MW fell, Syms fell as well. So when they both rose, I made points on MW but lost points on Syms; and when they both fell, I made points on Syms, but lost on MW.

The Flaming Lips - New Music - More Music Videos

Then one morning it hit me like a ton of bricks. Seriously it was a classic doh-moment, you know like an a-ha moment but for a stupid mistake: Both stocks were fluctuating in relation to general market expectations for the discounted men's clothing sector. Or perhaps more generally for the discounted clothing sector. Or just the discount retail companies. Of course. When investors were bullish on clothing retail – or even just on the retail market as a whole – both stocks went up, and when they were bearish on retail, both went down. It was to my disadvantage that both MW and Syms - in spite their differences, which appeared magnified in my analysis - were indeed such similar companies.

I’m admittedly unsure about my reasons for liking MW and disliking Syms, but I’m fairly confident about why, in combination, this was a losing proposition. Maybe it would've been obvious for more seasoned investors, but of course: It’s not a zero-sum game!

MW and Syms, although competitors in one sense, are allies in the general fight for opulence. This harks back to one of the best reasons for capitalism: It’s not a question of who gets what slice of the pie, it’s a question of the growth of the whole pie. Clearly there were larger forces at work than these 2 companies.

Sometimes it’s so easy to get bogged down in details that you forget about these overarching forces. The myth that life is a zero-sum game is commonly seen in economics, especially in arguments to redistribute wealth and in equilibrium models, but it extends beyond economics as well.

One analogous situation, which bugs the hell out of me, is the practice of awarding grades relative to students' standings in relation to each other, such that a class’ grades are based on percentiles (i.e., with a certain number of students receiving, A’s, B’s, C’s, etc). This practice automatically assumes that there is a limited amount of knowledge to be delved out among a group of students, and one student's insight into a concept is another's failure to grasp it. It further frees the professor from any responsibility to teach the subject matter, because all he’s responsible for doing is rating students relative to each other. Theoretically, the whole class can come out of a semester without any new knowledge and everything would look fine and dandy. In this system learning of true knowledge is mistaken for competition between students.

A natural extension of this system could be seen in Enron’s old semi-annual performance-review committees, where they ranked all the employees and laid off the bottom 15%. After years of doing this, the long-term result wasn’t better business but nasty cut-throat employees who tried to make their peers look bad, and who ultimately were part of taking down the company.

Competition, likewise in the free-market, occurs not so much between similar companies as it does against general market forces. Each company is fighting for the most efficient use of its necessary resources. It's telling, for instance, that Ford, GM, and Chrysler all announced that they were in trouble at the same time. Clearly these companies were hit harder from general market forces than from each other or from foreign companies.

I see people make this mistake as well in my day-to-day personal life. Like that guy with a nasty type-A personality who's always vying to get ahead or look better than his peers while he proclaims that it’s a dog-eat-dog world. Or on the highway the person who swerves right by you only to soon be stuck in traffic 3 cars ahead.

Or did you ever undertake an endeavor where no matter how hard you tried to succeed you still failed? And it’s like you come out of such an experience, and you’re running the same tape over and over your mind, trying to break it apart into smaller pieces, when perhaps it was really something bigger, or something out of view completely.

It seems like these days it’s easy to get into that sort of analytic rut in all sorts of contexts. Invariably the human mind has always been between 2 relative extremes - it’s small in relation to some things, large in relation to others – but modern science is constantly allowing us to zoom further in and to gaze further out, while more and more the hidden enigma for some things in life falls not so much at the edge of either extreme but in the ever-widening gap between them.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Men's Wearhouse, 02/15/2008, by AnotherSunshine; (2) reflecting (upon) empty parking lot, 07/30/2007, by Lori Greig; (3) 曼哈頓最讚的折扣店, 02/25/2007, by Tommy Ian; (4) Hemming and Hawwing, 12/01/2007, by Andy I.; (5) Times Square, 06/14/2007, by barabeke; (6) Project365 - 250, 09/09/2007, by Mike Nielson; (7) N2008-06-19_06_cesta-do-prahy, 06/25/2008, by Ma a Ra.

Video: (1) Music video of the song "Do you Realize??" by The Flaming Lips from their 2002 album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.

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Upcoming ideas:

Progress isn't linear
Intel vs. AMD, Apple
Advances in tech outstripping modes of thinking, ideas

Top 15 of 2008

2009-01-04T03:28:00.030-05:00

I thought about doing one of those year-end lists (like best CDs of the year) but I'm never very in touch with what's been released any given year. And furthermore half the time I find myself amazed by old things as if they were new (like a few years ago when I discovered Marvin Gayes' 1971 R&B classic, What's Goinig On). Society has a strong preference for the new, but sometimes old ideas can seem all the more relevant. So I decided to make a list of just top stuff in my life this year. Some are ideas and areas of study while others are new media and entertainment. Think of them as influencers in my life this year. In that sense, they're all things that proved to be novel to me in 2008 (that's why you won't find the sun rising) like little surprises or discoveries for the year. And in that sense as well I hope some of them you might find novel in your life.

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15. Dogs

Previously I never understood why people become so attached to them, though I never gave it much thought. But with new roommates I'm now living with a bunch of dogs and they’re a whole lot of fun like good buds. Dogs definitely make life just a bit richer.

14. The Washington Redskins

Being fully away from any form of school I’ve been able to get back into football. I enjoyed following the Skins throughout high school, but now that my mind’s a bit more matured I suddenly see there’s so much more to the game. This has become my new religion insofar as I set aside time each Sunday and think about it all week...and insofar as it’s not really a religion.

13. The Stock Market

Stock prices fluctuate in relation to demand for them not in relation to how good a company is. On a very intuitive level, this has never made sense to me, and it still doesn’t. But this year I’ve become intrigued with finding good intro books, reading about the market, researching companies, and even buying my first couple of shares. It’s essentially a mind-puzzle, a very tempered and controlled form of gambling. But boy is it intriguing. Sometimes I’ll just go to finance.google.com and watch the numbers change.

12. iTunes Genius

iTunes Genius is like an automated DJ who works with your digital music collection. You “play a song, click the Genius button, and iTunes creates a playlist of other songs from your library that go great together. Genius playlists help you discover songs in your library you never knew you had — and rediscover forgotten favorites.” Each song transition is tasteful and perhaps even artistic. It’s not perfect as it doesn’t recognize every song, and you can only use it for one song at a time. But its playlists really rival my own, some of which I've spent some time on. Even if you prefer to make your own mixes, you can use Genius to generate new ideas when you're stuck.
11. Motley Fool Caps

Motley Fool CAPS is an addictive stock market stimulator in which you vote on which stock picks will out- or under-perform the S&P. It’s as close as you’ll get to a true social networking community focusing on the stock market. And it’s taught me a good bit the market, both through making picks and reading others’ commentary. Tons of people use it and many stocks have thousands of predictions. For instance, Apple is currently the most frequently rated stock with 19,512 members for it and 1,593 members against it. TMF collects the data to generate all sorts of stats on players and stocks. It's only been around since 2006, and they're constantly tweaking it for the better. No one is even sure yet how it’ll turn out: Will it provide accurate real-world predictions? Will the highest rated stocks win out in the long run? In the meanwhile though who cares because it’s more fun than real investing.

10. Good cappuccinos

I’m not one to make elite aesthetic distinctions – they're often just puffs of ego and semantics. But this year a friend introduced me to a coffee shop that makes “real” cappuccinos and boy what a difference. Ones that look like this:

Cappuccinos are supposed to be thick and made with whole milk. The whole point in adding milk is so the dairy fat can bring out the flavor of the coffee. I'm hooked, and Starbucks' – who recently made skim milk their default for cappuccinos – now taste pretty empty to me.

9. metacritic.com

Metacritic.com combines critics' reviews on any given movie, music album, video game, or TV show. Each item gets a combined score across all critics, similar to rottentomatoes but with more media and a more user-friendly layout. I’ll often check it out before – and sometimes after – seeing or purchasing related media. The service is topnotch, since being bought by CBS, who've supplied it with more than adequate bandwidth, better quality control, and new features.

8. Coldplay’s album Viva la Vida

Like a revelation unfolded in sound. The collaboration between Coldplay and producer(/ambient maestro) Brian Eno worked perfectly. Coldplay and Eno are each intellectual aurally-aware introverts – sometimes to a fault – but here they build off each other quite well.

7. Improv acting classes

A few months ago I capriciously decided to give improv acting classes a try, as inspired through this article at CNN. It's taught me some unique life lessons, which I wrote about previously, but moreso it’s just a great release.

6. Slumdog Millionaire

The world is getting more connected, and we could only go on for so long before some artsy director pondered "why not make an American version of a Bollywood film?", and Slumdog Millionaire is the glorified result. An intense journey through the deepest reaches of poverty and fantasy, it’s the sort of film that could only have been released – or made money – this decade. Americans are truly getting smarter with each passing generation. Movies like Slumdog Millionaire or the Dark Knight are too complex and edgy to have been widely accepted a couple of decades ago. I loved them. We’re demanding more from pop-culture Mecca’s like Hollywood, and they’re giving us the goods. For more see Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Check out Slumdog's soundtrack as well.

5. iTunes audio-books

I enjoy music and my iPod gives me freedom to listen to it anywhere. But I’ve recently begun digging iTunes’ audio-books as much as its music. At first I thought that I’d rather just listen to my favorite tunes everywhere and get into a groove. But audio-books have slipped into my daily iPod use with surprising ease. Just be sure to pick ones that aren’t too complex to listen to on the go. For example, an audio version of Newton’s Principia Mathematica won't work.

4. New Balance motion control sneakers

A few months ago I decided to give these shoes a go. They're called motion control shoes, because they have extra support around the arch in order to force your foot into correct pronation. They’ve completely corrected my posture, solved a running injury that I’ve had for years, and allowed me to run again. Who would’ve thought? The New Balance store by me has exceptional customer service as well, far exceeding similar high-end running shoe stores that I tried.

"Graphite Rollbar® is a boomeranging positioned piece of graphite in the midsole which maximizes rearfoot stability. Rollbar can be combined with a TPU medial and/or lateral post for motion control."

3. Economics

Economics suddenly intrigues me to no end. I don’t know what it is, but this topic seems to pervade everything. This year I’ve spent some time trying to finding the right books to teach myself about economics, and so far my picks have exceeded my expectations. Among the top is Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics.

2. Sleep

This year I’ve reached new plateaus in how good my sleep feels. Wrote Vladimir Nabokov, “Sleep is a rose the Persians say.” (For more see a previous post).

1. Robert Pirsig's Zen & the art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I've returned to this book for the first time since a teen and it hits the spot like a popsicle on a hot day. I first read it a decade ago but it seems so much more relevant now. You can feel yourself learning with each page. And I even see how its lessons – which I’d forgotten explicitly came from the book – left their mark on my thinking since I was teenager, such as: the importance of analysis, both regarding its benefits and limits; the notion of honest work; quality and gumption; the limits of ego, opinion, and rigid-thinking. Other lessons are particularly relevant to my life now: the notion of moving laterally in life instead of forward; that roadblocks in life or in the mind are equally or more important than success; the severe limits of the empirical sciences. His discussion on lateral movement is exactly what I find so fascinating about free markets and alternative uses of scarce resources. But the book's reach extends far beyond.

-KJ
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Media (in order of appearance):

Photo: (1) Jason Taylor, 08/16/2008, jf; (2) iTunes Genius logo; (3) CAPPUCCINO, 07/22/2007, by kina3; (4) Movie poster from the 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire, fair use rationale to provide commentary on film; (5) 365/365: Audiobooks, 01/09/2008, by David D Muir; (6) New Balance motion control technology; (7) Cover from Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Video: (1) Music video from caleismachinegun of the song "Lost" by Coldplay from the 2008 album Viva La Vida.

Thru Fragments of Cinema: (New Years) Resolution

2008-12-31T22:25:00.010-05:00

Life gains meaning through taking responsibility.

I’ve heard that a few times in my life in a few different contexts. The latest is from an unexpected source - my improv acting teacher. (A few months ago I capriciously decided to sign up for improv acting classes, inspired thru this article.) We witness great art, he claims, when characters own up and take responsibility for things. Part of it is the ability to admit you’re wrong and the willingness to be vulnerable in front of others. You can see it in the best actresses. The more that I think about it, the more I’m beginning to see that true beauty – at least in other people – lies in vulnerability. Good looks are important, but vulnerability underlies it. It’s what makes good looks look good, and it extends so much further. Consider

Back to taking responsibility. In order to judge a principle’s worth, Robert Pirsig (author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) believed, you use the principle like a scalpel to divide and classify phenomena, and then you ask yourself whether you’ve made a clean deep cut. By these standards, the idea of taking responsibility seems meaningful. It makes a clean cut in my life.

But it’s not as obvious as it may seem. Another student in my improv class pointed out that Steven Speilberg’s main characters are notorious for doing everything except taking responsibility. They never change, they never do anything but just run around and have things happen to them. This really set my mind turning. I’m a sucker, you see, for good movies. There’s nothing better than a well-made film, and it’s not just about the explicit elements of character and plot, it’s about the visual and audio portrayal of human experience. That’s why Shakespeare rarely makes for great cinema and why black and white is rarely as good as color. Directors make up their own grammar in the style in which they make films. And Speilberg is one of the best at doing this.

But the student was completely right, I just hadn’t thought about it that way. And it’s not just Spielberg. A lot of films are chock-full of producing a range of experience all of which just swirl around the main character. This post was partly inspired by a review of the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (an intelligently shot and edited film which, I believe, fell way over top-side from a gimmicky story that went on for too long). Here are some snippets from the review. Consider how many other films the criticism could apply to.

Button is the star of the film, but also its least interesting, least developed character, a soothing blank of a protagonist who seems to want little, feel nothing, and never have anything to say.

Most of the scenes in the movie consist of Pitt giving pleasantly docile looks while others blather on. During one fairly long scene with a woman he's having an affair with, Button utters a total of three lines, two of which consist of only two words: "You make me feel young." "What mistakes?" And finally, "I'm freezing." Later, he's asked about his years of travels, and the only answer he provides is, "I saw some things." Which is accurate enough: he's an observer, a cipher, a blank screen, but nothing more.

Though the movie stretches past the two and a half mark, and Button is in every scene, it is impossible to say anything specific about him, except that he appears to desire Daisy. Button is not merely generic, he is utterly empty, like one of those carefully wrapped fake Christmas gifts displayed under a department store tree.

These points can apply to every other film produced these days. And I have to admit they apply to some of my favorites.

Consider Tom Hank's empty expressions throughout Forest Gump (written by the same screenwriter as Benjamin Button).

Or the classic American action hero.

How vulnerable is he?

But maybe there’s an appeal to the story of the man who is victim of his circumstances. The sort of person who merely has to watch life unfold around him, and he can come out saying, “The things I’ve seen. Oh, the life I’ve led.” Tom Cruise in Steven Speilberg’s War of the Worlds - all he had to do was run from the machines, and honestly what a great movie that made. Maybe that’s part of our modern world. Or maybe humans have always felt that way. Modern society can certainly be so alienating that it’s easy to feel like we’re just the victims of our surroundings or technology, and that that alone gives life a meaning worth fighting for – or running from.

Pirsig makes the point that while it’s easy to feel alienated from everything, technology was made to benefit us. There’s nothing inherently wrong with technology, or the system, or it all. It’s our mindset that’s wrong. Science has advanced so quickly that we lack the proper tools for incorporating it into our mindset. When your computer freezes your first thoughts are “it’s acting up again, what in god’s name is it up to?” You just want to take a bat to it! But the computer is just a tool, one that was meant to work with us. What the situation needs is someone to take responsibility for it. Because surely it’s not the computer’s fault. And I don’t think you have to know much about computers to realize this. But it’s not necessarily intuitive. And it doesn’t mean that you’ll solve the problem. But on the other hand the “condemnation of technology”, Pirsig wrote, “is ingratitude, that's what it is.”

I’d like to take more responsibility and perhaps allow myself to be more vulnerable. I’m not sure if that’s a tangible goal, or what it’d necessarily look like. But that’s my New Year’s resolution.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance):

Photo: (1) Natalie Portman II, 10/23/2007, Mira(on the wall); (2) Portrait of Julia Roberts; (3) zooey deschanel of she & him, 04/23/2008, by Dese'Rae L. Stage; (4) vlcsnap-959983, 02/22/2007, dooby brain;(5) Portrait of Jennifer Gehrt from the 2007 documentary Confessions of a Superhero; (6) zooey deschanel of she and him, 04/23/2008, by Dese'Rae L. Stage; (7) Photo of Kathryn Aselton, from the 2005 film The Puffy Chair; (8) Promo from the 2008 film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; (9) Photo from 1994 film Forrest Gump; (10) Photo from the 2008 film of Rambo; (11) Photo from the 2005 film World of the Wars; (12)Happy Christmas Shopping, 12/16/2006, by Sherlock77; (13) Jason Campbell of the Washington Redskins.

Video: Music video of the song "Lovers in Japan (acoustic version)" by Coldplay from the 2008 album Viva La Vida.

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Upcoming ideas:

Seeing things in perspective in the stock market
(another) example of why the economy's not a zero-sum game
One solution for some times when you may get stuck in thought