futurehead

Obama's Afghanistan problem

Obama has a big problem in Afghanistan -- one of many problems he was handed by his predecessor the walking national disaster George Bush.

Actually to be precise he has two problems: Afghanistan the military/geopolitical problem, and Afghanistan the political problem. 

As far as the military/geopolitical problem, I am deeply skeptical that having a bunch of frightened, heavily armed, militarized 18-year-old American kids running around Afghanistan can do any good, advance the national interest, at all. There are rare times when force makes the world a better place, so I am open to well-reasoned arguments from those who are actually on the ground there, but they would have to be awfully well reasoned. 

As far as Obama's domestic political problem, however, I know exactly what I would do if I were president.  I would announce that I am withdrawing all U.S. forces from Afghanistan within x months unless Congress approves a declaration of war.  The country is divided? Obama is in danger of being painted as soft on terror if he does anything less than a full-bore commitment to this war?  His base is getting mad at him for considering escalation?  Simple: throw the vote to the people.  Let Congress debate the issue.  Let members of Congress hear from their constituents on the matter.  Let talk radio light up over the issue.  Let letters to the editor flow.  Let the talking heads argue for hours on end.  And then let the people's representatives make a decision.  And then honor that decision.

You know what?  The Founding Fathers knew what they were doing when they invested Congress with the power to declare war, and all the other powers that Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution gives to Congress to deal with national security issues.  We're supposed to be living in a democracy and warmaking -- when it is not an emergency decision -- is supposed to be a decision that is up to the people's representatives.  The Cold War and 9/11 have so distorted our democratic system that nobody bats an eye that one guy -- Obama -- is going to decide what our nation will do in Afghanistan. 

By following my suggestion, Obama can kill 2 birds with one stone: take the weight of the political decision off his own shoulders, and start to restore the health of our democratic system of government.

The Gates Affair

The Henry Louis Gates incident is a couple of weeks old now and a lot has been said & written about it, but I am still bothered by it.  I have been a fan of Gates since I read his excellent memoir Colored People in the mid-1990s.  But the thing that bothers me about this doesn't have anything to do with race -- it's that many of our cops seem to think they can arrest someone for disrespecting them -- and an amazing range and number of Americans seem to think either that this is correct -- that it is illegal to give a police officer a piece of your mind -- or that a cop's retaliation against such behavior is something that should just be accepted. Have Americans really become such a weak, docile, timid and authority-cowering people as that?

The woman who called the police was blameless.  I would not be surprised if America's racial context and history played a role in the initial telephone call to the police reporting a possible break-in; on the other hand the house HAD been broken into before, and what homeowner wouldn't prefer that someone in such a situation make a report rather than not, if there is any doubt.

The police were blameless for showing up at Gates's house.  I would also not be surprised if race played a role in the attitude and bearing of the police officer, James Crowley, when he challenged Gates.  Gates reports that his bearing was hostile.  However, unless you were there, this is subtle and fundamentally unknowable.  On the other hand, if Crowley just accepted that Gates was the homeowner, and Gates later turned out to in fact be a burglar, he would have become the laughingstock of the Boston Police Department.

Gates was blameless for being angry. Given our national history of which Gates as much as anyone was all too aware, as well as whatever personal animosity took place between the two men, any anger that Gates may have displayed may have been understandable (and let it be noted that Gates denies being verbally abusive, and in fact says that a throat condition prevented him from raising his voice - his most detailed account of the incident is here).  And, regardless of whether it was understandable, it was entirely within his rights as an American not only to ask for the office's badge number (which under Massachusetts law the officer was required to furnish him) but also, if he so chose, to express his anger verbally to the officer in any way he saw fit short of credible threats of violence.  It may not be prudent to shower verbal abuse upon a police officer, given the inevitable discretion that the police have in enforcing the law (in many circumstances there may just be a legitimate infraction to be found under which a police officer can legitimately charge you).  But when a man is standing in his own house, that is not a circumstance in which any self-respecting self-governing democratic citizen of our brave nation should have to cower and crimp and swallow anger before an official who has no legitimate business on your property (and from the moment Gates had established his residency by showing Crowley his Harvard ID and driver's license with address, Crowley no longer had any legitimate business on Gate's property).

Up until this point, other than the probable but ultimately unknowable role played by the overall racial history and culture in the United States, everyone was pretty much blameless in this unfortunate incident.  Then the cop arrested Gates.

Crowley had no legitimate or legal basis on which to arrest Gates.  This was implicitly recognized by the Cambridge prosecutors who dropped the charges faster than molten lead.  He abused his authority in a very serious manner, handcuffing and bringing to jail an innocent man as a retaliation for having his personal feelings hurt.  As those prosecutors surely know, "disrespecting a police officer" is not a crime and indeed is an activity protected by the First Amendment as much case law around the United States makes clear.  The ACLU regularly takes and wins cases of people arrested for "flipping the bird" at officers of the law who are not professional enough to handle it without abusing their power in retaliation.  Overbroad "disturbing the peace" statutes are the most common vehicles for such abuses of authority.

This incident prompted a lot of discussion about race in America, and that is as it should be, but the nation should have risen up and recognized as one that the arrest constituted an abuse of power, and should have been used as a teaching moment not only to the public, but also to many police officers, who apparently need it, that disrespecting a police officer may be justified or it may not be, but it is every American's right.  Instead Crowley was allowed to continue defending his abuse of power, seeming or perhaps worse genuinely unaware that Gates did not break any law, as in this appalling piece.

Further thoughts on Detox

The other day I proposed a seemingly simple plan for addressing the mortgage and financial crises: have the government pay the mortgages of those who go into default -- and assume commensurate ownership in the real estate.

I had a chance to poke around and look at some quick numbers. For the 12 months through January 2009, there were an average of 247,913 foreclosures in the United States, or about 3 million for the year.  If you figure that each monthly mortgage payment is $1,700 (the national median), the government would have to shell out $5 billion per month -- $60 billion per year, or roughly 10% of our annual defense budget -- to pay all those mortgages. That's a lot of money -- except in today's context. AIG alone, for example, has received government commitments of $160 billion to keep it afloat.  And (though there would inevitably be losses due to bubble-priced real estate that will not regain its value for decades) the government will be gaining equity in all these properties and in some cases will make profits, so it will recoup a large percentage of these billions. 

A letter writer in the March 5 Washington Post, one Edward Y. Carp, points out another benefit that this plan would have: it would help bolster real estate values by keeping foreclosed properties from flooding the market and driving down prices.  

The day after I made this post, the Obama Administration announced a foreclosure plan. I haven't looked at it closely yet, but instead of my plan or something similarly clean, simple and effective, it appears that the administration has pursued the path described so well by Michael Lind here: opting for complex, inefficient private-sector rube goldberg mechanisms instead of simple, direct government provision of public services. I call this Democratic "deep wimpiness" -- wimpiness that runs deep into the intellectual orientation of the party, as opposed to shallower tactical wimpiness of, say, (pre-compromising on legislation when one holds all the cards).

Okay I realize the chance is good there is some huge looming practical problem with this plan that some expert could point out to me in 2 seconds, but right now this or perhaps some suitably modified plan along these lines, seems a helluva lot better than what they're doing now.

Bottom-up Financial Detox

I don't understand why the government does not address the financial crisis at the root of the problem. A big part of the problem is "toxic assets" (which as far as I can tell are assets that under normal circumstances would not be called "toxic" but "worthless" -- it's just that no one can admit they're worthless yet because to do so would collapse these giant firms and a lot else besides).  These assets are worthless because they were based on unsustainable mortgages.  A lot of the problem is also lack of transparency -- nobody knows what various assets are worth, so everybody suspects everybody of being in danger of insolvency, so nobody is willing to lend to anybody, even people who may be perfectly solvent, because they aren't sure whether to believe that.

One way of addressing the root of the problem might be as follows:

Stop all foreclosures.  When someone can no longer pay their mortgage, the government begins paying it.  The homeowners (maybe that should be home "owners") get to stay in the house that they "bought."  The mortgage holder gets to continue receiving payments.  However, the government receives equity in the house proportional to the number and proportion of payments that it makes, relative to the life of the mortgage.  So if the government has to pay your mortgage for you for one year of a 30-year mortgage, it assumes 1/30th of the equity in the house.  Or perhaps that should be equity equal to 1/30th of the value of the mortgage.  Perhaps the government's contribution would be deemed to go straight toward the principal, so the mortgage holder would take a hit as well as the homeowner. 

Someone who knows a lot more than me about the realities of these things would need to work out the details, but the basic concept is:

1. Residents can stay in their homes
2. Mortgages continue to provide returns so the value of toxic assets stabilizes and becomes transparent, even if at a reduced value, and
3. The government & taxpayers gain a whole lot of equity in a whole lot of real estate, which eventually will be recouped as residents get back on their feet, real estate is sold, values recover, etc.

Whether this is feasible would depend upon the numbers.  It could be that the numbers of mortgages involved are just too towering -- but let's just pause to remember that the numbers that are being tossed around already are very large, trillions of dollars.  And under a scheme like this, the government would in theory eventually get much of its money back. It would also recoup a lot through greater tax revenues from communities and individuals who are not ruined that would otherwise be.  I haven't checked but no doubt there are other such schemes floating around the internet, but it just seems like the way to go to me.  There hasn't been enough focus on the role that lack of *transparency* is playing in the credit crisis. 

Of course by now the financial crisis has gotten much bigger than the mortgage crisis. But this kind of scheme if possible would help an awful lot of people and at the same time at least make a big start at addressing the Wall Street crisis.

Arbortrary judgments

On my daily ride through Arlington National Cemetery the other day there was a big truck parked in the middle of a row of gravestones, with a crane on which were workers taking down a tree.  I looked around at all the trees in the cemetery -- big, beautiful trees, many of them, and as I coasted by Robert E. Lee's old house, I wondered how many of them were standing when he lived there.

The tree the workers were taking down had clearly been given a death sentence by some arborist.  I pictured the Arlington Cemetery staff arborist and how he must keep track of all those trees. That made me wonder how they know when a trees should be taken down.  And, how clear is it for an arborist when a tree needs to be taken down?  If you got 100 arborists and had them look at all the trees in Arlington Cemetery, how consistent would their recommendations be? 

Which raises the question, what about other professional fields?  Of 100 economists, how many would prescribe the same course of action when faced with a situation?  How many podiatrists would diagnose the same problem and prescribe the same solution.

It would be nice if there was a way to create a standardized measurement for this across fields -- an "intra-professional consistency" metric, if you will.  Of 100 specialists, how many reach the same conclusion?  And what is the standard deviation of their responses?  Which fields are the most unified, which the most fragmented?

Clearly, there would be a scale.  How many poets would describe love the same way?  Probably none.  On the other hand, how many physicists would calculate the mass of an object the same way?  Probably all of them.

In addition, intra-professional consistency varies not by profession, but by question. 100 physicists will agree on the mass of an object -- but not on the nature of a quark.  Here we spin off into the land of Thomas Kuhn and the complex questions of the philosophy of science.

That means that it will never really be possible to do this in any kind of genuinely standardized way across professions -- a standardized way of testing could be created *within each field* but not one that permits genuine rigorous comparison between, for example, astronomers and radiologists. 

Really, there are two core questions.  First, what are the questions on which a profession agrees. In physics, the basic questions of mass and motion and newtonian gravity are basically figured out in that the entire field agrees upon certain answers.  But there is much disagreement over the nature of energy.  Each field has its areas of agreement and its unknowns where the experts disagree.

The second question is whether the answers on which a profession does agree are actually correct.  It may be that 100 out of 100 podiatrists would all diagnose a runner with the same problem and prescribe the same arch supports -- and yet all of them could be under the sway of a false historical-cultural understanding of feet and be misguided in their prescription.  Similar errors can be made by any profession including physics.  At the same time, 100 poets describing love are certain to overlap very little in their "solutions" to the problem -- and yet a high number of them are likely to express truth of various kinds.  So, professional consistency does not necessarily correlate with the truth or usefulness of a profession's beliefs.  As I written about, there have always been groups of experts who are completely wrong.

That said, it is a useful analytic concept -- a concept that may not be found in nature but which is nonetheless useful for thinking about things.  I *would* be curious about the degree of consistency of recommendation of various experts on various matters.  It's no guarantee of correctness, but a lack of consistency sure tells you something (what philosophers might call a lack of intersubjectivity).

Economics of course is very low on the consistency meter -- nothing wrong with that, that's to be expected in the humanities; history is the same way. The only problem is that unlike with history and poetry and the like, too many people fail to perceive that economics is, in fact, one of the humanities (a particular, warped form of history, I would argue; others argue it's more like literature).  Instead our culture treats economics as if it were a science.  And that illusion of objectivity has very real damaging political and social effects.

Hope's Meat: Five Things Obama Must Do

Every day I ride past the White House on the way to my office and have been watching the construction of the Inaugural reviewing stand on the pedestrian plaza formerly known as Pennsylvania Avenue before it was shut to traffic (who says security mania is all bad?).  Soon Obama will be president.  What then?

We've been hearing a lot about hope in the past year.  Okay.  So here's what I find myself hoping for as we all await the end of the grim Bush era at long last.  These are items that are both exciting and yet which it is just possible at this moment to imagine maybe being enacted or at least pushed by the new president.  In no particular order:

• National health insurance. Employer-based health insurance makes no sense. The insurance companies are little more than parasitical leeches, sucking money out of the health care pipeline while providing no actual social benefit, and in fact doing active harm by spending many of the dollars they suck our of the health care system on figuring out how to avoid paying for people's health care (when they're not using it to lobby against reform).  They are enemies of the public good.  Obama should use the crisis of the car companies which are hurt by our stupid system (though they and other US companies seem too dumb or ideologically blinded to see it)to help explain why the United States needs to do this. It's time to restore some humanity and morality to our healthcare system -- this may be the top thing that can be done in America today to eliminate unnecessary human suffering.
  

• Build a rail infrastructure. As Congress contemplates a stimulus package of up to a trillion dollars, a top priority must be the construction of a world-class public train network. I say public because there's scarcely a passenger rail system in the world that runs a profit - it should be regarded as a public utility like the interstate highway system, not like a company. When is the last time interstate 95 made a profit, or that any conservatives demanded that it do so?  With global climate change, peak oil, continued concentration of population - not to mention horrible traffic congestion just about everywhere - it should be a no-brainer.  Trains are so much more energy efficient than cars; this is a vital investment in our future. Also more efficient than jets; there is no reason anyone should be taking flights of less than 300 miles.  If Congress wants to add provisions to encourage the creation of a domestic rail industry, that would be all the better (perhaps GM could do that and actually contribute something beneficial to the world for a change).  With all the billions that are going to be thrown around as part of the stimulus plan, now is the time to make a major investment that will pay dividends for many years.

• Undo the Bush attack on civil liberties. In 1998, President Clinton was impeached for lying under oath about sex was not a "high crime or misdemeanor," undermining the rule of law.  It is true, despite our written Constitution, that when push comes to shove the law is nothing more than practice and social agreement.  Perhaps conservatives recognized that reality and just took it *really* seriously, despite fact that Clinton's lie didn't seem to be an especially pertinent violation. (The primary flaw in this logic, which I never saw spelled out in all the commentary at the time, is that *any* violation of the law violates the "rule of law," yet the Constitution specifies impeachment only for "high crimes and misdemeanors").  Anyway, all that talk about rule of law by conservatives now stands revealed as just so much cynical political posturing, because these same conservatives (with a few exceptions such as Bob Barr) have spent the past couple of years defending far, far more serious violations of the law -- violations with the potential to undermine our constitutional structure itself.  Obama needs to rapidly and decisively overturn and repudiate these policies. If he does, Bush's crimes become an aberration. If he does not, they become the new status quo.  More broadly, Obama needs to curb the burgeoning power of the national security state, which is growing at a genuinely frightening pace.

• Repair our relationship with the Arab & Muslim world. Our nation's foreign policy has been a disaster with respect to the Arab and Muslim world, harming the (true, non-short term) national interest, earning the hatred of a big slice of the world's population, bringing down upon our heads acts of terrorism (and the deep security costs and attendant drains and inefficiencies that have followed), and threatening to embroil us in a quasi-religious hot/cold war.  What's needed is to stop U.S. support for undemocratic regimes, end the stupid Iraq war, end the seemingly failing and possibly hopeless Afghan war, and rebalance our Israel policy to work for an end to the oppression of the Palestinians.

• Decisive moves to curb global warming. Any other kind of moves will be a disappointment.  Just two facts: Seven of the nine warmest years on record have been since 2000.  And half the polar ice cap has melted since 2000.  Be very afraid, we're not in Kansas anymore, we're entering new territory for the human race. (Unless you're conservative, then no need to worry -- only olive-skinned shoe bombers are a threat to our "national security," right?)

If these things are done, Obama will go down as a great president, who really rose to the challenge presented by the crises of our time, and moved our country forward and positioned it well for the future.  Even if he tries to accomplish these goals but cannot force all of them through, I will consider him great.  Of course, I'm alarmed by recent disturbing signs such as his suggestion that we might need to cut Social Security and Medicare.  NO no no!  We're not going to cut our nation's pathetic excuse for a social safety net, at a time when ordinary people are hurting and billions are being tossed to numerous, to put it mildly, less deserving parties?  Hopefully there's some explanation for these statements other than that this guy is going to be the biggest disappointment since Piltdown Man. 

There are of course many other things that need to be done as part of a full liberal program for restoring our country and moving it forward, but I don't expect Obama to attempt these (let alone for Congress to pass them) unless he proves to be an exceptionally formidable, forceful and strong progressive leader.  For example:

• Create a decent national retirement system to go along with our national health care system.  It is barbaric for 70-year-olds to be working at McDonald's in a country as rich as ours.
• Restore the progressivity of our tax structure to the reasonable levels it had before the conservative/Reagan revolution. From 1951-1963 -- hardly an economically stagnant time in U.S. history -- the top marginal tax rate was 91%.  Until 1980 it was 70%.  Since 1987 it's been in the 30s (since 2003, 35%).  Good for the rich, but nobody else.
• Curb the political power of corporations, which is at historically high levels and is distorting our political system and everything controlled by that political system.
• Shrink the military and security sector, which has been growing and gaining power rapidly.  That is dangerous in a democracy -- and a huge waste of money since unlike, say, a bridge, money spent on the military does not circle back and contribute to our economy and our quality of life for years to come.  The military should be cut, at a minimum, in half, and the money redirected to domestic projects that will actually help build a better nation.

We'll see how he does.  Meanwhile, I'll be watching the inauguration with no more than cautious optimism. 

What do you do with a problem like Detroit?

I've been thinking and talking a lot about the issue of the Detroit bailout.  The reason is that it is a hard case for me.  What's to like about Detroit?  For all the reasons everybody talks about, they deserve no sympathy.  Prominent among these for me are their bad citizenship and anti-social activities in the environmental and transportation-policy areas, from their documented role in the destruction of perfectly good mass transit systems after WW II to their ceaseless lobbying against federal clean-air standards to their lawsuits against California for that state's progressive environmental efforts and so on.

They have been holding back the future and, it is no exaggeration, threatening the future of mankind.  Oh yeah, and they've been terrible businessmen.

Clearly, the idiots who run these companies do not deserve bailing out.  But there are two problems with letting them collapse:

1. Their workers, and the workers at all the companies that supply them, and all the workers at the restaurants that feed those workers, and so on and so on do not deserve to be hit.  But those are the people, not the executives, who will suffer drastic financial harm if we let car companies go out of business (or even one of them).
2. The national interest.  Do we really want to allow our national capacity for automobile building to slip away?

Death and renewal
Perhaps the solution is to a) let these companies go out of business and b) slap a steep tariff on car imports, and some kind of sanction on cars produced domestically by foreign companies as well.  The idea would be to create the space for a blooming of small, fresh, innovative new domestic manufacturers to spring up.  This "death and renewal" strategy would seek through public policy to prompt a renewal of the creativity and ferment that we saw early in the history of the auto industry. 

The outstanding question I have about such a strategy is whether it is possible for a thousand flowers to bloom in the transportation industry, or whether it is simply too capital intensive to be realistic.  Can a startup enter the car business?  The Big Three and their suppliers are gigantic organizations incorporating, if not a lot of foresight, wisdom, or good corporate citizenship, at least a lot of experience and expertise in building cars.  Would the nation be fine without big companies like the Detroit automakers, or are big industrial transportation companies a vital national resource?  Some things, like partical colliders, simply cannot be done by individual geniuses in their garages.

On the other hand, the shattering of the big companies would scatter that expertise but not necessarily destroy it.  After all, no one would die; all the Detroit engineers and experts could in theory be assimilated into a new ecosystem of automotive start-ups (a phrase that has been synonymous with "quixotic" for many decades) that might actually make much better use of them. 

Plus, it is not even clear whether the car industry itself isn't facing a long-term decline.  As the world oil supply starts shrinking -- even the optimists see peak oil as hitting in the teens of this century -- how big a part of our future will individual motorized transportation be?  Are we destined to evolve toward a nation of mass transportation, bicycles, and ecologically concentrated urban planning? 

Pure capitalism involves a radical degree of constant turmoil and change.  Yet our society requires a certain amount of stability -- families, neighborhoods, communities, etc.  Capitalism can just bring too much disruption on a human level; in its pure form it would require throwing our borders wide open (you can't have pure capitalism unless labor is free to move about as freely as capital) and having people pick up and move cities or countries at a furious pace as economic conditions dictate.  Too much stability, on the other hand, leads to stagnation.  Often the best course is to ameliorate the pace of change without standing in its way, and this may be one of those times. 

What might that look like?  Perhaps, a government rescue of some or all of these companies in combination with taxpayer ownership (which is what infusions of cash bring for everyone else, why not the taxpayers?)  Then the taxpayers (ie the government) could shift the focus of these companies (partly through an Obama stimulus package) toward more socially beneficial directions such as the construction of a world class rail system on the scale of the (misguided and disastrous) 1950s interstate highway system project.  (Once the taxpayers are forced to prop up the airlines perhaps we can use our new ownership stake in that industry to force them to stop lobbying against that as well.)

The next big technology wave

What is next big technology wave going to be?  As usual, it's staring us right in the face. 

Computers have been around since at least the 1940s and a part of American public consciousness since at least the 1950s.  But they never really took off as a major phenomenon until the 1980s.  That was the decade of the personal computer, when the technology finally reached the point where it matured enough to quite suddenly change life in this country.  The iconic event of that decade -- the moment where the fundamental change at work really snapped clearly into place -- was the arrival of the Apple.  Then the 1990s was the decade of the Internet (which had been around for a while but which didn't take off until the invention of its most successful application, the "World Wide Web" as people quaintly referred to it at the time).  Perhaps our current decade is the decade of social networking, with Napster's explosion onto the scene in 2000-2001 being the revolutionary development that rocked the status quo and heralded the really new possibilities that the Web had opened up. 

Decade    Defining Trend            Iconic event
1980s        Computer                     Apple personal computer
1990s        The Internet (Web)       Netscape
2000s        Social networking         Napster

So what's next?  Well, I predict that it will be another thing that has been lying around the public consciousness, and which has been around for decades without ever really playing any kind of transformative role.  And that thing is artificial intelligence.  Unlike pre-1980s computers, perhaps, AI has been the subject of much hype and science-fiction speculation for many years (see cover of a book I own, below).  So much so that it is easy to think that it will never really live up to its promise.  

But artificial intelligence is already creeping up on us.  It is already clear that the intelligence level of the machines that surround us is rising rapidly.  Most of our gadgets and appliances have the intelligence level of an insect at most; some may be more like the level of a trained dog.  But many of the computer programs we use are already starting to feel like dumb humans.  Computers have always been idiot savants, able to remember a million phone numbers but not recognize a phone, but their expertise is inexorably broadening.  And we are beginning to trust computers with an increasing array of tasks.  Just to pluck a few examples from the ether:

• In London, a girl was pulled unconscious from the bottom of a crowded swimming pool and saved from drowning after lifeguards were alerted by a computer monitoring the pool for swimmers in distress. 
• Robot therapists are reportedly on the brink of revolutionizing physical therapy. 
• Concern is growing among online poker players that card-playing “bots” are being used to rake in winnings.  

And it is already commonplace within tech communities to speak about “intelligence” as a quality that is possessed in varying degrees by machines and software, not just people and animals.  (“E-mail clients should have the intelligence to parse contact data found in an e-mail,” declares a technology columnist in a typical usage). 

All that awaits is a crystalizing moment akin to the Apple IIe, Netscape, or Napster that really busts open a new awareness of what our technology has made possible, setting off a pent-up cascade of innovation. When will that come?  I have no idea - it may not fit within any neat decade of its own, but I suspect it will be in the next 5-10 years.

People have been predicting the explosion of AI for decades now and it just hasn't happened.  But Moore's Law churns on, and one of these days I think we're going to hit a critical mass of computing power and possibly a conceptual breakthrough or two (though I suspect one breakthrough that will prove to be crucial has already happened: evolutionary algorithms) and suddenly we'll be in a whole new world, again.

The figure-ground problem with economics

One of the many problems with economics, I believe, is that it suffers from what we might call “figure-ground” confusion.

First of all, by figure-ground I’m referring to the difference between the foreground and the background, as in this famous optical illusion, where, depending on what your brain decides is the figure and what is the (back)ground, you see either a vase/chalice, or two faces looking at each other:

Most economists probably know that there are times and areas in our economy when competition thrives, but there are also times and areas when competition is decidedly flat or missing altogether.  Still, most economics is oriented around describing the workings of competition.

In fact, I would argue that competition is actually a rare and transient quality in most situations.  It is an inherently unstable, disequilibrious (if that is a word), and fleeting.

First of all, businesses talk a lot about competition and the wonder of the marketplace, but one of the dirty little secrets of capitalism is that businesses actually hate competition and usually cannot survive unless they find a refuge from it. 

All of this is implicitly recognized in our culture (but not explicitly which is my point here).  For example, athough the general discourse is all about free market competition, there is an entire realm of law, a legal tradition, that is based on a frank recogntition that much of the time competition is absent:  anti-trust law. When I had cause to delve into antitrust law for a research project a number of years ago, I was stunned to discover the extent to which the utter absence of market competition is taken for granted by practitioners in this area of law. Concepts such as “market power” (the ability of an individual company to set prices arbitrarily because they are not subject to competition), “oligopoly” (the lack of competition and inevitable collusion that results when there are only a handful of competitors in a market – as is the case in a huge number of markets in our economy), are used routinely despite their flagrant violation of the broad cultural understanding of markets that dominates our discourse today.

In addition, business analysts talk about a (for companies) dreaded condition called “commodification,” which basically refers to situations in which companies have run out of ways to overwhelm customers with complex choices or otherwise confuse them, and must actually compete on price.  As is generally recognized by these same analysts, this generally leads to ruinous price competition. 

So when competition is not taking place in a market, what is?  There are a large variety of ways in which competitors escape competition; examples of such "competition dodges" that spring to mind include:

• Monopoly.  One company has vanquished its competitors and faces no competition.  Some monopolies are regulated (eg utility companies) while others are not (cable television companies, for the most part).

• Oligopoly and price-fixing.  When there is no monopoly, there is often an oligopoly – a handful of firms, who then find it easy to shelter themselves from competition by setting prices, if not directly and illegally, which I suspect happens often enough, then through “price signaling” in which oligopolistic companies, without any explicit agreement or collusion, feel their way toward mutually beneficial noncompetitive arrangements.  (This kind of unspoken, tacitly negotiated cooperation is often observed in game theory; although individuals’ short-term interests may lie in cheating, even anonymous players in repeated rounds of a game often grope their way toward mutually beneficial arrangements.)  Oligopolies are handy because they kind of look like competition, thereby keeping customers from suspecting that they are being ripped off.

• Tradition.  Often competitors find refuge from competition through tradition, where customers are conditioned not to look for or expect competition or cheap prices in a certain area.  An example of this is drinks in restaurants, which continue to get away with charging $2.50 or more for 4.5 cents worth of sugar-water (ie soda) and similiarly inflated prices for other beverages, including often even water.

• Consumer confusion.  A common refuge from competition is to overwhelm customers with choices and confuse them.  Just set up price structures or other aspects of a product in ways that are so complicated that the company can steal some profits from that portion of the population that cannot analyze their options well enough to figure out their own self-interest.  The long-distance telephone companies, stuck selling what was basically a commodity, were notorious for doing this.

• Time swamping.  A variant of the “consumer confusion” strategy is to eke out profits, not from those who can’t sort out where their self-interest lies, but from those who simply do not have the time to do so.  By overtaxing the time customers have available for sorting through the complexities of competing offers, companies can extract profits from those who simply give up.

• Regulation.  Businesses routinely fight regulation, but in some circumstances they embrace it – for example when a prominent company with a positive brand is being undercut by competition from bottom-feeders willing to engage in practices that customers are likely to find offensive in some way, the leading company will often seek regulation to ban the strategies employed by its competition.  This happened in the meatpacking industry during the muckracking era, and many times since.

• Unions.  In the 1930s, for example, the U.S. automakers (eventually) accepted unionization partly because it standardized wages across the industry and therefore freed them from competing on the basis of wages (ie who would pay their workers the least) so they could compete based on quality fo product.  This is an example of a socially beneficial competition-dodge; if we had stronger unions we would no doubt see the concept extended to health insurance in short order.  Just like companies, workers also seek refuge from the relentless erosion of capitalist competition & efficiency and rationalization, through regulatory protections from competition.  Of course, thanks in part to popular buy-in of the myths of competition, too few workers today are demanding such protections.

All in all, competition is a much more rare and fleeting phenomenon than people usually recognize.

I am not a participant in the academic economic conversation, but I am sure it is collectively well aware of these “exceptions” to marketplace competition.  Only my point is, they are not in fact exceptions and should not be thought of that way.  It is the free market that is the exceptional circumstance, and instead of conceptualizing competition as the background condition and building the entire field of economics around it, we need to realize that *lack* of competition is actually the far more prevalent condition.  That is, these ideas are no doubt all circulating within the economic conversation already, but someone needs to step up and translate them into a macro-level reconception of that conversation itself – recasting economics from something primarily concerned with “competition and how it works,” into something that explains “how do companies avoid competition and under what circumstances does it break out?"

Of course this raises what may be part of the problem here and why this hasn’t happened:  such a reconceptualization could lead economics away from the realm where behavior can be explained with mathematics, and into the complex thickets of history and culture and politics.  But, it might also bring economics closer to the complex thickets of reality.

But someone needs to make the figure-ground gestault switch.  And if academic economists can tell us someone is already doing this, then I’d say the broader field and ultimately the broader culture needs to assimilate this point. Because this figure-ground confusion has huge, negative political implications.  Granted, there are many reasons for the fetishization of markets in the United States right now, including the moneyed interests that find competition convenient to talk about if not to actually engage in, but the thinkers among us need to stop aiding and abbetting in that enterprise.

Temperature regulation

I've never been one to force my kids to wear coats when they don't want to (though I sometimes force them to bring a coat when I suspect they're going to need it).  It bugs me when teachers or others with temporary responsibility for my kids force them to wear more clothes than they want to.  First of all, there is no reason to engage in power struggles with kids when they are perfectly capable of regulating their own temperatures.

More significantly, however, adults could actually be doing children harm by forcing them to wear more clothes than they want.  Here's why:

1. Children are more tolerant of the cold.

In my observation, many children are naturally more tolerant of cold temperatures than adults.  This despite the fact that their smaller size should render them more susceptible to the cold (because they have a much higher ratio of surface area to volume). 

2. Human beings actually adapt and adjust to different temperatures

First, I have also heard a lot of anecdotal evidence from people moving to colder or hotter climes that they get used to it after a year or two. 

But also, a renowned scientist named Laurence Irving did body temperature regulation experiments at the University of Alaska in the 1960s.  According to this article, Irving

noticed with great curiosity two UAF [University of Alaska Fairbanks] students who walked around campus barefoot, even in winter. In accordance with their religious beliefs, the students wore only light clothing and wore no shoes or socks....

Irving convinced the students to sit for him in a room cooled to about 32 degrees. The students were allowed to wear light clothing, and Irving measured the temperatures of their fingers, toes and chest as they sat for an hour and studied.

For comparison, Irving recruited a "vigorous young airman" to undergo the same test. After 30 minutes, "the airman's toes became so painful and he began to shiver so violently that I caused him to terminate the test lest he shake himself apart," Irving wrote.

The students who walked barefoot on snow every day didn't begin shivering until after almost 50 minutes in the room....  The study was an illustration of how humans can acclimate their bodies to cold weather and eventually feel little pain while walking barefoot in the snow, Irving wrote.

I came across this account through my interest in barefooting, the astute reader will gather, but it has wider implications (according to this article barefooting in Alaska winters is still going on -- though it can't be too common or it wouldn't merit a newspaper article!)

This New York Times article says that people can also adjust to hotter temperatures:

The process is called heat acclimation and is routinely seen in athletes training in hot weather. At first their internal temperatures climb, they sweat profusely, lose large quantities of salt in their sweat and feel miserable. But as the days pass they sweat even more, their salt loss diminishes, both skin and internal temperatures drop, and their endurance improves. . . .

And it took only a week or so for the research subjects in the California desert to develop high sweat rates, low pulse rates and low rectal temperatures. They could work more comfortably, with greatly improved well-being.

3. As a result of these two facts, two conclusions follow:

1. One person's judgment of how cold it is, is not necessarily accurate for another, especially for children.
2. Making kids wear unnecesary layers will just ruin their adaptation to the cold. Aside from being inconvenient, and seeming generally a pity, this could potentially add to a child's risk of obesity since the metabolic changes necessary to tolerate more cold presumably use up more calories.

I say, let children regulate their own temperature! 

All this could also have implications for adults as well: I once heard of a couple who swore that they were able to stay thin by sleeping with only a sheet, never using a blanket. Maybe there was something to that.

Analyzing "and/or"

As someone with a somewhat logical mind who does a lot of editing, here is a question I've always wondered about.  (Warning:  this one is seriously geeky.)  How, exactly, is the formation "and/or" supposed to work?  I've always thought that it has two possible interpretations.  But, I've never seen this addressed anywhere, so perhaps I'm the only one on earth who reads it this way.

As an example, look at this sentence:

That assumption of yours is wrong and/or unfounded."

"Unfounded" meaning you do not have any evidence or reason to make the assumption, "wrong" of course meaning it is actually incorrect.  What exactly does the "and/or" mean?  The possibilities, it seems to me, are:

1. The assumption is (wrong and unfounded) OR (wrong OR unfounded). 
   
2. The assumption is ("wrong and unfounded") OR it's ("unfounded").
   

MEANING #1:  Under this looser interpretation of "and/or" it does not matter in what order the two terms appear, because either one may apply.  It might be rewritten as "the assumption is wrong and unfounded, or it is wrong, or it is unfounded."  There are 3 possible states

MEANING #2:  This meaning is how I've always interpreted the expression.   It might be rewritten as "the assumption is (wrong and) or unfounded."  There are only 2 possible states.  It could also be rewritten as, "the assumption is unfounded, and perhaps also wrong."  Here the order of the two terms matters a lot, because the second expression ("unfounded" in my example) must always be true, while the first one ("wrong") may or may not be.  Under this interpretation it would be incorrect to reverse the terms and say "the assumption is unfounded and/or wrong," since an assumption can be accused of being unfounded but not wrong -- but a person who assets that an assumption is wrong, cannot but also assert that it is unfounded.  In other words, you would never say it's wrong without also saying it's unfounded.

Somebody oughta clarify what it means. Who?  Who knows.  Maybe me.  Okay, I hereby declare that the proper meaning is #2 and that #1 represents nothing but muddy-headed, sloppy thinking.

Okay maybe nobody has a clue what I'm trying to say here, but mark my words, this is the kind of thing that the fate of empires hinges upon! 

Ban Aerial Bombing

I first saw this amazing flash game a few years ago and ever since I've thought it is the best use of a video game format – maybe one of the best uses of the Web overall – to make a political point that I've ever seen.

The goal is straightforward: kill the terrorists. What could be simpler?

The game is not at all inaccurate as a representation of what goes on.

Bombs are notoriously inaccurate and ineffective and sloppy means of killing, even modern "smart bombs."  There was a fair amount of attention to some of the more deadly (for civilians) bombings early in the Iraq War (as well as in the Gulf War, for example when a U.S. airstrike killed 288 Iraqis sitting in an air-raid shelter in Baghdad).  But I was surprised to learn that the U.S. continues to rain down amounts of explosives onto Iraq and Afghanistan, and the number is actually increasing.  In the first six months of 2007, 222,000 pounds of bombs were dropped in Iraq, and 527,000 pounds on Afghanistan. 

I already pointed out that Bush's decision to launch the Iraq war was the metaphorical equivalent of shooting down an aircraft to kill Saddam, despite the presence of thousands of children onboard that plane. In fact decisions that are actually literally just like that are made every day by the U.S. military, it turns out.  According to Walter Benjamin, the U.S. military has a formal "collateral damage estimate" process by which the number of permitted civilian casualties is balanced against the value of the target, and regularly launches attacks that it knows will kill women and children.  Earlier in the war, the military had to get Bush or Rumsfeld to personally approve an air strike that was expected to kill more than 30 civilians.  But if fewer than 30 men, women, and children were anticipated to be splattered and burned, no such approval was required.  As Benjamin writes,

The skies over both Iraq and Afghanistan are filled with buzzing drones armed with powerful cameras. Military officials hundreds of miles away planning an airstrike can, in some cases, literally count the number of women and children near a target by staring at a screen.

As I said, that computer game is not that inaccurate. 

Aerial bombing should be declared a war crime. It is a moral abomination.  It has become such a part of warfare as we know it since the days of WW I, that such a step might seem radical.  But why not?  Intentional civilian casualties are already barred, and this is barely any less barbaric; it is as abhorrent as mustard gas or nerve agent, also already banned.  Besides, if we can chip away at the permissible boundaries of warfare as we inch toward a higher level of civilization, is that anything but good?

True, the military will lose some really cool toys, and some strategic flexibility.  There's been a lot of talk about "moral failure" with regards to Bill Clinton – but one of his real moral failures was his shameful failure to support the global movement to ban land mines, which also regularly blow apart the flesh of  innocent children (15,000-20,000 total people per year, mostly in countries now at peace).  The movement culminated in the 1999 "Ottawa Treaty" signed by 155 nations but not the United States, because of the U.S. military's objections and Clinton's lack of moral backbone where it really would have actually counted. (All this is according to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, a group that in my humble opinion might look at expanding its mission).

If you disagree with my proposal, meditate upon some of these pictures & then let's talk.

When I think about the U.S. military's willingness to kill large numbers of children to protect its own soldiers, it makes me think that perhaps the modern soldier is no longer the "manly warrior" who risks his life to defend his family, community and country, but has has been reduced by these policies into cowardly and risk-averse techno-bureaucrats willing to rain death down on the innocent in order to lower the chances of dying themselves.  This may also apply to the "Greatest Generation" (a stupid and nostalgic, historically naive label – people are great, not generations) of WW II, who lost their moral bearings and engaged in large-scale, hate-driven attacks against civilian populations in Germany and Japan. 

Wanted: McMovies

When I saw this story today headlined “Animation for the Masses,” I was very excited because it seemed that someone had actually carried out an idea I had some time ago.

My idea was that somebody oughta design a software program using all the 3-dimensional software that is now available in computer games – and constantly getting better – that would allow anyone to create their own animated movie.  You could sell a software package that would include a basic suite of customizeable sets, locations, backdrops, characters, costumes, props, sound effects, etc., and let the creator of the movie – or feeeeeeelm if you’ve got aspirations – record the voices and program the visual action using the software’s physics and motion programming.   

You would control your characters like the protagonist in a first-person shooter, or like a puppet, and layer the actions of different individuals in the same scene, like a music sequencer, program the actions of inanimate objects, and record "scenes," which you could then edit and stitch together to tell a story. 

Of course some would inevitably scoff at the product of this software as “McMovies” –- anytime an exclusive realm is opened to the masses, elites try to put it down -- but with enough customizability built in, the creative potential need not be any more limited than any real motion picture.   An art-director-oriented or serious filmmaker could devote as much effort as he or she wished to creating a visual masterpiece, while those who were interested more in just telling a story could use the defaults. 

Either way, I bet a couple of things would happen.  First, you would see a veritable explosion of creativity comparable to the explosion of blogs.  Of course something like this already exists – Flash animation – and we have seen an explosion of creativity with that format.  But this would allow for more fully realized, complex, quasi-photo-realistic dramas to be portrayed on-screen, and hopefully built more easily.

There would also spring into being a market for the sale of additional sets, costumes, designers, and all the rest, just like I hear they do on “Second Life.”

However, the "Animation for the Masses" article I saw is actually about is giving consumers access to really high-quality graphics. That's great -- but not nearly as exciting as the idea above IMHO.  Better graphics are nice but you always gotta get back to the difference between a movie with a good story, and a movie with good special effects:  the latter is empty without the former, while the former is compelling no matter how primitive the effects are.  And that is exactly why genius would sprout if my product ever came to life (though like all genius, it would flower amid a vast field of manure).

Who knows if it's doable or if it would be used.  But, movies are the art form of our century, and everybody wants to be in show biz, right?  Anyway, I predict that sooner or later we'll have this. (But it still won't be any easier to come up with a good original story!)

The mathematics of fascism?

German historians have long debated the origins of the Nazi disaster.  Part of that debate has revolved around what is called the sonderweig, or “special path" -- the notion that there was something unique in German history going far back that put them on a different path from other nations.  It is a suspiciously comforting thought, because if the Nazi takeover was due to more immediate factors -- was more contingent than inevitable -- then that would suggest that every country, if the wrong things take a turn for the worse, could head to hell rather quickly.

There was also a debate a few years ago the moral culpability of the average German for the Nazis and the Holocaust (prompted by Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners [1996]). I don’t really know enough about German history to have an independent opinion on the matter – but I lean against it.  First, I saw that a lot of historians I respect dismissed that book.  In addition, whatever the merits of that argument, it is not Useful.  If you conclude that the Germans were To Blame, what do you do with that?

I’ve always wondered whether the Nazi takeover of Germany – or any takeover that has at least an element of force – could be modeled mathematically – in other words, if there isn’t an element of game theory at work here.  Somebody oughta look into this, if it hasn’t already been done (probably has been).

This thought is based on an intuition that there is a mathematical dynamic behind a forceful takeover of a civilized nation.  This is based on the sense that a few people willing to kill might prevail upon a much larger, but atomized and passive, group.  It might run something like this:

Initial conditions:

N = Nazis, Hitler’s core supporters who were willing to kill those who oppose them
S = Nazi supporters, who support Nazis enough to inform on others
P = passives – non-supporter, non-opponents of Nazis
O = active opponents of the Nazis, such as the communists

N` = commitment of Nazis to kill opponents
O` = willingness of opponents to risk their lives to oppose Nazis

Now imagine a grid (like that used in the game “life” or in cellular automata) made up of cells, whose state is determined by the state of those around them (how many like individuals they are connected to, since power comes from connectedness & cooperation with others).  Imagine the opponents are red, the passives are white, and the Nazis are black.  Some reds and blacks are darker (more committed), while others are pale. 

Then apply a calculus involving how connected the reds and blacks are to others, and how committed they are, to determine which passives flip to Nazi supporters, and which opponents flip to passives – and which opponents are simply rubbed out.  It is easy to imagine how a tightly clustered, very committed batch of black squares (Nazis) in the middle of a sea of white squares (Passives) with sporatic clusters of Reds could end up flipping the whole field to supporters and passives (and dead people).

Similar-minded experiments have been done on the subject of residential racial segregation.  An economist named Thomas Schelling (a pioneer in looking at "tipping points" and other elements of nonlinear systems) puplished a famous paper in 1971 (“Dynamic Models of Segregation”) in which he found that if you have a population full of people each of whom is not a racist, but just doesn't want to live in a neighborhood that is strongly dominated by a race other than their own, that the individual choices made by that population would lead mathematically to an emergent pattern of almost total residential segregation. 

I don't know why but I just find myself worrying an awful lot in recent years about political stability and the ability of crazily committed and intense insane political minorities to "flip" much larger political systems. . .

The AAEAE: an organization I'd like to see

In Washington the other day I walked by a building with a sign announcing that housed inside was the "Society of Association Executives."  I just love that.  If they had embraced their "meta" status as they should have instead of trying to smooth over it, they would have named themselves the Association of Association Executives, or alternately the Association Executive Association.

Which makes me wonder: are they the only association of their kind?  It could be true that there are a number of them.  And, if the executives of those associations one day decided they needed to organize, we might see - yes! - the Association of Association Executive Association Executives. 

If you have trouble parsing that, this might help:

Association of [Association Executive Association] Executives

What a beautiful thing that would be!

Manly, naive & gullible

One of the amazing things that’s happened in the past few years is the way that the conservatives, having (more or less) lost the racial and communist cards as a way of separating fools from their votes, have succeeded in exploiting gender issues.  The GOP has successfully convinced large swatchs of America that it’s not quite manly to vote Democratic.

That is why I’ve always said that the critical moment, the turning point of the Bush Administration was during Katrina, when Bush flew over the disaster, looking down lamely from his airplane window, while his adminsitration impotently failed to rise to the occasion of dealing with the crisis. 

Bush and his handlers had succeeded in cultivating a carefully crafted illusion that he was genuinely manly – a take-charge, straight-talking, effective, no-holds-barred guy.  But the Administration’s reaction to Katrina (which resembled the flighty lady in distress more than her strong cowboy rescuer) and the Window Tour in particular, shattered that image.  A gestault switch took place among a certain significant chunk of macho (but naïve and gullible) Americans, and it’s been all downhill for the Bushies ever since. 

Some political scientist, if they haven’t already, oughta test these speculations about the primacy of gender consciousness in GOP voting against the GSS (General Social Survey, a huge biennial survey of Americans on a wide variety of subjects). 

The 75-year war over America

It always surprises me how many people do not “get” the ideological war that is taking place in the US, and has been since at least the New Deal. They don’t understand the differences between Repubilcans and Democrats. As a result they are baffled and annoyed by “partisanship,” and see it as just small-minded bickering and jockeying for power and television time. In fact it is a grand struggle over the direction of our country, and especially the role of government: more or less welfare and social programs; more or less government regulation to protect the environment, interfere in relationships between the strong and the weak, and ameliorate the bad effects of human stupidity.

If I were head of the Democratic Party, I would launch a “party branding” ad campaign to stress those very real differences. We’re for the ordinary person, they’re for the rich. So many people are just plumb confused over the differences between the parties – and if they understood a little more clearly, the Democrats would have the advantage.  I’ve never understood why the Dems don’t do that. Perhaps it’s all those fat-cat donors they must suck up to.