Notes
Eric Blair
January 15, 2009
D EAR R EADER ,
Many, many people have pointed out that the average person’s attention span has
been getting shorter with time. They recommend that you should keep your message short and punchy. Bullet points help; try not to have more than about four
bullet points to a slide.
To those people, I reply: bite me.
You, my intended audience, are educated: you know how to skim for useful
information, if a topic interests you then you want it discussed in detail, and you
read English at above a ninth-grade level (or are a non-native speaker who wants
not-watered-down prose).
And so, I offer you too much information. As I write this, these notes are about
400 pages, and thus well beyond my own attention span and probably yours. Print
it out, set it on the ledge in the bathroom, and read whatever parts of it interest
you. If you skim, skip entire chapters, or just use your copy for note paper, I won’t
know.
The first essay, on page
ii
C ONTENTS
iii
iv
CONTENTS
1
W RITING , THINKTANKING , AND THEORIZING
1.1
On writing
28 December 2007
Today’s artificial division of the world into two types: those who are productive
because of constraints and those who are productive despite them.
As with any ‘two kinds of people in this world’ distinction, it’s artificial, but
I’m gonna run with it anyway. [My favorite distinction of this type is from Pink Flamingos:
‘There are two kinds of people in the world: my kind, and assholes.’ That just sums up the worldview
of so very many people.]
Igor Stravinsky was decidedly on the side of constraints:
My freedom thus consists in moving about within the narrow frame
that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall
go even further. My freedom will be so much the greater and more
meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more
I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one
frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit. [Stravinsky, 1942,
p 65]
So Mr. Stravinsky works within certain forms, though you won’t find many folks
who would call him uncreative.
On the other end, you’ve got the joke about how Michelangelo carved David:
he started with a block of marble, then chipped away all the parts of the block that
don’t look like David.
You could argue that the constraints are just a question of degree: Michelangelo
still had the constraint of the limited tools and techniques he had on hand, and marble has certain properties that preclude some techniques that would be fine on other
slabs. But for the length of this column, I’m standing by my arbitrary distinction.
1
2
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
E.g., at the extremes, you start to see the differences in people’s reactions. When
you list a hundred considerations before anybody can do anything, some people
get engaged and start exploring the possibilities and combinations and some get
frustrated; when you present a blank piece of paper and say go, some people get
flustered and some attack.
I used to play a lot of Chess—I won the junior division Chess championship
at the Champaign Public Library—but quickly gave up on it, because playing the
game stressed me out. When you set up a Chess board, 50% of the board is covered
in pieces. The pawns are in front, which means that you have to get them out of the
way before you can move the pieces you want to move. That is, Chess is a game
of constraints. There are many shelves’ worth of books on Chess openings, and
you could read them as a catalog of constraints: if you move here, this constraints
loosens, but this other constraint binds more tightly, whereas if you do this the
situation is reversed.
So I still play Chess at about the level of a skilled fifth grader, and have since
moved to playing Go. The full game is played on a 19-by-19 grid, which means
that the first player can pick among 361 options, though there are only a hundred
or two that are salient. The second player then has 360 choices for the response,
and so on until a structure and its constraints emerge out of nothing. I won’t claim
to be more than an OK Go player, but I feel better playing it.
So I’m coming to a close on my second book. I have about a dozen pages that
need a heap of research and rewriting, and then I can count the whole 450pp of
it as done. That is, I’m in the endgame, where there is a structure and its attendant constraints—that I built for myself—and I have to work within them to solve
problems. So I came over here and filled a blank screen with text.
But that’s why I like writing, be it stupid columns like this, full books, or code.
It’s the process of building something out of nothing—creating meaning.
Just as a block of marble is not perfectly malleable, a blank screen is not entirely constraint-free, being that you need to fill it with some coherent sort of language (English, HTML, C, some combination thereof). Further, you need to accommodate the sort of constraints other humans impose. A theory of the audience’s
mind is absolutely essential for good writing—and good sculpting, good coding,
and any other sort of filling of the blank slate. Unless you put “Dear Diary” at the
top of the page, you’d better have something that other people find coherent and
useful.
To formalize this, more or less every published work has a query letter attached,
explaining who the audience will be for the book/article/whatever, and why the
article will interest and serve that audience. When I’m in a bookstore, I often try
to picture the query letter that was attached to any given book. “Dear Editor: I
would like to propose to you a book entitled Dancing with Cats which will consist
1.2. WHY I BLOG
3
Figure 1.1: Creating a blank slate.
of photos of people dancing with their cats. Although the cat photography market
is crowded and demand is strong, I could not find a single book in which the cats
were dancing.”
But anyway, watching things form is fun. My commute passes several construction projects, and I always stop watching the road for a block to see how
much more things are taking shape today than they were the last time I passed by.
Then they finally finish, and it’s just another condo.
OK, The Form says that this is where I’d put a conclusion, which would say
something like, ‘In conclusion, I like writing stuff. I like watching things form’.
But instead, here’s a picture of a row of Baltimore houses being torn down to build
a hospital.
1.2
Why I blog
2 January 2004
[Or: a defense of non-clarity.]
4
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
Here’s1 a rant entitled “Why I fucking hate web logs”. It’s a little confusing
because the guy put 4,200 words online on the subject of ‘why I think it’s dumb that
people write so much and put it out to a semi-anonymous audience’. Miss AMJ
of Richmond, VA gave the author benefit of the doubt and took it as an attempt
at irony and/or humor, but I’m inclined to think that our anti-blog author means
everything he/she says [the author didn’t give a name, so I’ll herein refer to the
person as a female named Stevanna].2 Anyway, it’s always nice to have a foil, so
I’m going to write a response in earnest.
Communicating information
Here’s Stevanna’s first coherent point:
Communication mediums like IRC/chat, email, instant messaging, etc.
all [. . . ] directly imitate, by design, communication channels used
in the real world, such as telephones, direct in-person conversation,
etc. They were designed this way because, over thousands of years,
these are the methods of communication that have risen to the top
of the usefulness list. People communicate and socialize much more
effectively when communication happens in real-time. [. . . ] Weblogs
take us away from that.
The first time I saw that real-time communication is not really at the top of
the usefulness list was my high school calculus class, where the teacher, in lieu
of writing her own lessons, would read us sections from the textbook. I could
directly compare the process of learning through reading and learning the exact
same material through listening, and reading won by a mile [1.6 km]. There was a
real problem that my teacher was overcoming by reading the book to us: nobody
would bother to read the thing on their own. But outside of that social problem,
words on paper win out. Reading is visual, and the majority of the world consists of
visual learners; and I can spend as long as I want on the parts I care about or don’t
get, instead of allocating time based on what the speaker thinks I should focus on.
Academic conferences and presentations are the same thing: many people honestly mean to read the paper, but don’t get around to it; showing up in a public place
and seeing the author face-to-faces forces the reader/listener to pay the author attention. But don’t confuse this attempt to overcome laziness as better communication.
Academia is very much the sort of community that Stevanna describes, in that most
academic papers are read by a small handful of people who understand the issues,
1
http://mama.indstate.edu/users/bones/WhyIHateWebLogs.html
A year or so after I wrote this, the author placed his name, Donald Brook, at the top of the page,
but I haven’t bothered revising this essay accordingly.
2
1.2. WHY I BLOG
5
and there are only a couple of superstars whose papers will break out and become
widely read. In that community, the best means of communication has shown itself
to be the paper. The self-interested and sort of antisocial part comes not in writing
the paper but in presenting the paper face-to-face, forcing people to aurally read
your paper instead of getting to it when s/he decides to make time.
Communicating affect
All this is in contrast to most face-to-face communication, wherein people don’t
really select with whom they hang out based on content, but based on personality,
affect, and cuteness. Some people, like Ian Frazier, are fun to read, and it doesn’t
matter what they’re talking about. That’s a good definition of the celebrity: a whole
lot of people want to spend time with that celebrity because they find their way of
being agreeable, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re pontificating on the meaning
of life or just reading lines the screenwriter wrote for them. My pals, to me, are
like that. Your pals, to you, are like that.
Affect-oriented communication does indeed work best in person and in real
time. But I think blogs really do have a place in this. Most of my pals are over 4,500
kilometers away, and don’t get free evening minutes until right around my bedtime.
When something interesting does happen in my life, I’ll repeat the anecdote to both
of my friends ad nauseum, whereas I can’t do that if I’ve already written about
it. No, the blog isn’t the ideal medium, but on a practical level, it solves some
problems pretty darn well.
Blogs
Blogs are a confusing idea because they fulfill both of the above roles on the same
page. People chat online, watch movies, and read blogs by models because they
want to spend time with a person that it feels good to spend time with, and the
content is secondary. Meanwhile, people read academic papers, newspaper editorials, and blogs by programmers because they want to learn something that may be
useful, and the personality of the author is secondary.
Stevanna doesn’t understand blogs because they serve both purposes, without
telling you. They don’t follow the model of a Power Point presentation3 , clearly
stating at the top of the page what you’re about to read; they just tell you stuff and
it’s your job as a literate human to actively filter the information.
One of Stevanna’s complaints may be that the average blog author has the
hubris of assuming that there are people who are both interested in what the author
3
http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld001.htm
6
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
has to say and in the author him/herself. But any person who is reasonably welladjusted will have some friends who care about the person and want to spend time
with them; and that well-adjusted person is also no doubt an authority on something, which he or she will be happy to expound upon. Well-adjustedness aside,
even I am comfortable writing on this page about my lousy moods, my authoritative pontifications on economic theory, and SQLite, because I know that there’s
some number of people who will read what I have to say about all of these topics
with interest. I also know that there is no one person who is simultaneously interested in what I have to say about all three of these topics except myself. This is not
a contradiction.
I don’t know if she means to be doing this, but Stevana is pushing us to a
lowest-common-denominator model of communication, where we throw style and
fun out the window for the sake of not confusing the readers who aren’t totally paying attention. Yes, bullet-pointed presentations are efficient and have their place,
but they’re also not very fun, which is why newspapers still print essays instead of
bullet-pointed summaries of essays, and why we don’t send letters to each other in
presentation-style format. Affect trickles into informational essays, and information pervades affect-oriented conversation, and the mixing is inefficient, sometimes
annoying, and generally more fun and more human. Compare with Stevanna’s essay, itself a fun mix of affect and information, which says that blog authors should
include a statement of purpose so the reader knows exactly what to expect.
1.3
Wikieverything
14 June 2006
You all know good ol’ Wikipedia, but there are also Wikibooks. As you browse
through the books at that site, you’ll notice two things: they aren’t very complete
(most are half an essay at best), and they aren’t very good.
I’m not going to talk about the reliability and authority issue which seems to
dominate most discussion of wikimedia. Personally, if I’m reading to get a lite
intro to a subject of which I’m ignorant, I’ll take Wikipedia as gospel, because it
doesn’t matter; if I’m working on an academic topic, then I’m not going to cite an
encyclopædia of any sort, but will have my own external sources providing detail.
You no doubt have your own sense of what is or is not reliable.
Instead, I’m going to talk here about why the deck is stacked against wikibooks
and other attempts to apply the open source idea to every field of endeavor.
1.3. WIKIEVERYTHING
7
Narrative vs reference
Mr. ZF of Nueva York, NY4 tried to get readers of his blog to write comic scripts.
Yup, wikicomedy. From the linked article: “Quickly, the script began to get out of
hand. Jokes became tediously long. There were arguments over the content of the
material, and over who had the authority to approve or delete it, with some writers
taking a dominant role and deleting the work of others at will.”
The average entry on Wikipedia is between a single line and a few pages long.
They have limited narrative depth at best, and generally just cover a simple list of
facts. Although wikipedia would be thousands of pages if printed out in its entirety,
nobody is expected to have edited anything beyond a sliver, and nobody expects it
to have any structure beyond alphabetical order.
Figure 1.2: Wikiart from the surrealists
Computer code is much like this: a person working on one subpart of a program
doesn’t have to know anything about how the other subparts work. To write a
translator, Jane can work on text parsing, Joe can work on a set of dictionaries, and
4
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/fashion/sundaystyles/
18ze.html?ex=1308283200&en=4ea006130a1baabe&ei=5090&partner=
rssuserland&emc=rss
8
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
Jess can work on the clicky interface, and all can work with little regard to what
the other parties are doing.
Narrative works don’t have such wonderful compartmentalization. Sure, there
are chapters, but if the chapters don’t tightly come together, we won’t like the darn
story much.
You ever make an Exquisite Corpse? You fold a paper in thirds, and draw a
head, and then refold so the head isn’t visible and hand the paper to a pal who draws
the torso, and then your pal hides the torso and another pal draws the waist and the
legs. Then you unfold it all and laugh about how delightful such a disjointed figure
could be. If you were lucky enough to be one of the founders of the Surrealist
movement, then your drawing will wind up on the wall of the Art Institute of
Chicago (see figure). But for the rest of us, the game is a fun brainstorm but ain’t a
final work.
Anthologies are common enough, but we often call them edited volumes and
put the editor’s name on the cover to remind the reader that somebody sat down
and made sure that the elements somehow cohered.
We’re used to other aggregate works directed by one individual: pop songs
that have a single producer and movies with one director. I leave to the reader the
debate over the quality of songs written via jamming with the band versus songs
written by a single composer.
OK, there’s your survey of media. Painting, sculpture, movies, music, novels,
all involve one or a small number of people directing a final product, which may
have been touched by dozens of hands. This is not surprising, and I don’t think
anybody seriously expects wikipainting to truly surpass the old method.
But textbooks. There seems to be a serious belief that a textbook can be collaboratively written by a committee. This is not a new wikiconcept. In elementary
school, we all had many a textbook with no author or editor on the cover, and a list
of committee members on the title page.
Those textbooks sucked.
We often refer to a subject like math or biology as a field. Picture a big expanse
of plain, in which you could take any direction. When we go to school, we take
courses—carefully guided paths through an open expanse. In other words, a good
textbook goes somewhere. It is a narrative.
Conversely, some textbooks attempt to survey the entire field at once. Such
books are frankly no longer textbooks, but are rightly called references. They have
their place, but it ain’t teaching. I can see the appeal for the textbook writers, who
want to maximize their market share. They provide as much material as possible in
the hopes that the teacher will select a course through the material; some teachers
do, covering only chapters 1.3, 3.8, 8.1, and 16.4, while others wind up ploughing
through the entire field, column by column. [If you are reading this in book form, I’ve put
1.4. ANATOMY OF AN OP-ED
9
effort in to cohering the essays into something of a few narrative threads. Really.]
The wikimethod is good for writing references but bad for writing narratives,
so the deck is stacked against wikitextbooks. Again, like the encyclopædic texts,
they have a valid and valuable place on the e-bookshelf, but they can’t replace
narrative works, just as (conversely) we wouldn’t read a single narrative and claim
that we understand the entire field.
Build it 6⇒ they will come
Much open source propaganda goes into telling us that if you provide a good and
useful basic structure, then diverse people will contribute little elements to it, until
you eventually have a complete system. Mr. Eric Raymond has built his entire
career on this premise, and I will admit to putting such claims in print myself.
Of course, it’s not so simple. The real success stories in open source come
from a single good idea, some good coding, and lots of good advertising and selfpromotion. Of course, it also helps if your program is about porn5 .
Out of a thousand readers, over 990 won’t fix so much as a typo, and a handful
will make little ten-second fixes on a single equation or such. If you’re lucky,
maybe a single reader out of every few thousand will contribute the significant
time investment to contribute a narrative.
Open source provides a new alternative to finding and coordinating coauthors,
but it’s not particularly a revolution over existing coauthoring tools (diff, revision
control, those cute little change tracking features in word processors). But regardless of the technology, the process of building a narrative has seen no Internet
revolution: it’s still about a small number of dedicated people in close communication.
1.4
Anatomy of an op-ed
26 March 2006
The editorial page of your favorite newspaper or magazine is primarily (but not
100%) push-driven. Editors typically don’t solicit editorials; editorials solicit editors.
Here’s the timeline: I wrote a 700-word op-ed on Tuesday, and sent it to the
think tank’s Communications department, where we have a few people who work
full-time on placing op-ed pieces in the newspapers. Ms AM wrote up a polite
cover, and emailed it to the editors of a paper or two (I don’t know how many).
5
http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=
porn&Search=Search
10
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
The editor of the Wall Street Journal wrote back on Friday, saying that he’ll run the
thing as a letter. He cut a few hundred words, sent it back to me and Ms AM for
approval, I made two tweaks, the editor tacked on a sensational headline that I did
not approve, and it ran in today’s paper.
Among the columns pushed upon him or her, what will an editor pick? No
surprises: the work will have to be apropos to current news, and will have to be
sensational. Simmering-but-not-boiling issues will not run. Moderate opinions
will not run. [Or at least, as in the case of my editorial, relatively moderate opinions will be
revised to sound as sensational as possible.]
Topical
The topical topics only rule produces a random draw somewhat biased toward
pressing issues. On any given day, one out of fifty pressing problems breaks, and
that one gets to be in the news that day. It ain’t the most efficient method, but I
suppose there are worse.
The trouble with patents has been building for a decade, but it hasn’t been in the
mainstream press until the whole thing about the Blackberry hit. Now, it’s easy for
me to get op-eds printed, because disaster is already starting to strike. But wouldn’t
it be great if people could have gotten press five years ago about how trouble like
the Blackberry case is on its way? But punchiness really does force the press to be
reactive instead of proactive.
The guys on Capitol Hill want desperately to be proactive. They’re smart folks,
and many of them care about good policy. That means that the press, to the extent
that it goes after what happened yesterday, is of limited relevance to policymakers.
Conversely, to the extent that rule making is about obscure details of legal code,
policymakers are assured that general media will not molest them.
Brief
The other problem is in writing for tiny attention spans. As I have demonstrated
often enough, I could easily write a 7,000 word article on the problem of defining
patentable subject matter, and that would still be omitting loads of details. But
news media are much more interested in covering lots of topics in minimal detail
rather than one topic in depth. And so, I get to cut that article down into a 700word op-ed, from which the editors will delete a few hundred words. Especially
with online media, this isn’t necessary, because readers can be brought to the well
and drink as much as they choose to. But there’s a 700-word standard out there
that everybody seems to stick to anyway.
1.4. ANATOMY OF AN OP-ED
11
TV and radio are only worse. They have a hard-and-fast time constraint, meaning that they have no choice but to be on the low-detail end of the spectrum. A
five-minute piece can not have much more content than a one-page op-ed, which
is not much. I’ve done a few interviews for the nice people at NPR. One went
for half an hour, and my final on-air time in the three-minute piece was a single
sentence—I didn’t even get a semicolon. Last week, I got a call where I was explaining the situation to a radio reporter, and she said, exasperated, “We’ve been
talking for thirteen minutes now and I still don’t have a good ten-second clip.” I
wound up getting cut from that one entirely.
You don’t need me to tell you this, but details are anathemic to punchiness,
and so are going to be lost. If your idea is too complex for a single sentence, it’s
evidently not worth the listener’s time.
The odd relationship
Nothing in this little column is new to you. You know the generalist media chase
ambulances and have no attention span.
I’m mostly whining because before I started dealing with media folk on a regular basis, I didn’t think that it would all be so true. Every time I deal with generalist
media people, I feel pressure (often explicit) to round off details and say caustic
and sensationalist things. When I get off the telephone or hit the send button, I fret
about how the journalist at the other end is going to spin and simplify me until I
disagree with myself.
So, am I going to stop talking to media folks and stop submitting oversimplified
op-eds? Of course not. If I want Congress to do anything, or if I want to get grants
or continue writing, I need media appearances. It’s how we keep score. For many
people, the mental shortcut to answer the question is this person worth talking
to? is to reduce it to has this person been published in/by something I’ve heard
of? The first question is about whether the person knows the topic in depth, while
the second is about whether the person can convince an editor that he or she can
summarize information for a general audience. But it is an ingrained heuristic,
rooted in observation biases that one could characterize as basic human nature, and
I can’t imagine a future where such tendencies magically disappear.
So it’s not going to go away. There will always be a need for generalist media, and generalist media will always be better-recognized and more widely read
than specialized media, and to maximize audiences they will chase ambulances
and oversimplify. Further, people like me have a strong incentive to play along
even though we really hate to, because so many people equate widely-read with
authoritative.
12
1.5
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
Anti-intellectual
11 April 2006
Pundit is a term from Hindi meaning “wise and learned man”, but it is usually used
sarcastically in modern parlance. But, y’know, I don’t feel so sarcastic about it.
You can decide the “wise” part for yourself, but having spent a couple of years
studying the narrow topic of subject matter expansion in patent law, I am confident
describing myself as an authority. It’s been months since I’ve heard a new argument
on either side of the debate, and the new facts I’m learning are increasingly fine
details. I don’t feel any hubris when I say that nobody is going to blindside me on
the tiny, narrow bit of subject that I have chosen for myself.
And ya know, most of the arguments that I have presented in various media
and to various bigwigs over the last few months are arguments that numerous nonexperts have also made.
I often run into people who divide academic results into two categories: (1)
things anybody could have come up with after a bit of thought, and (2) things that
are too esoteric to be worth anything. Some exceptions are made for chemists and
engineers, whose work the commonsense folk have some sense is esoteric but will
somehow eventually lead to new toys or a cure for something, but everybody else—
the mathematicians who study tensors in R14 , the biologists who study odd tropical
flora, and most importantly, the anthropologists and sociologists and economists
who study people, whom we all study every day—are wasting their time and our
money.
Findings
Nor is the righteous ‘my common sense trumps their PhDs’ attitude restricted to
the stereotypical hick. The back page of Harper’s magazine, the page most magazines reserve for the humorous finale, is the Findings section, that lists a series
of out-of-context study results. From the March 2006 issue: “. . . It was discovered
that guppies experience menopause and that toxic waste in the Arctic was turning
polar bears into hermaphrodites. . . . A survey found that Americans are becoming
less repulsed by the sight of obese people. Scientists launched a study to determine what sorts of clothing make a woman’s bottom look too big. A study found
that Americans are more miserable today than they were in 1991, and British researchers discovered that many young girls enjoy mutilating their Barbie dolls.”
OK, what are we to make of this? What message is being sent? Mashing
together the studies means that the findings do not add up to any real image of the
world, even if the page does categorize the findings for some sense of flow. Readers
can’t drop these tidbits into cocktail party conversation, because they only have one
1.5. ANTI-INTELLECTUAL
13
piece of information and so aren’t armed for even the simplest follow-up. Interested
readers can’t learn more, because there are no citations. More importantly, there is
no context: we are not given the reason for studying guppy reproductive systems,
so we don’t know why a scientist would care to do such a thing.
Being the back page, we know that it’s supposed to be humorous, and with
everything taken out of context, it can be, the way that so many statements out of
context or in a different context are funny. But there’s also the sense of laughing
at the scientists. The subject of every sentence (but the passive-voice ones) is a
researcher or a study or a survey. If the editors just wanted to list facts, they’d say
“Americans are becoming less repulsed. . . ” but instead they waste ink pointing out
that “A study found that Americans are becoming less repulsed. . . ”.
If there were an American Association Against Science, they would probably
reprint the Findings page verbatim. The AAAS would ask, in big red letters, ”Why
are we spending money on this?” and the answer to why would not be anywhere to
be found.
But you know that I spend all day studying obscure features of people’s behavior and reading math books, so it’s no surprise that I’m anti-anti-intellectual. It’s no
secret that if I had an anti-intellectual in the room here, I’d tell him or her (reading
from Harper’s again) “New data suggested that Uranus is more chaotic than was
previously thought.”
[[See, statements in a different context are downright hilarious!]]
But it goes further than my kind of academic. The anti-intellectual sentiment—
the insistence that it’s either common sense or it’s not worth the trouble—is a belief
that there is no such thing as an expert. It is the myopic belief that if I don’t know
it, then there’s nothing to know. As such, the anti-intellectual sentiment is often
aimed at targets well far afield from intellectuals.
At the Baltimore Museum of Art, the same establishment that houses Picasso’s
Mother and Child, are such aggressively simple works of art as two silkscreen
reprints of the Last Supper, and a curtain of blue and silver beads. Some readers
will recognize the first as a work by Andy Warhol, and thus know the context:
Mr. Warhol felt that the repetition and mutation of familiar images created new
perspectives. For the second, as for a great deal of art that was clearly easy to
execute, we don’t know the context at all.6 But even though we don’t know it,
there is a context. The guy went to art school, has had a few focal ideas that drove
all his work, and has done years of pieces that led to this simple bead curtain.
So what is an expert to do? One approach is to always stick to things that are
obscure and look hard. Make sure that every study, every work of art, every essay
6
Sorry, I can’t help the art snobs in the audience with the guy’s name. Enjoy being in the dark
with me here.
14
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
says fuc* you, I’m an expert and you can’t do what I do. But we value people
who make it look effortless, whether they’re figure skating, producing a painting,
or running regressions. We always value simplicity, so if all it takes to get across
the message is a curtain of beads, then why overcomplicate things to remind the
viewer that it took years of work to get there? Some of the best guitarists out there
never really ventured past four chords, while the guys who can play intricate solos
are often dubbed wankers.
I’m glad I wrote my PhD thesis, and more generally love the idea of a thesis in
general, including for high school seniors, BAs, or anywhere in between. A good
thesis means that the author has become an expert in some tiny, irrelevant little
corner of the world. Research ability by itself is valuable, and it’s good practice
for when the student needs to be an authority in something of more practical value,
but it also gives the student an idea of what the other experts of the world have
gone through to get to their simple ends. Remember that part in Zoo Story where
the guy says that “sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way
in order to come back a short distance correctly”? A student who has gone a long
way in becoming an expert, and must then reduce that to the sort of ten second
summaries that we all give to friends and family, will have a better understanding
of the long distance that other experts have gone before they could string together
simple words or beads or chords.
1.6
Paid to think
26 April 2006
When I ask people what they do, the most interesting answers are verbs. I
don’t care that you’re an assistant executive manager for BungleCo. What have you
been doing for the last eight hours? Have you been talking to people? Organizing
papers? What conflicts do you need to resolve?
Conversely, when I tell people that I work at a think tank, many of them are
entirely unconcerned with what I actually do during the day, because they already
have the correct image of me staring at a computer screen until my eyeballs hurt.
The real mystery: where does the money come from? How does somebody make
money at a place where people just sit around and, um, think?
Writing doesn’t pay the bills. If you get a few hundred bucks for an op-ed, you
should be delighted. If you put out a magazine article a month, you can make a
living, but then you’re a full-time journalist and don’t have time for anything else.
The book? I’ve made more on Amazon referral commissions than royalties for
writing the thing. From a business perspective, the press placements are all just
1.6. PAID TO THINK
15
advertising.
Not everybody thinks they know all there is to know about knowing things.
There are people who appreciate an expert. They realize that the most efficient
means of doing things is a division of labor where they produce widgets and when
they need a policy expert, they hire one, rather than thinking they can study up on
the subject in their spare time.
So when does somebody need an expert in a given policy? When they have a
deeply-held opinion, and need somebody to espouse it. By finding an expert who
happens to agree with them, the expert gets funded and the interested party gets
support on its beliefs. And that is where all those studies funded by the most obvious donor come from. Since I know the software patent debate well, I can point to
a pro-software patent study or two that says “We are grateful to Microsoft for their
support” on the cover. Some read this and presume that MSFT found somebody to
speak for them, and then purchased their opinion. But the flow probably went the
other way: the expert formed his opinion (I have in mind two guys, one of whom
I know), and then approached Microsoft about maybe providing funding for the
research.
This is how the funding for many a study happens: first, the expert does research until he knows the subject well. He has formed his honest best opinion
about the subject. He starts writing up a few pages. Then, he shops it around.
Dear philanthropic organization/corporation/wealthy individual:
I have an opinion, and can state it eloquently and with authority. Further, that opinion happens to match yours perfectly! What a wonderful
coincidence. If you’d like me to continue fleshing out this idea which
I personally hold, then please send cash.
The expert is independently deriving his opinion, but the funding certainly has
great potential to corrupt the expert’s research. First, there are the details to be
negotiated, wherein funder and researcher agree on the broad concept, but there
may be details on which they differ. Second, there is the problem of the nonunitary actor. You know that guy that MSFT funded because they agree with him?
We’re coworkers, to the extent that you’d call this work. When I plug in my laptop
to write articles opposing MSFT’s IP position, MSFT chips in for the juice.
There are a few approaches to the conflict. I’m happy to say that in my case, the
administrators at my think tank are well aware that my writing disagrees with the
position of one of its funders, and at no point have they asked me to tone down my
bitching. They care more about doing independent research than any one donor,
and know that the only way to please all the donors all the time is to never say
anything.
16
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
Another approach is to take such a firm opinion that there’s no way to budge.
Are there orthodox economic motivations for government regulation? Absolutely.
Will you hear about any of them from the Cato Institute? Funders know the answer
to that one, and know not to bother asking.
The final approach, of course, is to fold to pressure. I could only guess at how
often this happens. To keep a parallel essay form, I should give an example here,
but that would be rude.
The other way that the ‘formulate hypothesis, then find funding’ approach can
create bias is in the suppression of certain ideas. This is no conspiracy theory
suppression, but the simple fact that publicizing an idea needs both an expert to
formulate it and a funder to pay for it. You can find an expert somewhere that
espouses any given idea, but the business side has a whole lot more money than
the rest of us. So why doesn’t the policy world turn into a gigantic pro-business
alliance? First, the funding for the pure social benefit is surprisingly large. There
are general funds like MacArthur, Ford, Soros, Hewlett, and while we’re talking
MSFT, the Gates Foundation, that have little or no interest in supporting moneyed
interests. Any one of these funds could keep several think tanks running for a long
time to come.
Second, there’s two sides to every issue. Say Company A has a labor-intensive
process to produce pollutants, while Company B has a giant machine that was built
in Japan to produce the same pollutants. Company A will be happy to support
bills that espouse anti-business import tariffs because they would hurt Company B
more; Company B will be happy to support higher minimum wage laws, because
doing so is handing a charge to its competitor. As for the overall issues of the
pollutant’s environmental effects, you won’t see much disagreement.
Thus, the problem of getting funding for policy research (and the problem of
policy design in general) is finding the mega-rich interests that happen to agree
with your belief. For any sufficiently detailed question, there will be some balance
between the funders.
Other
This was going to be a general essay about how a think tank pays the bills, but
the question of how corporate funding can support objective and honest policy
research is the interesting part. Keeping to my original intent, there are a few other
folks who are interested in experts and willing to pay for it. There is consulting
in the traditional sense of companies hiring an expert for the day. The guys who
study international trade policy happen to know a lot about international trade that
a business may be interested in.
Others are interested in access for the sake of keeping engaged. People want
1.7. BEING A TOOL OF THE MAN
17
to be surrounded by folks who are beautiful and smart; the think tank ain’t doing
much for the beautiful part, but has its share of smart folks who can say an interesting thing or two. There are people who will contribute to be a part of that.
The administrators describe these folks as individuals who “get it”, where “it” is
the value of good research, regardless of the bias of that research. If this were
Broadway, I suppose we’d call these guys angels.
There’s also the funding from the pure research supporters, such as the National
Institute of Assorted, which is not nearly as exciting. Though, it’s a chance to
mention an interesting paradox that applies to academic work in general: nobody
will fund a study that doesn’t have a good idea of the expected conclusion. You
can’t do the research until you’ve got the funding; you can’t write a good funding
proposal until you’ve done the research. The academics who can unravel that knot
live in big houses.
1.7
Being a tool of the Man
2 June 2005
I’ve been working exclusively at places with .edu in their addresses for the last
seven years or so; The .edus have their own hierarchies, codes, and bureaucracies,
but as you know, they are an order of magnitude smaller than those in the Real
World. Now that I’m working for the third largest employer in DC, it’s taken a bit
of adjustment.
The usual trappings of tooldom are banal but ignorable. The office takes up a
full city block, so the walk to the water cooler or the underpowered microwave is
a long one, an expanse of speckled grey carpet.
The tie is irrelevant. I have so many other pieces of individuality that matter
(biking to work, running my own IT system outside of theirs, rearranging the furniture) that the problem of wearing nice clothes seems an aside. Yeah, I’d rather
not wear it, and I have to change in the bathroom downstairs every morning, but I
never understood why the tie became the symbol of oppression when there are so
many other dumb, silly customs that are truly onerous.
We’re working on a report on migration (i.e., immigration and emigration), and
it’s an entirely different world from the academic. My boss stresses the fact that
economists are storytellers; avid readers of this site will recognize this as a word
choice away from my own insistence that all academic papers are a persuasive
essay.
The difference is in the story that one chooses to tell. One of those standard
jokes about the Scientific Method:
• 1. Form hypothesis.
18
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
• 2. Conduct experiment to test hypothesis
• 3. Change hypothesis to correspond with test results
And ya know, it’s kinda true for the theoretician. It is not unheard of for a
researcher to write down a model hoping to derive a result, and then finding that
the result needs a half-dozen caveats to work, or that the exact opposite is actually
true. This is an honest means of deriving good theory, in which reality advises the
math and then both advise the results. The same is true for a qualitative survey or
any other sort of study whose primary intent is not apophenia-crushing.
But the revised scientific method will not work for a two-volume report covering a dozen aspects of the migration process. If the report is to work out to a
coherent story, then the broad outline of the story needs to be written before the
research is anywhere near completed. So, what happens when the data disagree
with the story?
Strategy one: prevent this outcome by devising a hypothesis so bland that it
can’t possibly be false. This already probably explains the format for most of these
big overview reports, which are a great resource for tables and figures, but which
manage to say approximately nothing. The base hypothesis of our report is that
cooperation among countries instead of snippy bickering will be beneficial to all
involved. If you’re somehow not convinced, you can read the supporting evidence
in volume II. [OK, there’s a little bit more to it...]
Strategy two: maintain enough flexibility. Before writing this, I had often
complained that my Boss’s story kept changing. He’d ask me to write up a model
to show that the black market for labor can be dried up by various changes one
week, but the next he’s all about the demography of an aging Europe–but then the
next he’s lost interest in that and wants me to look at remittance rates. From the
perspective of the story here, his vacillation is trying to manage the fundamental
conflict between telling a coherent story before the data is gathered and the story
reality wants to tell. Although I’m often frustrated, I guess he’s doing as well as
one could.
Strategy three: spin! I’ve been doing a good amount of this, since my model
produces a lot of null results. I usually put a header in front in the way of: the
model shows that all the people who think an incremental change will lead to the
sky falling are wrong. Instead, nothing ever happens.
While we’re on the subject of spin, it’s worth distinguishing between the sort
of report here and reports from people like FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform). FAIR will never publish a report that supports any loosening of
immigration laws of any sort. Of course, this is not their official policy, but I’ve
read much of their stuff for the last few years, and that’s certainly what turns up.
1.8. IN PRAISE OF NOT KNOWING
19
There are other comparable fanatic organizations in any field and on both sides,
and their story is rigidly fixed and will not change to accommodate data. What
does such a group do when data appears which directly opposes their position?
Strategies one and two (be bland or flexible) are out, which leaves strategy three
(spin!), and perhaps another:
Strategy four: Suppress!
Strategy four will be used by both the bland megastudy and the fanatics. After
all, one run of my model will give me about 15MB of data, which could potentially
say something about any of the above topics; but in the interest of telling a coherent
story, I’ll be suppressing 14.98MB of that data. The same holds of the surveys and
regressions and other parts of the study: they’re all flexible enough to tell a story
in any field, but will be used for only one. In that respect, this suppression is sort
of like not talking about the paint job on the car that hit you—some detail is not
really apropos to the story.
Suppression doesn’t get insidious until one finds data that isn’t just not-apropos,
but actually contradicts the story. Hopefully, strategies one and two kick in, and a
good researcher finds some sort of compromise between the data and the story; for
the extreme organizations for whom strategies one and two aren’t available, their
only resort is to lie by omission, which we see more than often enough in such
reports.
1.8
In praise of not knowing
18 September 2005
The big ol’ business report
I’d already commented on the process of producing one of those megasurveys that
multinational institutions like to put out. The summary: you need to have some
definite hypotheses before you start writing, and if your analysis gets a null result,
you’re screwed. This actually happened elsewhere in the report I’ve been dealing
with: they spent about a month trying to run a regression that would find that
remittance rates are positively correlated to growth. They had about ten years of
data from a handful of countries, the data wasn’t great, and there are causality
problems—if your country is about to suffer a downturn, going abroad and sending
money home is a great strategy, so a surge in remittances may predict an economic
downturn.
In short, we don’t know. We’ll see what turns up in the actual report. But
there’s a clear and evident incentive to make claims toward what the report is sup-
20
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
posed to say—and no matter what happens with the numbers, the report will not
say ‘we don’t know the relationship between remittances and growth.’
The Realtor(R)
I have a pal who is interested in buying a house in Baltimore, so we went on a tour
of Baltimore yesterday morning with a real estate agent (a Realtor(R) even). Saw
lots of houses, asked lots of questions.
Me: Hey, so these appliances with stainless steel front panels; what do you think
that adds to the sale price of the house?
Her: $5,000.
We pass through my neighborhood, and there’s a big ol’ structure going up
across from the university.
Another person: Hey, what are those gonna be?
Realtor(R): They’ll be condos.
Me: Um, since I’m involved with the university, I can tell you they’re gonna be
student housing, with a Borders & Noble on the first floor.
My pal was impressed by the Realtor(R), who never emitted so much as an
’Um’ before answering every question. Me, I was entirely turned off. For our
Realtor(R), the correct answer to question (1) is: ‘I don’t know.’, and the correct
answer to (2) is: ‘I don’t know.’ If you don’t like these examples, it was a two hour
tour, during which she had a precise answer for every question, so other examples
are available on request.
Our b-schoolers learn early on that confidence is essential, and derive a direct
corollary that you should therefore never say you don’t know. Let this type of
comportment be ‘business school confidence’. [The reader will note that this sort of faux
confidence is often observed in our President, who is the first President of the U.S.A. with a b-school
degree.]
“If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would
it?”
It’s a cliché that academics are more precise and methodical than their businessworld counterparts, but there are enough businessmen who are precise and methodical. I believe that what actually separates the two worlds is that academics are
allowed to say that they don’t know.
In fact, even when academics say something, they’re really just lowering the
level with which they don’t know. ‘Before, I knew nothing, but now I know nothing in only about 5% of the states of the world.’ The way we’ve been writing
aforementioned report for multinational institution is that I’ve been sending in re-
1.8. IN PRAISE OF NOT KNOWING
21
ports with the usual caveats and confidence intervals, and then they delete all of
that and leave the results. This would be grounds for disciplinary action at any
research institution in the world, but is evidently just another day’s work for our
business-oriented institution.
The good academic exudes confidence as well, but does so in a manner very
different from business-school confidence. The good academic heads the seminar
with a list of items which he or she knows with confidence. Then, when a participant raises his hand and asks about something else, the academic simply says ‘I’m
sorry, that’s not on the list of things I know.’ The audience walks out not thinking
that the speaker is some sort of messiah, but with much more confidence in the
short list of things that the speaker claims to know. The form of academic confidence explains a great deal of the academic world; e.g., why paper topics are so
hopelessly narrow: it’s the author’s way of confessing ignorance about the whole
world, save for a tiny sliver about which he or she can speak authoritatively.
In the borderline world between academia and the b-world, different people go
in different directions. For example, the World Bank’s World Development Report
2006 doesn’t include a single confidence interval that I could find (given a decent
skim—I’ll say 95% confidence), even though it includes a number of regressions
run in MSFT Excel by the authors. [And this addresses my commentary on the Bank in
Section
Compare with this Urban Institute report which I chose because it happened
to be on their home page right now. The executive summary makes no mention
of statistical significance, and if you’re a policymaker who slept through stats, you
will have no problem reading the report. But if you look at the half of the report
labeled ”Notes on methods and terminology”, those pesky little stars start to turn
up. It’s still not academic publication-level detail, but these guys took seriously
the problem of describing where the numbers came from, instead of presenting a
façade that the numbers and regression results are indisputable and certain.
By giving b-school confidence and academic confidence parallel names, I’m
maybe implying that they’re both sort of OK in their context, but I don’t believe
this is so. B-school confidence is disingenuous, and is a form of misleading without
technically lying. As you can see, b-school confidence has lately grated upon me.
Why not just throw in that extra column of numbers indicating that we could
be wrong? People have great alibis for it, typically based on a Lake Woebegone
story: oh, you understand the concept of statistical uncertainty, and I understand it,
but our readers don’t, or don’t have time for it. True, many people don’t get the
minutæ of how one would apply a central limit theorem to produce a confidence
interval, but they do understand what it means to be not-100%-certain.
This may also be a social norm issue: if b-school confidence is the norm, academic confidence looks out of place, and vice versa. But if it’s a social norm issue,
then we can do our part to change the norm: If you’ve been hanging out with your
22
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
Realtor(R) for two hours and she has a confident answer to all your impossible
questions, don’t entrust her with your business. If you do cite a report that doesn’t
confess to ignorance on any topic, point out that you looked for confidence intervals, but found none. Just as you would normally let the reader decide what level
of confidence is acceptable(*), you should let the reader decide how to interpret a
complete lack of such information.
[(*)By which I mean, don’t just report that this number has two stars attached and this other
one has one star; give a significance level like 91.3%, and let the reader decide whether he or she is
comfortable with that. Maybe print stars to suggest or guide, but not as the sole piece of info. But
you knew this.]
1.9
Definition of a crackpot
20 October 2007
A crackpot is somebody who does not respect the prior literature.
The easy way to not respect the prior lit is to ignore it. For example, a few
months ago, a pal of mine asked me to review a paper from a physicist about an
exciting new statistical mechanics approach to economic decisionmaking. Several
pages of symbols later, I realized that he was describing the logit model, which had
been written up by economists somewhere around the 1960s. In fact, the author
even cited the standard citation for the logit model (from the mid-70s), but failed
to make the connection. He just assumed that what he had was new, and did only a
cursory browse throughout the economics literature before proclaiming as much.
A great many blog comments, and comments while made over booze, are of
exactly this form. You’ve got what may be a generally smart person, commenting
on somebody else’s field. But when chatting with pals, it’s OK to not have the
existing literature on hand, because everybody in the room is aware that nobody
has any authority, and that nobody’s comments on global warming or what-haveyou really makes any difference. In that context, you’re no fun unless you’re at
least a bit of a crackpot.
In a sense, every grad student is a crackpot because they just haven’t had time
to really read up. However, most but not all are able to recognize this and act
accordingly. They inquire of others, ‘I have this nifty idea; how would you propose
I fit it into the existing setup?’ Those who say things like ‘I have this nifty idea,
and it is new and wonderful’ are readily (and most of the time, rightly) accused of
hubris.
1.9. DEFINITION OF A CRACKPOT
23
Root causes Beyond just ignoring the literature, there are the self-proclaimed
revolutionaries who go out of their way to disdain the prior literature (e.g., FT
Marinetti7 ). History talks a lot about people who brought about fundamental
change, and doesn’t say much about people who made incremental changes. But
the biographies often fail to mention how much time the revolutionaries spent reading the literature. I may have mentioned these guys before, but Thomas Edison
didn’t invent the light bulb, and never claimed to; he just made (significant) improvements on the filament materials. Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity
was pretty darn original, but it was based on the Lorenz Equations, which are not
named the Einstein equations. Einstein was famously an outsider—he was a patent
examiner, not a physicist—but he enlisted the help of other prominent physicists in
hammering out his theories.
The individualistic mythos is allegedly a U.S.A. thing, but the world over has
people who strive to be as self-sufficient as possible—meaning that they go out of
their way to not read the literature. Further, we all have the tendency to think we’re
smarter than everybody else, which often translates to either not bothering to check
the literature, ‘cause it’s all dumb, or dismissing it quickly as not on track.
All of this borders on crackpot. Those individualists in the Upper Peninsula
are like this, as are the people who write lengthy tracts criticizing the status quo.
Every class of grad students has one or two of ‘em, who reject the literature out of
hand. I think I used to be like that, once upon a time, when I was less cynical than
I am now.
So the other means of being a crackpot is knowing that there has been prior
work done on a subject, but just assuming that it’s all stupid. Those other people
just don’t ‘get it’ the way you do. I.e., everybody else is dumber than you are.
The root of such a belief is a massive failure of theory of mind—the ability
of non-autistic and non-asshole people to develop a model of what is going on in
other people’s heads. Which is why crackpot is not a compliment.
[Most patent holders are very level-headed types, but crackpots also flock to the patenting world,
because the concept of a patent is built on the idea that the recipient of the patent is smarter than
everybody else and deserves to be paid for being a revolutionary. Folks like that are why I stopped
reading the comments on patent blogs.]
The academic response So you could read the literature review of the typical
paper as the ‘prove you’re not a crackpot’ section. Indicate a modest familiarity
with the literature and a respect for those who came before. Then, when you say
crap that’s completely off the wall, at least the reader knows that you are aware of
7
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/˜crshalizi/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.
html
24
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
the context in which you’re saying it.
Academics have a crackpot sensor, and it is often very sensitive. But the requirement that you be at least modestly versed in the literature can easily create the
sort of inner-circle feel that many academic organizations have.
It does go too far sometimes: some people like to characterize an academic
journal as an ‘ongoing dialogue,’ meaning that your contribution is irrelevant unless
it centrally focuses on problems presented in the prior lit. This is where that sense
of cliquishness starts to appear—especially when the lit you’re supposed to be
respecting is considered to consist of the writing of a handful of star academics.
All that talk about the value of interdisciplinary research goes out the window
if the key criterion for credibility is being well-versed with the existing literature
by a few people. Being that I’m kinda multidisciplinary, what with articles in
genetics journals and law reviews, I get the crackpot glare all the time, even though
I definitely know not to claim that my ideas are not in the lit.
Anyway, there’s a balance to be struck. There are people who show up to
economics seminars from their work as a know-it-all to just present their single
piece of intuition as fact. They are annoying. But there’s a long ways between
those guys and the people who have an active interest but are not entirely up on the
inner circle’s writing.
But the policy implications are easy for those of you dealing with academics
on a regular basis, because it can be easy to not set off their hypersensitive crackpot
sensors: just respect the literature.
1.10
Academia doesn’t scale
14 December 2007
The current academic model is based on the academic societies of the 18th
and 19th centuries, e.g., The Royal Society of London for Promoting Natural
Knowledge8 , est 1660. These societies were everything you’d imagine: a bunch of
wealthy white guys, all best of pals, generally brilliant, debating and experimenting. Many wore powdered wigs. Journals were often filled with cleaned-up letters
or speeches given by members.
This is the root of the modern academic journal. Unfortunately, the model
doesn’t scale from a gentleman’s club of up to a thousand members to the global
mass that is modern academia. It reveals a specific worldview about where value
comes from, which is not as advertised.
8
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/11/
dayintech_1128
1.10. ACADEMIA DOESN’T SCALE
25
Ad hominem caveats This little column was hard to write because I don’t want
you to think I’m ranting about how all academics are evil. No, the simple thesis is
that the current peer-reviewed journal system is ill-suited to the modern world. It
works well for the small academic societies of the 1800s, and needs to be dropped
now that the academic community is global and decentralized. After the initial
statement of problem, I’ll get to some suggestions of how modern academia could
evolve past the 1800s.
As for my own experience, I’ve got my share of rejections from academic journals on the one hand, and a couple of papers published (or on their way to being
published) on the other. I’ve also written two peer-reviewed books, partly because
the peer-review process for books overcomes some of the small-circle problems
that journal peer-review suffers. So I don’t comfortably float around the peerreviewed world, but I’m not a total outsider either.
That said, we can get to the key conflict, which is basically the eternal fight
between the small-circle meritocracy and egalitarian democracy, except sometimes
those with the most merit aren’t in the small circle.
The conversation The academic literature is frequently described as an ongoing
conversation. This is a fundamentally different concept from being a repository
of the best current work. The ongoing conversation story neatly follows the tradition of the society journals, which were sometimes literally the record of ongoing
discussions held by the individuals in person or via letters.
As we’ve all experienced at parties, it’s hard to walk in on an ongoing conversation, especially walking in on a conversation with people who don’t know you.
The typical first response is not my, what an interesting new perspective but who
the fuck are you?. The same holds with a submission to an academic journal: the
first question is who you are, where you’re coming from, what perspective you
have on the ongoing conversation, and then finally what you actually have to say.
Law reviews, which are not really peer-reviewed in the traditional sense, take the
direct approach and typically require a résumé with submission.
For a small society, the who-are-you stage of things goes pretty quickly, because if the society’s members are willing to talk to you then you’ve already passed
a crackpot test. But now that we’re an egalitarian world and journals accept paper
submissions from anybody, the editor needs to start with filtering crackpots, and
then move on to evaluating the merits of the work.
Fear of crackpots The ‘ongoing conversation’ model is inherently conservative.
After all, sometimes the topic of conversation really needs to change. To give a
concrete example, there is a thread in the voter turnout literature over the claim
26
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
that people turn out based on purely self-interested means: they find the likelihood
that they’d be the pivotal voter, multiply by the expected personal gains from one
candidate over another, and then choose to vote accordingly. The ongoing conversation is over reconciling this claim with the data, which contradicts it every step of
the way. Gee, maybe the theory, which is countered by both intuition and empirical
data, is just wrong. But it remains the baseline model, and if you want to write a
paper about why people turn out to vote, you need to spend some portion of your
time engaging in this ongoing conversation that really should have died a decade
ago.
The conservativeness is rooted in a fear of crackpots, as I’d discussed above (p
Speaking a New Word I submitted a model of network formation to Economics
Letters, which gave me a one-paragraph rejection, the gist of which was: a model
of network formation isn’t Economics. I suppose this fact would be news to the
editors of the Review of Network Economics. The intent of this example is to
point out that the humans editing the journals evaluate the work based upon what
they’re comfortable with, not based upon some sort of objective criterion that they
as humans aren’t capable of achieving.
We can go back to my favorite question: where does value come from? It
doesn’t come from new knowledge about the world, but from the belief by other
humans that such knowledge is important and relevant. That is, the peer review
system establishes science as firmly subjectivist and relativist, no matter how much
it pays lip-service to objectivity.
Or, we can go back to what I consider to be the fundamental rule of nonfiction writing: the work should make the reader feel smarter. The reader should
know how to do something s/he didn’t know how to do before, or learn facts and a
means of structuring them that the reader hadn’t known before, or otherwise make
the reader feel more secure about his or her existing knowledge. In the political
context, people are much more likely to read articles and books that agree with
them than works that oppose them (and yes, this phenomenon has been extensively
documented in peer-reviewed journals).
In the specific case of a peer-reviewed journal, it’s not just anybody you’re trying to make feel smarter, but the referee, who already has an established worldview
and an established set of tools that he or she learned in graduate school. The process of presenting a new method, like presenting a network model to an old school
economist, is exceptionally difficult, because new things are threatening and make
the reader feel stupid until the reader has had time to absorb the full implications.
Meanwhile, the rift between ‘useful’ and ‘useful to the current members of the
ongoing conversation’ grows.
1.10. ACADEMIA DOESN’T SCALE
27
Let me again clarify that this isn’t about being evil, it’s about a well-known
fact of human nature: we are more comfortable embracing the familiar than the
foreign. Travis and Collins [1991] explain that this is not cronyism or an ‘old boy’
network, but the tendency to pick people from your intellectual school of thought
over outsiders—which can often look a lot like cronyism and an old boy network.
Anonymity Anonymous review may make sense in a small society, where you
may have to reject your best pal. In cases like these, you always know who wrote
the rejection anyway. But when the author and reviewer may be continents away,
anonymity just produces low-quality reviews.
Anonymous peer review doesn’t scale, but it is necessary to perpetuate the
system as it exists today. Pretty much every academic has a story about a rejection
they got that was rude to the point of humorous. My own rejections have just
been boring and typically indicated that the review didn’t read the paper. E.g., I
once received a rejection—after a year and a half wait—based on how I numbered
my theorems. A rejection I received after I started writing this essay chided me
for failing to discuss the multiple possible modes in a probit model—except the
probit likelihood function is globally concave, and therefore always has exactly
one mode. But hey, there are no peer review reviewers to check the facts or merits
of the anonymous review.9
This one has at least a partial solution, because anonymity is an endogenous
social norm: we can sign our reviews. I do, and make a point of never saying
anything in a rejection letter that I wouldn’t say to the author’s face. The problem
with this, and why it’s not the norm, is that I can’t be lazy. I can’t reject based on
ad hominem excuses or theorem numbering or a vague sense of dislike. In short, I
can’t pretend that I’m being egalitarian and working from the merits of the paper
while actually working to maintain a closed society.
Competition In both small society and the globe at large, there’s always a conflict between striving for the greater good and for individual advancement. For a
system where peers review your work, this is a central conflict, because the people
most qualified to evaluate your work are your direct competitors.
In a small society, your direct competitors are probably also your pals. Any
business organization is naturally something of a social organization as well, and
9
A not-anonymous peer points out that the editor should be checking the reviews for quality
and acting accordingly. However, part of the referee’s job is to save time and effort for the editor,
and editors are generally inclined to trust the referee, so human laziness and trust generally prevent
editors from overturning all but the truly worst reviews. I did once have an editor who told me that a
referee report was so bad that it indicated more that the referee was a crackpot than that there were
problems with the submission, so the editors are not entirely asleep.
28
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
apart from some famous disputes (e.g., Liebenitz v Newton), we find that all those
letters between famous colleagues were generally collegial. So when somebody
accepted an article from a competitor, it was at least from a competing pal, who
would be able to give a leg up next time in return.
In a global society, the author and the person reviewing a paper are just competitors. The one who is doing the review was selected because s/he is considered
to be part of the established system, and has something to lose, like real live funding, by expanding the membership of the established system.
I went to a delightful conference the other day regarding a new paradigm for demography. When the question of getting funding from the NIH came up, a couple
of people suggested just not bothering. The people who read the grant applications
are the people who were most successful in the last decade, and therefore are the
ones who most stand to lose from a change in paradigm, and are in some ways the
least qualified to evaluate a change of topic from their own life’s work.
The alternatives Now and then, people tell me that the peer review system is a
revered part of science. This is even political—the PRISM coalition10 is a group of
academic publishers who oppose open access journals under the presumption that it
is the private, traditional peer review system that ensures high quality in publishing.
The claim as I stated it here implies that peer review has evolved into what it is
based on centuries of refinement and improvement. Rather, it’s a throwback: it’s
a system that primarily emerged among small academic societies and has entirely
failed to adapt as modern academia stopped being about a few inner circles and
became an open, global meritocracy.
So, what can we do? There are already many online repositories to be had.
My favorites are the Arxiv11 for math/stat/physics and the self-descriptive Social
Science Research Network12 . The SSRN is especially important because of the
absolutely pathetic speed of peer review in the social sciences. That paper above
that got rejected over nonexistent nonconvexities in the probit (it’s December): I
submitted that paper in January. Amusingly enough, the reviewer criticized my
literature review for not citing papers published in May. So if we relied solely on
the formal journals for social science research, the entire system would quickly
grind down, as everybody would be a year behind all the time. Instead, we spend
more time at places like the SSRN.
So the SSRN is already eating the journals’ lunch with regards to the work of
archiving and dissemination. But the SSRN lacks peer review, and an endorsement
10
http://www.prismcoalition.org/
http://arxiv.org
12
http://ssrn.org
11
1.10. ACADEMIA DOESN’T SCALE
29
system is still valuable and important. It’s still the case that 90% of everything is
crap, and some papers are more important, better written, or otherwise of higher
quality than others. We humans with limited time on this Earth need some sort of
guidance toward what is worth our time.
Could Arxiv and the SSRN implement peer review? Sure, in a heartbeat. Especially if we give up on the gentleman’s society rule of anonymity, a paper’s web
page could include endorsements or comments from others. Readers will then have
more than enough to evaluate whether the paper is useful, accurate, and so on. Depending on how reviewers are assigned, authors who write about relatively new
methods may be more likely to find another party who doesn’t feel dumber when
confronted with that specific method. [The Arxiv already has a very weak endorsement
system, but it doesn’t yet provide as much information as users need.]
We’d like authors to revise based upon comments and improve things accordingly; which means that there’d need to be some sort of revision control system in
place. The author may have the right to publicly respond to public peer review, in
which case the ongoing conversation would happen right there on the page. Since
a peer review is now an invitation from the editor to publish a short article, colleagues now have a half-decent incentive to actually do peer review beyond the
vague sense of responsibility that is the sole, insufficient motivator now.
[And yes, people suck, and there are bad academic apples who would say mean things and try to
ruin the system for everyone. But this is still a system that restricts commenting access to named and
identified peer reviewers, not YouTube. All of these details are a low-grade kind of problem which
SSRN and Arxiv could easily surmount with a few days of coding and some vigilance on the part of
the editors.]
A system like this would also take the semi-sacred significance off of peer
review, which is a good thing. The popular media often refer to peer-reviewed
papers as if they are unquestionably valid, and not-peer-reviewed papers as necessarily pseudoscience, but with all the problems underlying the system above, the
signal is not so clear. A public endorsement system would guide the reader toward
good papers but not imply that the paper is the gospel truth—just that two or three
knowledgeable but fallible humans found it to be of high quality.
I expect that the concept of a paper—a single unit of scholarship that others can
read and refer to—will continue to exist, but its delivery and evaluation will have to
change. Delivery has already changed: nobody goes to the library to pick up dusty
bound volumes from the 1800s, since they’re in PDF format on Jstor. Nobody in
the current ongoing conversation of social science even bothers with new journals
as they are mailed out parcel post, because they’re just the archiving of research
from a year or two ago. The archiving process will be online no matter what.
The endorsement system as it stands will live a lot longer, because it clearly
benefits the incumbents, provides a means for the small inner circle to keep itself
30
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
small, and provides a shield of anonymity that many reviewers continue to use as a
crutch. Especially in social sciences, this is a sad state of affairs: we have a dozen
journals devoted to mechanism design and making sure that people’s incentives
are aligned with our overall social goals, and yet we still base decisions on anonymous comments from those who are most likely to lose funding and relevance to
something new.
1.11
Moderate economists unite!
26 April 2004
Yesterday, I handed out copies of the main essay of Chapter
For example, here is a flier for the World Bank Bonds Boycott. As a form
of protest, the boycott is on par with not voting. Yeah, not buying bonds and
not voting sends a signal, but one which is entirely indistinguishable from apathy.
Back to the pamphlet: “The World Bank’s voting structure is based on a system
of one dollar, one vote. The G-7 governments control 43% of the voting rights”,
it reads. But no, that’s the IMF, a linked but very distinct organization. [The WB
gets its money from bonds; the IMF directly from governments (mostly the G-7
govts, as described above). If the World Bank were one dollar=one vote, wouldn’t
it make sense to buy all the bonds you could to gain that much more control over
the organization?]
One person gave me a t-shirt in exchange for my essay. Thanks, I wore it all
weekend. It has the WB logo on the front, with ‘Billions served?’ underneath; on
the back, it lists some facts (wait, I have to take off the t-shirt—topless blogging,
ladies):
Of the 4.7 billion ‘satisfied’ World Bank Customers:
• 3 Billion live on less than $2 a day
• 1.5 billion do not have clean water to drink
• Nearly 3 million die each year from vaccine-preventable diseases
Yup, that’s right: the World Bank works in the most impoverished places on
Earth. Those bastards—we have to stop their evildoing now! The shirt also has a
URL for A World Connected, a site I haven’t looked at enough to comment. Its
cover stories at the moment include one about protecting U.S. jobs and one about
a guy who won awards from libertarians, so I dunno.
1.11. MODERATE ECONOMISTS UNITE!
31
These protests
leave me feeling lonely and isolated. The preparatory rally is necessarily short, and
short on facts. There’s a lot of repetition, in which the leader prepares the crowd
with a few vaguely witty chants (which I won’t bother repeating here). Chanting
leaves me so cold.
When I was living in Chicago, and the Bulls had won, I went up to Clark &
Belmont, knowing that a crowd would be there, and indeed, a crowd was there,
and everyone was happily whooping. A poor guy in a pickup happened by the
intersection, and while he was idling at the red light, a bunch of us jumped in the
back. It was fun. We whooped. The guy, bemused, drove for a while. Meanwhile,
we whooped. Eventually, we got tired of whooping, and all fell silent, facing
each other in close quarters, as if to say, ‘OK, um, now what?’ Bemused driver
eventually turned around and dropped us off, and we half-enthusiastically got out.
So I have a lot to write about the IMF, but couldn’t chant much. In fact, as a
firm believer in shades of grey and qualifying all sound bites, I don’t think I’ll ever
find myself in a crowd I can totally believe in, which is somewhat disheartening.
When you’re in the majority—at least among the people in the room—you don’t
have to defend much of anything. In a world where there are only two sides, you’ve
got a better than fifty-fifty chance of being in the majority among your pals. But in
a world where there are a hundred different beliefs about a hundred subquestions,
there is no solidarity to be had.
[[Poole and Rosenthal [1984] helped with this, by the way. They found that two dimensions,
economic and social, explain about 90% of the variation in voting patterns among Congressman.
E.g., somebody who supports abortion rights is very likely to want to dissolve the World Bank and
Israel. Whether there’s a consistent logical thread connecting these things is left as an exercise to the
reader, but the Congressional stats and the turnout at the protests certainly back this correlation up.
You could take this in two directions. One is that there are consistent points of view which lead
those with those points of view to all agree on a dozen different issues at the same time. The other
is to say that it’s all-but-haphazard, a question of what your pals wound up thinking. For example,
at last night’s punk rock rally, some punks buzzed the event chanting ‘You can’t be vegan and prochoice!’, but I’m told that at today’s march, the ‘Vegans for choice’ contingent was in full force.]]
So it feels good to join the crowd and not have to think. I do not think that this is
a bad thing. There are a three reasons for this: the first is that, for the most part, the
protesters on the street probably won’t have much of a direct influence on things,
so the rally is all about its side-benefits. Foremost, it’s fun. It also allows you to
hear opinions on issues that are tangential to the issues at hand, such as the guy
who was handing out fliers about halting the embargo on Cuba at the WB protest.
It allows networking in the traditional sense, getting people connected to work on
more effective campaigns involving cash, attempts to influence the non-converted,
and attempts to influence people who write laws. Finally, it’s not all groupthink, so
32
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
the rally allows people who meet there to debate a bit about the details of the issue.
Second, consider the alternative to such mass, ideologically watered-down action, which was sort of revealed by the people who canceled their memberships at
N.O.W. in a previous entry: “I agree with everything you say, except your endorsement of Carol Mosley Braun was inane. Cancel my membership and don’t ever
talk to me again!” If everybody thought like this, micromanaging group ideology,
no organization large enough to do anything would ever exist, and bickering would
rule the day over actual action.
The third reason why these crowds are a good thing is the effect of radicalism
on others, a subject which I’m going to put off until next episode.
1.12
Moderate Economists II
4 May 2004
I had dinner at the home of Mr JR, of Chicago, Illinois a few times. J is a defense
lawyer, and has argued more than his share of pro bono death penalty cases (before
the IL Supreme Court realized the whole death penalty concept was just a bad idea
and imposed the moratorium). More often, he’d defend alleged drug dealers, who
somehow found the cash to pay Mr JR’s hefty hourly fees. My favorite story was
about the guy that he defended with an alibi defense. It was so airtight because the
prosecution had given the wrong date for the crime. Through procedural wrangling
which technically broke the rules, the prosecutors corrected their errors, appealed
the case, and had the guy convicted. Couldn’t you have used another defense, I
asked him, and he replied, “Well, no. The fucker did it.”
He explained why he was comfortable defending the guilty thus: the adversarial system works by two advocates making as forceful an argument as possible for
his or her side, and a judge who selects from these the best of all possible arguments. The conditions under which this works are beyond the scope of this note
(it was a chapter of my dissertation), but you can see that if everybody does their
job perfectly, then this system will indeed work. [But do you break the procedural
rules when the prosecutors give the wrong date?]
Outside of the courtroom, there are more than enough people who believe in
the adversarial system, or at least seem to. For example, there is the Federation for
American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an organization which advocates tighter
immigration restrictions. Although the name and stated purpose is just ”reform”,
the reader will not find a single instance where FAIR advocates for a liberalization
of immigration restrictions (not even for the highly skilled). FAIR is at the far end
of the spectrum, and every single argument they make will pull toward that far end.
The International Intellectual Property Institute (IIPI) advocates for stronger
1.12. MODERATE ECONOMISTS II
33
intellectual property laws, the world over. They will in no way entertain the possibility that IP in the U.S.A. is too restrictive, or that other countries in other situations may benefit from laxer laws. For example, Africans are dying by the millions
from AIDS, but the IIPI has an explanation of why allowing generic AIDS drugs
won’t do anything to stem the flood of death and misery. Their argument in a
nutshell: malaria pills are generically available, and people still die from that.
Going into more detail, they say that the infrastructure isn’t there, so that even
if trade-related IP isn’t enforced, Africa still couldn’t produce the drugs it needs.
This paper works fine if you have blinders on, adjusted just right so that you can see
Africa and the U.S.A. but can’t see Brazil, which has had great success in saving
people’s lives by ignoring US patents. The drugs produced there are as effective
and safe as those from the U.S.A., and could potentially be exported to Africa
and other countries, but for Brazil’s understanding that if it expands its program to
helping people elsewhere in the world, it would jeopardize the entire project and
thus Brazilian lives [see Wired news, a more liberal source13 ]. The IIPI’s failure to
address the fact that other countries do have the infrastructure that Africa lacks, and
failure to acknowledge that the market has already invented mechanisms whereby
lives could be saved if IP restrictions were weakened, seems almost disingenuous
to me.
On the liberal side, you have your share of extremists as well. PETA comes
to mind, or the dissolve-the-World-Bank contingent from last week. Here14 is an
occasionally insightful thread from my favorite discussion group about Richard
Stallman, a fanatic in direct opposition to the fanatics at IIPI.
I have more sympathy for the far left, but am still annoyed by their shrillness,
and inability to accept reasoned arguments or to produce reasoned arguments of
their own. Part of this comes from the simple difficulty of telling a story which is
both true and cuts absolutely no slack for the other side. Usually, the other side
is populated by human beings, who have non-evil reasons for believing what they
do. How do you demonize those people, deny their arguments, and tell a true story
with a straight face?
Mr. JR had a simple method: a firm conviction and faith in the adversarial system. Public discourse doesn’t have such an easy myth to fall back on, so
fanatics need to resort to a simpler, tried-and-true method: being dumb and uninformed. Conservatives do this by using an oversimplified free-market model
(unless it doesn’t fit their agenda); liberals do this through an oversimplified characterization of corporations and the wealthy (unless they want to buy a car). Both
points-of-view entirely fall to pieces on analysis, so both sides avoid deep analysis
13
14
http://wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,44175,00.html
http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=04/04/21/02445302
34
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
at all costs, leaving things at a surface level.
Which is why I handed out essays at the World Bank protest, and why I wrote
the ‘how to argue with a conservative’ piece (which I swear I’ll finish next time,
unless something comes up). I believe more informed discourse is better discourse.
But sometimes I worry that I’m sabotaging the natural balance of things. Here I am,
trying to pull the far left closer in, but the far right are kookier than ever. I have no
dissertation chapters to back this up, but it seems evident that having more rabid
leftists can indeed pull the final outcomes more toward the left. E.g., if Richard
Stallman hadn’t been such an antisocial and annoying person, we wouldn’t have
the wealth of free software today. And the IMF does still have a large population
of rabid neoclassicists.
Maybe a rabid left is more of an asset than an informed and carefully reasoned
left.
This brings me to the final hazard of being a moderate who acknowledges that
both extremes have some validity: your essays always lack a forceful conclusion.
1.13
Teaching the debate
12 December 2005
I had a wonderfully educational day on Amazon.com today. Before getting to
the main subject, let me suggest a fun Amazon chestnut: if you click on “show all
customer reviews”, you can sort the reviews to show the lowest rating first. Then,
you can read one-star reviews explaining why works like The Great Gatsby or All
the King’s Men were terrible books.
We had somehow gotten on to the topic of evolution, and I pulled up an evolution textbook, where all of the one-star reviews were about how misguided it is
for a book to call evolution “science”. For balance, I pulled up Of Pandas and
People: The Central Question of Biological Origins, which got many more flames
than the Evolution textbook. After a few of the more entertaining reviews, one
wonders whether any of the people on either side have actually read the books they
are reviewing with such revulsion.
So, I started reading Pandas. The book opened, as do many biology books,
with a discussion of chemistry: how genetic information is stored in DNA, which
is a sequence of amino acids, and how scientists have been able to take a mixture of
basic elements and zap them with electricity and wind up with amino acids. Also,
how scientists have not been able to take the next step to turn those amino acids
into self-replicating strands of DNA.
I skipped to the section on genetic mutation. It pointed out that the intelligent
1.13. TEACHING THE DEBATE
35
designers of old misinterpreted Plato to say that there are a set of ideal, immutable
archetypes for each animal. This is absurd, because we observe evolution and
change and even extinction. No, the correct interpretation is that there are a set
of species, but those species change with time. That is, within a species there is
genetic drift and variation. One presumes these species match Linnaeus’s use of
the term, but I didn’t see this supported or refuted in what I’d skimmed.
However, to say that there can be unlimited variation, wherein one species
transforms into another, is just absurd. Modern scientists readily induce limited
variation in test animals, causing offspring to vary either by Mendelev-style selective breeding or more direct manipulation of the gene, but modern scientists have
never in the 62-year history of genetics been able to cause sustained, unlimited
genetic variation. Yet they continue to pretend that such a thing is possible.
The textbook is not at all what I’d expected. It makes every effort to not deny
lab-based scientific evidence. No, it takes the pragmatic approach: what is the
absolute minimum one needs to support the claim that there was a Divine intervention to create life and that people are not descended from monkeys? The text
supports everything in modern science, except those few steps required for those
premises. Sure, amino acids from random variation are OK, but that last step where
they become an informational code is not. Genetic variation is OK, but only within
species.
On the one hand, I found this romp through creationism to be refreshing, because it was not nearly as crackpot as I’d feared. The authors know a whole lot
more about genetics than I do. On the other hand, it’s that much more frustrating.
They understand all of genetics, they understand genetic drift, but they just draw an
arbitrary line that says that genetic drift has to stop at some point. No matter how
cool they may be about the biology literature, that statement that there exists an
arbitrary limit to genetic variation is the purest of dogma. The constructive means
of handling the dispute would be to inquire as to the mechanisms that limit genetic
variation to within-species changes, but I could not find anywhere in my short jaunt
through the creationist literature the slightest suggestion of what the mechanism is
that limits genetic drift to within species boundaries. We’re just supposed to take
seriously the assertion that genetic variation is limited to what we’ve been able to
observe in the last few decades, in nature or the lab, and no more.
I want to shake these guys and make them learn statistics. If a million draws
from a distribution all fall within five standard deviations of the mean, that doesn’t
prove that there is a mechanism in place that forces the data to fall inside five standard deviations, it just means that you’ll need to make billions of draws to observe
events seven or eight standard deviations off. Doing that could take millions of
years, but one in a billion is substantively different from mechanically impossible.
Finally, if I were to put a review on Amazon, I’d say that the book is defensive
36
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
instead of constructive: it points out those parts of the standard evolutionary model
that don’t work, but merely asserts the alternative model rather than providing a
positive mechanism explaining why the alternative model is correct.
Teaching the debate
Following the ultraliberal principle that all views—especially those that are contrary to the beliefs of the authorities—deserve to be aired, the intelligent-design
team push for the debate to be taught in schools. I wholeheartedly agree with
them. I think it is a salient debate that should be taught.
The key lesson that teaching the debate would cover is the difference between
faith and science. It is not the night-and-day difference that some would describe
it as. Richard Feynmann has gone on record stating that faith is based on absolute
certainty while science is based on never knowing, and therefore the two can never
merge. To leave it at that misses some important details, so let me explain exactly
how this is so.
I prefer to describe the process via the Bayesian model of inquiry: people begin
with a prior belief, gather data, and then update that data to arrive at a posterior
belief. [[Note to statisticians: this is a model of thought and human beliefs that mirrors but does not
match the data-processing method named Bayesian updating that competes with classical hypothesis
testing and is intended to mirror this process of human belief formation. All of this is named after
the Reverend Thomas Bayes, by the way.]]
There are other words one could use instead of beliefs. For example, one could
use biases, in which case we’d say that the researcher begins with some biases,
gathers data, and concludes with new biases which are closer to reality. But bias
has a negative connotation that a belief doesn’t necessarily merit: my bias toward
the theory of gravity is very well-founded in data.
One could even use the word faith, but the important distinction between a
faith and a belief or bias is that a faith, as per Mr. Feynmann’s definition, can not
change. The researcher begins with the faith that something is true, gathers data,
and ends with exactly the same faith.
To teach the debate properly would require that we look to examples from history such as the repression of Copernican beliefs by the Church, and how, even
though we have never made a star in the lab and the Copernican model of movement of the planets is still just a model, the preponderance of evidence was so
great that the Church eventually had to concede, and that which it had taken as
un-updateable dogma was updated. Has the Church’s claims about wheels within
wheels been disproven? No, but there is so much data against it that we have a
very strong bias against it, and most are willing to just round off the statement
“I am 99.999% certain this is false” to the technically incorrect but much simpler
1.13. TEACHING THE DEBATE
37
statement “this is false.”
Teaching the debate would involve a digression into the idea of falsifiability,
and how it fits into the bias-updating model. We would begin with a moderate
belief in a theory, gather data, and depending on the data either end with a stronger
or weaker belief in the theory. By repeating this process a thousand times, we
might wind up with a very strong belief in the theory. But if there is no downside
to the process, so that there is no data that could possibly give us a weaker belief
in the theory, then there can be no upside: no data that could possibly give us a
stronger belief. We’d start with a moderate bias toward the theory, gather data, and
since the data is irrelevant we’d end with the same moderate bias toward the theory.
The cliché applies: nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Applying this to the questions above, we see that the claim that there are set
species and that they can not inter-evolve is not falsifiable. There is no set mechanism to define species besides “that which seems to inter-evolve”, so as we find
wider and wider evolutionary changes, we can rewrite the definitions so the system continues to work. If there were a claimed mechanism that puts a fixed (as
opposed to a statistical) limit on evolution, then we could design tests to determine
whether to place stronger or weaker belief in those mechanisms, but lacking such
a mechanism, all we can do is seek the widest evolutionary change we can find
and then rewrite the definition of species to fit. This is what our authors did above
when they pointed out that former creationists who’d believed in a Platonic ideal
for each species were wrong.
Notice that non-falsifiability does not mean that we can never reject the theory,
because there is a sort of race among theories. Every year we get new data that the
range of genetic drift is larger and no new evidence that the range of genetic drift
has a fixed upper limit. As such, a formerly neutral belief in the falsifiable claims
of mainstream evolutionary theory would get stronger every year, while a neutral
belief in the non-falsifiable claims of intelligent design would remain lukewarm.
Eventually we get to a point where there is so much more data supporting one over
the other that we just throw out the weakly-supported theory.
Teaching the debate would indeed show that science is a human process, not
the perfectly objective mechanism that it is sometimes characterized as in the media. It would show how each individual paper or study takes the steps above—
author begins with some belief, gathers data, and revises those beliefs—and how
the preponderance of hundreds of thousands of papers allows us to do the same
belief-updating process on a larger scale. This would show the student that although science is a human process and is about the updating of biases, some biases
have more support and more validity than others.
Teaching the debate would not reject the idea of faith. It would point out that
there are limits to what scientific inquiry can gather data on, and these realms (such
38
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
as ethics) are a fine place for faith to take over. The perspective and opinions that
are put forth in literature and theology are all valid and deserve to be heard because
there is no way to gather data to disprove a perspective, but beliefs in different
theories are not equally valid, because there exists data that allows us to put more
or less belief in some. One does not need to teach a debate in a science class the
way that a debate would be taught in a literature or sociology class because there
are some concepts so unsupported by data that we stop saying ‘we believe theory
A has much, much more support than theory B’ and just round off to ‘we believe
theory A’.
1.14
Is IBM evil?
May 2003
In the 1940s, a number of IBM’s subsidiaries assisted the Nazi government in
implementing the logistics of the Holocaust, to some extent being entrepreneurs
who originated some of the ideas that made the whole thing possible. For example, every serial number tattooed to a victim’s arm corresponded to a punch card
manufactured and processed by IBM. The involvement is so well documented that
even IBM doesn’t deny it. When Edwin Black organized the facts and wrote the
story for the lay-reader in a book entitled IBM and the Holocaust [Black, 2001] ,
IBM’s official response was to play down the book by pointing out that it didn’t
say anything that a host of historians didn’t already know.
But what does this piece of history say about the IBM of today? By way
of discussion, and for the sake of not sounding like a crackpot (always a hazard
when talking about the Holocaust), I offer a few social science approaches to the
Holocaust before returning to the question of what IBM (and you) should do today.
Game theory Game Theory begins with a situation in which people have an
abundance of actions they could take, but those actions depend on the actions other
people choose. John Nash proved that given a few simple technical conditions,
there are always equilibria, wherein everybody implicitly agrees to behave in a
certain manner and is OK with that behavior. This is why he won a Nobel prize
and has books and movies about his life.
The problem with Nash equilibria is that there are often many of them. One or
the other may be more likely, but before the fact, they’re all possible. For example,
everybody in England chooses to drive on the left, whereas in most other countries
the equilibrium given the same situation is for everybody to drive on the right.
Why’d it happen one way or another? Historians who have studied the question
1.14. IS IBM EVIL?
39
can amalgamate all the random events into some compelling stories, but here’s my
own summary: it’s basically arbitrary.
If we had asked people in the Germany of 1935 whether they would assist
in mass killings, all but a handful would have said no; yet in the Germany of
1945 we found enough Germans who said yes that mass killings were efficiently
and extensively conducted. Why’d Germany as a country choose this approach to
getting out of the depression when other countries just chose to have people build
extraneous public works? Why’d the society switch from a peaceful equilibrium
to a violent one? Many thousands of pages have been written on the subject, the
basic conclusion of which is: it’s basically arbitrary.
To be literal about Game Theoretic examples, consider Chess. There is nothing
inherent to the setup of the game that causes a given outcome. Sometimes white
wins, sometimes black wins, depending on what the people playing the game do.
Similarly in social situations: sometimes one side prevails, sometimes the other,
and we never know which it will be until after the fact, and if we put similar people
in a similar situation, the other outcome could easily prevail. Conversely, equilibria
which occurred elsewhere in time or space can always crop up again; the best we
can do is try to bias things in one direction or another, by taking away black’s
knight, setting social norms about not killing Jews, or establishing rules explicitly
outlawing hate crimes.
What the historians say Hannah Arendt wrote the seminal book on the question,
Eichmann in Jerusalem [Arendt, 1963]. This is the book which coined the phrase
‘the banality of evil’ to describe people like Eichmann, who was a dull bureaucrat
who didn’t think twice about the implications of his paper shuffling.
The moral (one of many): any organization is capable of evil, because the size
of the organization allows an action to be broken down into bite-size, palatable
pieces to be farmed out to people who would never approve of the whole. Their
individual roles seem trivial and relatively blameless, and just as the officers at
Nuremberg claimed that they were “just following orders,” everybody in an organization has somebody else they can point their finger at. Yet the end result is an
equilibrium which nobody would have volunteered to bring about.
Ronald Wintrobe, in the final chapter of The Political Economy of Dictatorship [Wintrobe, 1998], extends the story that any individual only makes a marginal
contribution by describing the bureaucrats who are entrepreneurs within the system, working hard to have a more-than-marginal influence. They advance in the
bureaucracy by taking the initiative and having ideas which will help the organization achieve its goals more effectively. They do not ‘just follow orders’ but take
action to help the world along to the evil equilibrium. Wintrobe says Eichmann
40
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
was a bureaucratic entrepreneur of this sort; Black shows that the heads of IBM’s
German subsidiary were. Such entrepreneurs always exist, pressing the society to
move toward the evil equilibrium, in a manner that creates business or influence
for them.
These authors show us the structure of the evil equilibria. There will always
be people who are callous to moral considerations and will attempt to shift the
organization to their benefit and the detriment of the rest of the world. Then, most
of the people who have to take action to bring about a bad outcome can’t see
the big picture and so have no idea where their actions are leading to. So the
protest singers have the right idea: large organizations (IBM, the government) have
a comparative advantage in implementing evil equilibria, and we need to maintain
especial vigilance over them.
Within this context, the big question is: what can these organizations do to
ensure that the organization won’t fall into an evil equilibrium, either through manipulation by bureaucratic entrepreneurs or just by wandering into them?
The IBM question Let’s return to present-day IBM, and the question of whether
they’re evil. Yeah, their laptops are all an evil-looking black; they make a server
called The Intimidator; they’re a big, blocky bureaucracy like every other big,
blocky bureaucracy. But that’s mere cosmetic evilness. As should be clear to
this point, evil does not hit anybody over the head, and those who say that IBM’s
German subsidiary didn’t know what the Nazi regime was up to are to some extent
correct [but see Edwin Black’s comments].
But today’s IBM chooses to take a simple, insidious course which exacerbates
its past: it tries to forget.
In a press release discussing Edwin Black’s book, IBM states that it “[...] looks
forward to and will fully cooperate with appropriate scholarly assessments of the
historical record.” This follows discussion of the logistics of which universities
house IBM documents. The message is clear: nobody in Armonk, NY, would be
willing to operate a gas chamber, so the matter is a “scholarly” and “historical”
question.
If the important moral question were “Should IBM be held accountable and pay
reparations that would affect its balance sheet?” then IBM’s insistence on averting
its collective eyes makes sense–the IBM of today doesn’t want to have to pay the
debts incurred by the IBM of yesterday. But there is a far more important question:
how do we keep such things as genocides or mass internments from ever happening
again? This is the question which affects us today, and is the question that IBM can
best help to contribute to, and yet seems to go out of its way to avoid.
The above press release was written in February 2001, so IBM didn’t know any
1.14. IS IBM EVIL?
41
better, but the follow-up of March 2002 doesn’t seem to say anything to change the
claim that this is a question for researchers, not the people who head today’s organizations and build today’s machines. IBM’s business conduct guides say nothing
about refusing business from parties with suspect intentions or who aim to trample
the rights of citizens [as of 2 May 2003]. As far as I could ascertain from their
publicly available information and from correspondence with employees, IBM has
made no changes that would ensure that its bureaucracy can not re-entangle itself
in those past misdeeds which it “categorically condemns.”
Generalization From IBM’s second press release discussing Edwin Black’s book:
“A review in The New York Times concluded that the author’s ‘... case is long
and heavily documented, and yet he does not demonstrate that I.B.M. bears some
unique or decisive responsibility for the evil that was done.’” [Here is the full review.]
I agree with the reviewer: IBM was not unique or decisive.
IBM is the paragon for this essay because their work is dull and doesn’t seem
related to anything we picture oppression on a mass scale to look like. Also, there
is nothing hypothetical about their situation: a subsidiary did provide substantial
assistance to Germany’s eugenically-oriented goals, and its official statements of
today do make an effort to forget that. Yet everything we could say about IBM we
could say about any other organization or person: each of us is capable of assisting
in evil, there are situations which would tempt any one of us to do so, and all of us
are more comfortable just not thinking about it.
Many people with whom I have discussed this topic point out that governmentsponsored genocide is unlikely in the USA, so the game is fundamentally different.
This would be to see white win a dozen games and to assume that this means black
can never win. The game may be biased toward white, but that is by no means a
proof of impossibility. Over the lifetimes of our elder citizens, the USA has gone
through many periods which we collectively look back on and exclaim, ‘What
were we thinking?’ How did Japanese citizens wind up spending years imprisoned
in internment camps for no reason? How did McCarthy manage to ruin the lives of
hundreds of political enemies? Forty years ago, lynchings weren’t prosecuted as
crimes. No, this stuff wasn’t genocide, but it certainly wasn’t OK, either.
Others I have met contend that the situation was much more ambiguous in
the 1940s than it is now, and it wasn’t so clear-cut that IBM shouldn’t have been
involved. This is entirely the point. If it happens again, it will be just as not-clearcut until after the fact, so we must plan for it before it happens.
You So ask yourself, given that you have perfect retrospective knowledge of history, what you would have refused to do. Would you have supported and aided in
42
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
the registration of minorities? If not, then you should not support it now. Would
you have accepted that other people around you were being imprisoned without
habeas corpus? If not, then do not just assume that thing will turn out differently
this time around. Would you be comfortable if your boss asked you to work toward
ethically suspect activities? Rather than worrying about it if it happens, make sure
that your organization has rules in place now to ensure that such a situation can’t
happen in the future. There will always exist amoral bureaucratic entrepreneurs
pushing us toward an evil equilibrium, but we can do a lot to lower the probability
that they will succeed.
The game is not different. All of the ingredients of the situation of Germany or
the USA in the 1940s are around today: we have bureaucracies, different races and
countries, a government, and people. I’m not proclaiming that the sky is falling,
and am not predicting genocides. But conversely, many people look at the horrors
of the past and see them as something which was committed by monsters who are
incomparable to the noble souls who populate the world now. But it was subtle,
and if it happens again, it will be subtle again. Some arbitrary sequence of events
could push us toward an evil equilibrium just like before, and there are no new
safeguards in place. The only difference between now and then is that we have the
experience of history, marking red flags along the way. To see those flags and do
nothing about them would be, well, evil.
[About the author: I wrote this essay on an IBM Thinkpad–one of eight I have owned (mostly
Thinkpad 560s and Thinkpad 570s). I recently refused a job interview solicited by a contractor for
the Department of Homeland Security.]
1.15
Your genetic data
7 June 2007
[Or, The ethical implications of SQL.]
Our paper on the genetic causes of bipolar disorder finally came out last week.
The lead author has repeatedly said things like ‘we really couldn’t have done it
without you,’ though, to tell ya the truth, I have only a limited grasp of the paper’s
results, and have been unable to read it through, due to my lack of background in
the world of genetics and biology in general. Fortunately, there have been press
releases and a few articles to explain my paper to me.
The figure explains how this is all possible. It is what a genetics lab looks like.
That’s a work bench, like the ones upon which thousands of pipettes have squirted
millions of liters of fluid in the past. But you can see that it is now taken up by a
big blue box, which hooks up to a PC. Some of these big boxes use a parallel port
1.15. YOUR GENETIC DATA
43
Figure 1.3: The tools of the data processing field known as Biology
(like an old printer) and some run via USB (like your ventilator or toothbrush).
The researcher puts processed genetic material in on the side facing you in the
photo, onto a tray that was clearly a CD-ROM drive in a past life. Then the internal
LASER scans the material and outputs about half a million genetic markers to a
plain text file on the PC.
I know I’m not the first to point this out, but the study of human health is increasingly a data processing problem. My complete ignorance regarding all things
biological wasn’t an issue, as long as I knew how to read a text file into a database
and run statistical tests therefrom.
Implication one: Research methods We are in the midst of a jump in how
research is done. Historically, the problem has been to find enough data to say
something. One guy had to sail to the Galapagos Islands, others used to wait for
somebody to die so they could do dissections, and endless clinical researchers today post ads on bulletin boards offering a few bucks if you’ll swallow the blue
pill.
But now we have exactly the opposite problem: I’ve got 18 million data points,
and the research consists of paring that down to one confident statement. In a
decade or so, we went from grasping at straws to having a haystack to sift through.
As I understand it, the technology is not quite there yet. There’s a specific protocol for drawing blood that every nurse practitioner knows by heart, and another
protocol for breaking that blood down to every little subpart. We have protocols
for gathering genetic data, but don’t yet have reliable and standardized schemes for
44
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
extracting information from it.
When we do have such a protocol—and it’s plausible that we soon will—that’s
when the party starts.
Implication two: Pathways If you remember as much high school biology as
I do, then you know that a gene is translated in human cells into a set of proteins
that then go off and do some specific something (sometimes several specific somethings).
So if you know that a certain gene is linked to a certain disorder, then you know
that there is an entire pathway linked to that disorder, and you now have several
points where you could potentially break the chain. [Or at least, that’s how it’d work in
theory. Again, there’s no set protocol.] There are many ways to discover the mechanism
of a disorder, but the genetic root is the big fat hint that can make it all come
together right quick.
Then the drug companies go off and develop a chemical that breaks that chain,
and perhaps make a few million per year in the process.
Implication three: Free will versus determinism One person I talked to about
the search for genetic causes thought it was all a conspiracy. If there’s a genetic
cause for mental illness, then that means that it’s not the sufferer’s fault or responsibility. Instead of striving to improve themselves, they should just take a drug.
And so, these genetic studies are elaborate drug-company advertising.
From my casual experience talking to folks about it, I find that this sort of
attitude is especially common regarding psychological disorders. See, every organ
in the human body is susceptible to misfiring and defects—except the brain, which
is created in the image of ’’, and is always perfect.
Annoyed sarcasm aside, psychological disorders are hard to diagnose, and
there’s a history of truly appalling abuse, such as lobotomies for ill behavior, giving women hysterectomies to cure their hysteria, the sort of stories that made One
Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest plausible, &c. Further, there are often people who
have no physiological defect in their brains, but still suffer depression or other
mood disorders. They get some sun, do some yoga, and everything works out for
them.
But none of that means that the brain can not have defects, and that those
defects can not be treated.
The problem is that our ability to diagnose is falling behind our ability to cure.
We know that certain depressives respond positively to lithium carbonate, Prozac,
Lexapro, Wellbutrin, Ritalin, Synthroid, and I don’t know today’s chemical of the
month. But we still don’t have a system to determine which are the need-of-drugs
1.15. YOUR GENETIC DATA
45
depressives and which are the get-some-sun depressives.
Or to give a physical example, we don’t know which obese individuals have
problems because of genetic barriers and which just need to eat less and exercise.
It’s only harder because, like the brain, the metabolism is an adaptive system that
can be conditioned for the better or for the worse, confounding diagnosis. Frequently, it’s both behavior and genetics, albeit sometimes 90% behavior and sometimes 90% genes.
A genetic cause provides genetic tests. If we have a drug based on a genetic
pathway, as opposed to a drug like Prozac that just seemed to perk people up,
we can look for the presence or absence of that genetic configuration in a given
individual. This ain’t a silver bullet that will sort people perfectly (if that’s possible
at all), but having a partial test corresponding to each treatment is already well
beyond the DSM checklists we’re stuck with now.
Implication four: Eugenics We can test for genetics not only among adults and
children, but even fetuses. On one small survey, five out of 76 British ethics committee members (6.6%) “thought that screening for red hair and freckles (with a
view to termination) was acceptable.”15
Fœtal gene screens to determine Down syndrome or other life-changing conditions are common, and 92% of fetuses that return positive for the test for Down
Syndrome are aborted [Mansfield et al.].
Biology has an embarrassing past in eugenics. And we’re not just talking about
the Nazis—the USA has a proud history of eugenics to go along with its proud
history of hating immigrants (I mean recent immigrants, not the ones from fifty
years ago, who are all swell). [My above-mentioned lead author refers me to this article on
eugenics16 , and having read it I too recommend the first 80%.]
If I may resort to a dictionary definition, the OED tells us that eugenics is the
science “pertaining or adapted to the production of fine offspring, esp. in the human
race.” In the past, that meant killing parents who turned out badly in life or had big
noses, but hi-tech now allows us to go straight to getting rid of the offspring before
anybody has put in too heavy an investment.
Anyway, I won’t go further with this, but to point out that what we’ll do with
all this fœtal genetic info is an open question—and a loaded one, since the only
choices with a fœtus are basically carry to term or abort. The consensus seems
to be that aborting due to Down syndrome is OK and aborting due to red hair is
not, but there’s a whole range in between. If you know your child has a nearcertain chance of getting Alzheimer’s 80 years after birth, would you abort? [This
15
16
http://adc.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/88/7/607
http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_6.1-2/jacobsen.htm
46
CHAPTER 1. WRITING, THINKTANKING, AND THEORIZING
Congressional testimony17 approximately asks this question.]
Implication five: the ethics of information aggregation This is also well-trodden
turf, so I’ll be brief:
• It is annoying and stupid that every time you show up at the doctor’s office,
the full-time paperwork person hands you a clipboard with eight papers, each of
which asks your name, full address, and Social Security Number. By the seventh
page, I sometimes write my address as “See previous pp” but they don’t take kindly
to that, because each page goes in a different filing cabinet.
You may recall Sebadoh’s song on data and database management: “You can
never be too pure/ or too connected.” If all of your information is in one place,
either on your magical RF-enabled telephone or somewhere in the amorphousness
of the web, then that’s less time everybody wastes filling in papers and then refilling them in when the bureaucrat mis-keys everything. I have a FOAF whose
immigration paperwork was delayed for a week or two because somebody spelled
her name wrong on a form.
• Having all of your information in one place makes it easier for people to
violate your privacy and security. As advertisers put it, it makes it easier to offer
you goods and services better attuned to your lifestyle, which is the nice way of
saying ‘violate your privacy’. It means more things they can do to you on routine
traffic stops.
The data consolidation=efficiency side is directly opposed to the data disaggregation=privacy side. There is no solution to this one, and both sides have their
arguments. A prior entry discussed how information aggregation can lead to disaster18 , but we should bear in mind that the same technology discussed there made
the innocuous and essential U.S. Census possible. The current compromise is to
consolidate more and put more locks on the data, but that doesn’t work very well
in practice, as one breach anywhere can ruin the privacy side of the system.
Back to genetics, when we have a few more snips of information about what
all those genes do, your genetic info will certainly be in your medical records. This
is a good thing because it means that those who need to will be able to diagnose
you more quickly and efficiently; it is a bad thing because those who don’t need to
know may also find a way to find out personal information about you.
At the moment, you can rely on the anonymity of being a needle in a haystack,
the way that some people who live at the top of high rise buildings are comfortable
walking around naked and with the curtains open—who’s gonna bother to look?
But as the tools and filters and databases become more sophisticated, the haystack
17
18
http://www.hhs.gov/asl/testify/t960917c.html
http://fluff.info/blog/arch/00000199.htm
1.15. YOUR GENETIC DATA
47
may provide less and less cover.
So we’re going to have a haystack of data about you (and your fœtus) right
soon. Unfortunately, we don’t quite yet know how to analyze, protect, or act on
that haystack. I guess we’ll work it out eventually.
2
H OW TO ARGUE WITH A CONSERVATIVE
Here are a few notes on what I feel are the best arguments to use when debating
with a conservative. It covers that narrow slice of argumentation that is both a valid
counterargument to the average conservative’s claims and is also comprehensible
to a conservative. There are a multitude of other means of debate, but I feel that
those discussed here are the most likely to succeed.
I self-identify as an economist, meaning that most of the discussion here will
be economic [even including a few technical notes from basic economic theory in
square brackets]. For the social issues, however, have a look at Section
As a final caveat, no two conservatives are the same, and it would be overblown
to the point of silliness to claim that a 6,000 word essay covers everything every
conservative believes. Having said that, I will spend the rest of the paper debating
the imaginary conservative in my head and pretending he represents all conservatives, without plastering the essay with little ‘some conservatives believe that. . . ’
warnings.
Uncle Milt It all began in the fifties or so, with a Mr. Milton Friedman, herein
‘Uncle Milt’, which is what U of Chicago professors really called him when I was
a student there. Uncle Milt wrote this little book called Free to Choose, and the
name basically describes everything there is to know about the theory. If you have
to choose among a few options, an unconstrained choice is always better than a
constrained choice. It’s almost a tautology. Therefore, government restrictions on
the choices available to people, be they consumers or managers of businesses, are
bad.
[This is often called the Neoclassical school, since it’s a reinvention of Adam
Smith’s work. You know Adam Smith: he wrote A Theory of Moral Sentiment,
which explained how a market requires good will among its members in order to
properly function. He also wrote something about an invisible hand moving the
market to an optimal state.]
Free to Choose is basically the Republican position on all economic (but not
48
2.1. EXTERNALITIES
49
social) issues. It’s appealing because it’s so simple: restrictions bad. But economics since the dominance of Uncle Milt and the Chicago School has been all
about the exceptional situations where the simple logic of constrained vs unconstrained choice is too oversimplified to do reality justice. Generally, regarding any
issue where we in the modern day consider government to be potentially relevant,
one of these exceptional cases will come up. Pointing out the appropriate exception
is often enough to get a free marketeer to stop smirking.
2.1
Externalities
The biggest problem with the neoclassical view espoused by so many conservatives
is that it forgets about externalities. This is huge.
An externality is the effect you have on others that doesn’t directly affect you.
When you drive, every pedestrian has a little more trouble breathing. When you
eat a hamburger, a cow had to be killed. When you wear a low-cut dress, the boys
who pass you on the street feel a little bit better. [I swear, every econ class I’ve
ever had used an example about cute girls.]
From the economist side of things, there is no real solution to the externality
problem, in the sense that it’s supremely difficult to work out what the optimal
behavior is, and how you should go about getting people to engage in that behavior. Basically, if an agent can do something that benefits it but causes a negative
externality on others, then you’re guaranteed that the agent will do too much (a
suboptimal amount) of that activity.
If we could find a way to have people internalize their externalities, so that
they simultaneously feel both the benefit they experience and the displeasure that
others experience, then the market mechanism would work just fine. Too bad that’s
impossible.
Which is where government comes in. As a first approximation, there are taxes
on activities which produce negative externalities: gas consumption pollutes, and
so is taxed; alcohol consumption leads to some number of annoying drunkards, and
so is taxed; cigarette consumption makes other people’s clothes stink and leads to
a rise in public health expenditures.1 All of these taxes proxy for the displeasure
that the buyer is causing everybody else.
Barring a tax, the other means of internalizing the externality is making the
activity illegal—think of the fine from breaking the law as another form of tax. A
1
Taxes don’t have a will, so ascribing a motivation to a tax is a fallacy, but notice how far we can
go in justifying these taxes without describing any of them as ‘sin taxes’. After all, if taxes really
were a puritanical attempt to change people’s behavior, the puritans would also be taxing condoms—
but the externalities from condom usage are all positive, so you’ll only find no taxes or occasional
subsidies on them.
50
CHAPTER 2. HOW TO ARGUE WITH A CONSERVATIVE
good law curtails those activities which have negative externalities and thus makes
the world a better place. Examples: don’t litter because it’s easy for you but makes
other people’s lives worse; don’t drive drunk because it’s easy for you but makes
other people’s lives worse; you can’t buy a car with certain types of dirty engine
because it’s cheap for you but makes other people’s lives worse, et cetera.
The problem comes in when working out how much curtailing to do. When
people say that their lives are worse off because of somebody’s actions, they have
absolutely no incentive to tone down the whining. I think you’ve all been there—
especially if you’ve ever had a roommate. Back when I was a bike messenger, my
roommate borrowed my bike for a stroll along the lakeshore, and got a flat tire.
He didn’t quite patch it right, and it went flat a few more times over the course
of the day. I lost work as a result, and by the time I got home, I had prepared an
extensive bitchy commentary for him about how his actions had ruined my life.
Yet he started yelling first, about how I’d left a nubbin of pasta at the bottom of
a pot, and now it was really stuck, and how I had thus totally ruined his life. He
made it very clear that losing business, patching an expanding hole, and walking
part of the way home was nothing compared to what he’d suffered at the hands of
that blob of pasta.
It wasn’t the best roommate situation, but it mirrors legislative lobbying and
debate pretty well. Imagine the whining when the problem is bigger than pasta
stuck to the pot, like an issue of education and property taxes, or pollution. It basically becomes guesswork as to what damage one person suffers from somebody
else’s actions. The conservatives of the world often latch on to this, and conclude
that everybody is just lying all the time, and there really are no externalities, or
if there are, they aren’t nearly as bad as everybody makes them out to be, so we
should ignore them. ‘Buck up and stop whining,’ the conservative would politely
explain.
Anyway, behind a huge number of government activity and restrictions upon
behavior, there is an externality involved. It’s a fun exercise to ask yourself, for
any law that comes to mind, what harmful externalities that law is preventing;
you’ll find something for almost all of ‘em. For example, laws curtailing pollution
exist because pollution damages property which is either in the public trust or is
intimately the property of a non-polluter (like the air in my lungs). When people
don’t get an education, studies show, they’re more likely to wind up poor, annoying,
and a criminal, which are all things that affect the other people that interact with
the uneducated. On the positive side: when you take public transportation instead
of driving, other people have clearer roads and lungs. When people tell you that
government should get out of these fields and the market will provide the optimal
levels of pollution, education, and public transport, tell them that they’re entirely
wrong, because the market can not accommodate the effects of the externalities.
2.1. EXTERNALITIES
51
Also, when the privatization people tell you that the bus system is losing money,
and therefore needs to be severely cut and/or privatized, you should tell that that
because of the externalities, the system isn’t behaving optimally unless it is losing
money. See also the section on cost minimization below.
Law is often a blunt instrument, so if the optimal amount of an activity is less
than current, the law often simply makes it entirely illegal. But the optimum is
probably not at zero activity either. People often latch on to this, pointing to cases
where somebody really needed to do something which had a negative externality
attached, and couldn’t do it because of some law. But the question of degree is
more subtle than that: zero is not optimal, but neither is the amount you’d get if
everyone were free to do all they wanted; which is less suboptimal?
2.1.1
The choice of externalities
Both sides of the political fence complain about externalities, but different ones.
For example, social conservatives have lately taken to griping about how their marriages will be less sanctimonious or something if gay marriages are allowed.
Externality arguments are usually made by social conservatives and economic
liberals. Conversely, social liberals and economic conservatives (both of these categories include libertarians) tend to ignore or belittle externalities. The asymmetry
here is that economic externalities, which the liberals gripe about and the conservatives ignore, are about the things that actually affect people’s lives; the social
externalities, which the conservatives are up in arms about, are typically aesthetic.
In an ideal world, you could call a conservative on the relative triviality of the externalities s/he chooses to care about. E.g., why are you bothered about how your
kids are harmed by gays, but aren’t bothered by how many kids are killed by guns
every year? Why do you think the market should be free to decide on whether to
drill for oil in Alaska, but don’t think the market can work out the optimal exposure
of boobies on TV without government oversight?
Another asymmetry is the exaggeration issue: when people suffer externalities
such as job loss, crime, disease or death (or even environmental damage), there’s
something physical that can be measured and compared to any hypothetical benefits, albeit imperfectly. But when somebody says that they suffer because gays
are getting married or because they were subjected to the sight of female nipples,
there is simply no way to measure the aesthetic damage that the person is internally
suffering. I’m not exactly sure how you can use this for rebutting a fanatic conservative, but it gives some idea of how fanaticism can come about: there’s nothing
keeping anyone from the extreme position, because there are never facts that get in
the way of the claims of endless damage.
52
CHAPTER 2. HOW TO ARGUE WITH A CONSERVATIVE
2.1.2
How not to argue: equality and fairness arguments
Here are some things which are generally true and often important, but which are
simply non-starters in debate with conservatives. They’ll never get it, so don’t
waste your time trying. In some ways, this is the most important section. A bad
argument is worse than no argument at all, and I’ve often been vicariously embarrassed by fellow liberals (Ralph Nader) who argue the points below as if they’re
persuasive.
Equality is, to many conservatives, just not important. There’s nothing much
in the Bible about it, and humankind got along just fine without it for centuries
and centuries. Similarly, many conservatives define fairness endogenously, so any
outcome is always tautologically fair: if you can grab more for yourself, then you
deserve more and that’s fair.
A desire for fairness requires internalizing all externalities, which many people
either have trouble doing or explicitly don’t want to do. As such, I don’t think
there’s any way to convince somebody that equality in treatment or outcomes is a
good thing. So don’t argue that a certain rule or structure is fair; instead, consider
the ways that it appeals to the principles that our conservative pals find appealing,
like efficiency (everybody likes efficiency) or pro-U.S. nationalism.
For example, redistributive taxation. By keeping the poorer folks fed, the likelihood of crime is lower, and kids are better fed and are more likely to be healthy
and smarter and more productive in the future. You could provide certain goods/services via inefficient social services, or via the market by undertaxing the poor
who are most likely to use those social services. You can get pretty far without ever
using the word ‘fairness’.
To give another example, the Unified School Districts of various areas insist
that all schools in a wide area (like LA) must get the same level of funding. Again,
this improves efficiency: another dollar to a school which needs to buy textbooks
will go a lot further than a dollar to a school which wants to fund one more field
trip.2 And why is it so easy to talk about optimality when we want to talk about
fairness? Because fairness is optimal. Another dollar given to a wealthier person
just isn’t as useful as another dollar given to a starving person, so all else equal, the
best allocation of a given dollar is to the starving guy. [Technical version: Although
not universally true, people are generally risk averse, meaning that we can describe
their preferences using a concave utility function. If everybody has equal weight
in our objective function and has the same private utility function, then the optimal
2
So why do LA’s schools suck so badly? Because property taxes in California are so low that
they’re effectively nil, so every school in LA is equally underfunded. It’s a paragon of where the
conservative drive for lower taxes at all costs will get you: the fastest drop in school quality you’ve
ever seen.
2.2. PUBLIC GOODS
53
allocation is the perfectly equitable one.]
To summarize the section, fairness is an idea you learn as a kid, and if somebody doesn’t get it by now, they never will. But you can argue for efficiency almost
anywhere you’d prefer to discuss fairness, and you won’t have to ask the person
you’re debating to make the mental leap of internalizing the situation of other people.
The more hard-core libertarians take it all a step further, though, and believe
that not only is the empathetic desire for fairness a weakness (as Ayn Rand teaches),
but the world would be better off if we all went out of our way to eliminate empathy (i.e., the internalization of externalities, which are assumed away in the free
market model). By this point, it becomes a religious issue (sometimes literally),
so debating is useless; cut your losses and just don’t bother associating with the
person.
2.2
Public goods
Another common divide along the liberal-conservative spectrum is that liberals
want more goods provided by government and conservatives want fewer goods.
2.2.1
The fallacy of the self-made conservative
Many a conservative shoots for an individualistic character. Some take it to the extreme of insisting that they are entirely self-made: their family did all the work of
raising them and sending them to a private school, then they paid for college themselves, never took a handout, et cetera. They conclude from these broad strokes
that government was unnecessary in getting them to where they are today. Other
conservatives don’t go this far, but are still willfully blind to their reliance on public
goods.
Direct benefits Part of the problem is that the government services that most
people enjoy are so fundamental that they’re invisible. If the water is clean, and
you don’t get sick when you go out to eat, and the gas lines under the street don’t
erupt in flames too often, then you don’t notice the inspectors, engineers, and bureaucrats on the government payroll who made such a halcyon existence possible.
The best government is one which is involved in dozens of fields and yet is entirely
unnoticeable.
Indirect benefits Leaving aside the person’s health and general well-being, there
are also indirect benefits to government spending which our conservative friends
54
CHAPTER 2. HOW TO ARGUE WITH A CONSERVATIVE
enjoyed, whether by their choosing or not. They worked through school? There’s
a good chance that they were able to find a job because the federal Work Study
program provides subsidies to make sure that every campus has a larger supply of
jobs. Even if our conservative friend eschewed such handouts, the non-handout
jobs had much less competition.
Our Conservative Hero doesn’t have any diseases, and is healthy and fit thanks
to 100% private health insurance? It’s also because of massive public health campaigns, both direct (closing sewers and other basics that the U.S.A. worked out a
century ago) and indirect, in the form of taking care of the impoverished ill and
advising them on how to get better so they don’t cough up an infected lung on any
conservatives.
Our Conservative Hero isn’t mugged every day? This is partly thanks to the
fact that the poor in the neighboring communities have government support that
lowers their need to get resources by illicit means.
The list goes on, but the gist is the same: by stabilizing and taking care of those
parts of our surroundings that are most at risk, those parts stay invisible to those
who can take care of themselves. But if those supports disappeared, then the at-risk
may not remain so invisible.
2.2.2
Limited rationality and informational asymmetry
This is a bit of a digression, but it’s a good place to mention regulations requiring
labeling, full disclosure, and licensing.
Trademark laws are all about minimizing confusion in the marketplace: if your
logo looks too much like the other guy’s logo, then dumb people will get confused
and buy the wrong thing. There are loads of other truth-in-advertising laws, such
as how stock brokers can not guarantee that a plan will make money. And indeed,
there are enough dumb people and enough slimy stock brokers that laws like this
have to exist.
In LA county (among others), all restaurants are inspected and must post signs
giving their inspection grade. Similarly, food manufacturers have to tell you basic
nutritional info and what’s in their food. Publicly traded companies have immense
reporting requirements, which keep many a lawyer and accountant employed full
time. Generally, any sort of licensing requirement is a requirement for full disclosure of important information.
All this seems fair enough to me: trade on equal grounds requires equal information. And yet, there are loads of conservatives (not all, but a few) who think
these are invasive laws that condescend to the buyer. The emptor should caveat
for his or her own darn self. Again, all of these rules are based on hope for a ‘fair
market’, which differs from the concept of a ‘free market’. As above, you can’t
2.2. PUBLIC GOODS
55
argue fairness to a conservative who doesn’t already believe it’s worth striving for.
Part of this is the Lake Woebegone effect, that everybody thinks ‘I’m smarter
than average, so this law isn’t protecting me; it’s protecting the dumb people whom
I don’t know.’ From my own experience, self-made conservatives are especially
prone to this, which makes any argument about how information is not perfectly
disseminated at all times supremely frustrating. I think your best bet is to either
argue the extreme cases [should out-and-out scams be legal? When does hiding
information become substantively different from lying?] or use the grandmother
argument [Would you want your grandma to have to sift through this?]3 However, my experience is that the Lake Woebegone effect combined with a refusal or
inability to internalize the difficulties of others makes this class of issues almost
impossible to debate.
The self-made conservative believes that he (and it is usually a boy) can fend for
himself, so everyone else is obliged to as well. But the self-fending is a delusion,
because he is already surrounded by a wealth of services which he directly and
indirectly benefits. He doesn’t get lied to not because he’s so supremely savvy, but
(at least in part) because those he deals with have laws they must comply with.
The question, then, is how these services which the self-made conservative
takes for granted should be provided, and the conservative always prefers private
provision over public.
2.2.3
The fallacy that a profit motive means efficiency
Conservatives often work from the premise that if an organization has no profit
motive, then it will be inefficient. A business has a simple directive—maximize
sales minus costs—and a business which fails in that directive will lose out to
other businesses which do a better job of it. This logic is false in two ways.
Cost minimization The first part of the argument, that an organization which
isn’t maximizing profits has no motivation to be efficient, is simply false. The reason is that profit maximization is equivalent to cost minimization. We could cast
the problem of the business as finding the cheapest way of producing its product;
similarly, we could characterize the goal of the bureaucracy’s manager as finding
the cheapest way to achieve whatever its goals may be. If the manager isn’t minimizing costs, then there’s something s/he could do to save a few bucks and then
apply that toward achieving the bureau’s goals. Why would the manager of a government department pass up such a savings, while a business manager wouldn’t?
3
I don’t know why grandparents are always considered to be so dumb, but this debate is probably
not the time to work on dispelling stereotypes.
56
CHAPTER 2. HOW TO ARGUE WITH A CONSERVATIVE
Of course, there’s still the problem of defining the goals of the organization,
and here government excels in the provision of things where the goal is ambiguous. The goal of a public energy utility is to provide citizens with reliable and
cheap power, while the goal of a private company is to maximize profit for the
owners of the company by providing citizens with power. It’d be nice if these incentives aligned perfectly, but they clearly don’t, which means that privatization
often leads to disasters in the provision of public goods (e.g., everything associated
with Enron). Externalities matter here too: the profit-maximizing fee schedule
ignores externalities, and will therefore lead to a suboptimal level of service.
This may seem easy and obvious, but the privatization harpies forget all the
time, and need reminding: profit maximization and cost minimization both encourage efficiency, and neither magically produces efficiency.
Zero profits The second part of the fallacy, the Darwinian part, assumes that if
you’re not perfectly optimal, you’ll lose money and will go out of business. But
anyone who has ever worked in a company’s office will attest that abject, persistent inefficiencies happen every day throughout the business world, and yet these
companies continue to keep their heads above water. Liberals and conservatives
alike agree that ‘big government’ in the sense of ‘over-bureaucratic’ government is
a bad thing, and if there’s a more efficient way to achieve existing goals, then that’s
a good thing. But the same could be said of IBM.
Some folks used to tell me that zero-profits-plus-efficient-market means that
racist hiring would eventually disappear, since a racist manager is imposing a restriction on his choices, which will therefore lead to suboptimal hiring on a regular basis, which will lead the company to go out of business. Maybe racist businesses go under more frequently than non-racist businesses, but a few centuries
have shown us that no, having racist policies does not immediately condemn a
company to bankruptcy. Similarly with any of a number of other mean, irrational,
and destructive policies that the businesses of today engage in all the time. Conversely, laws that force people to not be racist also don’t lead to businesses closing
down all over.
Theoretical economists assume that all businesses are on the verge of bankruptcy at all times because they always assume that firms are all competing to
produce widgets that are exactly alike in every way—and there are often an infinite number of firms. But the assumption of zero profits really doesn’t work in
real life, as you can see by the fact that businesses exist, and this means that any
reasonably healthy business can afford to operate in a manner that society deems
acceptable, and can conform with laws about accounting, treatment of workers, or
environmental care.
2.3. MONOPOLIES AND MARKET POWER
57
Yet when a new regulation is put in place, the chorus of capitalists all shout out
in unison, ‘I’m barely making ends meet and will go out of business.’ Sometimes
the response is a bit more moderate: ‘I’ll have to lay a few people off and reduce
production,’ or ‘If you pass regulations that I don’t like, I’ll just take my ball home
and pout.’ After all, they’re right on the verge of bankruptcy, so any new costs will
put them under.
The reality of the situation is much more complicated. For example, New
Jersey raised its minimum wage one year, while Pennsylvania didn’t. Card, Katz,
and Krueger took this to be as good a natural experiment as you’ll ever get in
the social sciences: the economies are closely linked, the passage of the new law
was quick and sort of a surprise, and C, K & K managed to get a good picture
of fast food joints on both sides before and after the law took effect. The end
result: there were more jobs created in New Jersey after the law was passed than in
Pennsylvania. It wasn’t much (and I don’t recall if it was statistically significant),
but it was definitely not a loss of jobs [Card and Krueger, 1997].4
Why were there more jobs in NJ? Maybe people spent all their new minimum
wage earnings on fast food, or maybe more people entered the labor market, or
maybe all those truckers carting in goods which used to be produced in NJ factories
needed a place to eat. Regardless, the moral is that a new rule can often change all
sorts of things in the economy, some good some bad, so reducing it to a simplistic
one-liner like ‘a higher minimum wage means less jobs’ is stating a falsehood. [For
the theorists, here’s the moral: never trust a partial equilibrium model.]
Regulations can be burdensome and annoying, just like not being able to pee
in the street is often burdensome and annoying, but somehow, we all manage it.
However, not all burdensome regulations are destructive regulations, and if a conservative forgets that there’s a distinction, be sure to remind him/her/it.
2.3
Monopolies and market power
With monopolies, two mantras of conservative economics collide. One says ‘competitive markets are good’ and the other says ‘government intervention is bad’.
So what do you do when the only way to have a competitive market is through
government intervention?
One of the main money-makers for the working economist are anti-trust proceedings, in which one set of well-paid economists proves that a merger will allow
4
CK & K’s arch-nemeses, Neumark & Wascher, wrote a reply in which they got another data
set for the NJ/Pennsylvania experiment, from the NRA—the National Restaurant Association. Their
data set conclusively found that the passage of the minimum wage law caused New Jersey to fall into
the ocean. C K & K asked to see the data so they could verify the results, and N & W refused, citing
a non-disclosure agreement with the NRA.
58
CHAPTER 2. HOW TO ARGUE WITH A CONSERVATIVE
a company to ‘unfairly’ use its expanded market share, while another set of wellpaid economist proves that this won’t happen. Many a conservative I have met
believes that this is all silly, and that if a monopolist can find a price at which people will buy their goods, then the monopolist is clearly still providing something
valuable, so why is the government being all pissy about it? Leave the companies
to merge to their hearts’ content.
More generally, the idea of a monopoly gets to the concept of market power:
the ability of a single player in the market to influence the market itself. Most
of neoclassical economics assumes that every agent has zero market power, and
is thus a price taker—they can’t influence prices at all, just take them from the
market.
First, there aren’t any theorems about the optimality and welfare-maximizing
properties of monopolists (that I know of). If the company can set prices, instead of
just take them, then all the Econ 101 proofs about optimality [not including Pareto
optimality, which is not really optimality in any human sense] are out the window.
You can have a government that doesn’t try to prevent monopolies, but then all the
arguments about the virtues and automatic optimality of the market are thrown out
of the debate.
For example, say that there are only two or three media conglomerates, who
offer cheap television, radio, and print to every person in the world. Since there
are only a few, a documentary producer who wants his or her work to be seen has
to get one or two of these conglomerates to distribute the documentary. If all three
offer the producer too little money for the film, since they know the producer will
have no one to make a lower bid, then the documentary will never be seen. With
more competition among the buyers and distributors of media, there would be more
variety in public debate, and content providers would make more money, instead of
having to accept whatever sum the distributors see fit to offer. In short, the quantity
and variety of content is larger in a competitive market than in a monopsonistic
one.
Another example of the sorts of problems market power produces: products
often interoperate with other products, meaning that a company which is doing
wonderful market-pleasing things in one field can exert its power to sell crappy
goods in another market where it’s not necessarily the best. I am thinking, of
course, of Microsoft. The company, at this point, is built entirely on the concept of
lock-in, and spends most of its marketing budget trying to convince consumers of
two things: you should upgrade your existing Microsoft product, and you shouldn’t
switch to something else. Not much in the way of innovation going on here.
This is not the place to go into the computer geek details, but there are a wealth
of alternatives to the desktop-with-word-processor paradigm we all work in now.
Sun Microsystems, for example, had the idea of letting users run their word pro-
2.3. MONOPOLIES AND MARKET POWER
59
cessor via their web browser. But for this to work, everyone needed a web browser
that would be technically compatible with such a setup.
When it was being investigated for monopolistic practices, Microsoft’s argument to the Justice department was that anti-monopoly regulations hinder their
ability to innovate by making incremental improvements and additions to Windows. But at the same time, Microsoft used its market power to ensure that innovation in the form of fundamental paradigm shifts wouldn’t happen.
So what can you tell your conservative pals? That incremental innovation isn’t
necessarily a problem when there are monopolists involved, but innovation on a
larger scale are blocked when there are monopolists who can use their influence on
standards and the basic operation of the market to prevent that innovation.
With a few players, the market is no longer a clean, optimal environment, but
a tangled mess where customers are not free to choose (outside of the ‘my way or
the highway’ option) and those with market power can use that lack of choice to
their advantage.
Employers as monopsonists Large companies are clearly not price takers, and
conservatives frequently need to be reminded of this. For example, Wal Mart negotiates the price it pays on most (maybe all) of the items it sells. There is one Wal
Mart, and dozens of pretzel vendors, so Wal Mart can use this asymmetry to negotiate down the price it pays for pretzels. The most important price for Wal Mart it
the price of labor, and the market is again clearly asymmetric: one Wal Mart, and
millions of potential employees.
Setting a price is a negotiation over how surplus should be divided. If an hour
of work is worth $6 to Wal-Mart, and a person is willing to work for $4, then any
wage between the two would work, in the sense that the person would work the
hour and Wal Mart would pay the person and both would walk away better off.
Uncle Milt stops here, content in the belief that even if Wal Mart stands firm at
$4.01, the employee is still better off.
The main problem with this is that the lowest wage a person will accept depends on the conditions. Notably, because of what I will call the ‘food constraint’,
any job is better than no job at all. Our conservative pals forget the food constraint
all the time, since it’s hard to work in to a simple model of agents [discontinuity
and/or nondifferentiable kink in the utility function at zero], and it’s easy to forget
that ‘agents’ means ‘people’.
Also, the wage Wal Mart sets is interdependent with any of a number of other
things, such as the wage the company next door sets. In the theory, there’s a menu
of wages available, so if you don’t like Wal Mart’s wage, you go next door to Sam’s
Club and take the wage they offer. But if Wal Mart and Sam’s Club set their wages
60
CHAPTER 2. HOW TO ARGUE WITH A CONSERVATIVE
in concert, and Sears and K-Mart follow Wal Mart’s lead in price-setting, then the
model falls apart again, because it is impossible for people to negotiate the price of
their labor by threatening to go next door. This is not necessarily overt collusion;
it is simply the ease with which a small group of actors can imitate each other
and wind up at a very stable equilibrium. The minimum wage, ironically, helps
immensely with this by providing a focal point for all employers to set their wages
against.
The solution to the asymmetry of the market, by the way, is unionization. One
Wal Mart and one worker’s union is a symmetric market, which has some hope of
working as it should. Conservatives often miss this, and only see that the union is
a restriction on the behavior of its workers and the employer. [See p
2.3.1
How not to argue with conservatives: corporate conspiracies
Many liberals argue from the basic premise that small businesses are better than
large corporations, and that companies which are big enough to be international
are especially bad. The issue needs to be disaggregated into parts which can and
can’t be argued with a conservative:
Personalization and diversity Just as conservatives like smaller government
which is more representative of the people, we want smaller businesses which don’t
force corporate HQ’s worldview on its patrons. But conservatives will dismiss this
by saying ‘if they don’t like the bigger store, they’ll shop at the smaller, spunkier
store next door’ and will dismiss any further debate on this point. In other words,
the cultural issue is a total non-starter.
Market imperfections As above, there is a natural asymmetry between labor
and capital (many workers, few employers), and this distorts the market in favor
of the few, the monopsonists. As corporations grow and consolidate, the problem
only gets worse. Some conservatives get this, and will acknowledge that reduced
competition is bad. The more libertarian conservatives will abjectly refuse to accept this, and will cling to the idea that a firm that abuses its market power will be
deposed by a spunky startup.
The Spunky Startup argument is impossible to argue with, kind of like the ‘tomorrow will be sunnier’ argument: there are enough examples where it’s been true
that people can say it with a straight face and be happy ignoring the fact that there
are so many cases where it was entirely not true. On the perfectly level imaginary playing field, the spunky startup can definitely win—but in the real world, the
profit-per-unit only goes up as a company gets larger, network effects and lockin make people more likely to buy the old thing instead of the new, and if all
2.3. MONOPOLIES AND MARKET POWER
61
else fails, the big and lumbering corporation can keep serving Spunky the Startup
with lawsuits for trespassing on Lumbering Corporation’s intellectual property until Spunky’s supply of optimism is entirely depleted.
To summarize, your best replies to arguments about Spunky the Startup are
about the market imperfections discussed above, most of which help companies
which survived at the start keep new competition out of play. But my personal
experience is that it’s an uphill battle, and an irrational faith in Spunky the Startup’s
abilities is hard to dispel.
Competition with sovereigns A company which exists in multiple states will be
able to find the state with the least restrictive laws and register there. When ‘state’
means portion of the U.S.A., this is Delaware; when ‘state’ means sovereign nation,
this is any of a number of islands in the Caribbean. Whether this is a problem to the
conservative you have before you depends on how much contempt the conservative
has for the concept of a government. Some enthuse at the idea of a lawless world;
others are a bit concerned by the prospect. As with any issue involving sovereigns,
there are enough thorny philosophical issues that you have no chance of selling
somebody if they disagree with you. But if you find that they do believe some
laws are worth having, then take advantage of that and ask how that law is going
to be maintained in a world where corporations get to pick the set of laws they are
beholden to.
In short, be sure to focus on the specific things that large firms can do that small
firms can’t. ‘Bullying’ is too vague—stick with the specific mechanisms by which
firms with market power can unfairly use that power. There are abundant options
to choose from.
3
P EOPLE AND THEIR PATTERNS
3.1
Measuring attractiveness
12 May 2004
Ms AMJ of Richmond, VA, asked me, her personal economist, for a lit review of
academic studies of attractiveness. So, Ms AMJ and whoever else may be around,
I offer you this haphazard and arbitrary romp through the literature on beauty and
its correlation to symmetry, BMI, WHR, VHR, and 2D:4D.
Innate attractiveness
We’ll start with the infant studies, which try to get around the culture/innateness
thing by using subjects too young to comprehend culture. Maurer and Barrera
[1981] showed the images depicted in Figure ?? in front of 1- to 2-month old kids.
For those using text browsers: one image has features arranged as a proper face,
and on the others, the features are either random or symmetric but not a face. They
found that the two month olds fixate more on the face than the others but the one
month olds don’t, implying that face recognition comes in somewhere during that
time. So some quantity of our processing of people’s faces comes either from
hard-wiring or stimuli well before the kid can comprehend culture. [The sample is
smaller than I’m comfortable with, 20 1-month and 15 2-months, but I guess these
are a pain to conduct: “An additional six babies did not complete the experiment
because they cried (N=3) or fell asleep (N=3).”]
So it would not be a great leap to presume that beyond the basic shape of the
face, there are other things that are hard-wired into the brain, but it’s not entirely
obvious as to how fine-grained that hard-wiring is. For example, how about symmetry? The study above didn’t find much difference between the symmetric and
the asymmetric non-faces, but those weren’t faces. Samuels et al. [1994] showed
babies symmetric faces and attractive faces, and found that the babies paid more
attention to the more attractive faces than the more symmetric. Noor and Evans
[2003] found that perfectly symmetric faces were judged (by adults) to be more
62
3.1. MEASURING ATTRACTIVENESS
63
Figure 3.1: Am I hot or not?
Neurotic, less Agreeable and less Conscientious than normal faces, but not more
or less attractive.
But there’s not just symmetry: there are hundreds of ways in which we can collate and dissect women’s faces and bodies. The standard, gleaned from back issues
of Playboy, is that a .68 waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) is the ideal shape for a bunny.
Katzmarzyk and Davis [2001] report this figure, and that “there has been no appreciable change in either BMI [body mass index] or WHR in centerfolds over the
past 20y. Based on current recommendations for the classification of underweight
(BMI < 18.5kg/m2 ), 70% of the centerfolds were underweight. Further, 77.5%
of the centerfolds were < 85% of their ideal body weight.”
But Fan et al. [2004] think that using WHR is all BS: the real measure of
attractiveness is volume divided by the square of height. [I presume we measure a
woman’s volume by dunking her in a giant test-tube and measuring the quantity of
water she displaces.] They also propose (waist height)/(chin height) as a secondary
measure, meaning that women that are all legs are more attractive.
Sugiyama [2004] thinks that the waist-to-hip measure confounds some sort of
innate waist-to-hipness with body fat, and that it doesn’t take into account cultural
conditions. He finds that the forager-horticulturalist men of Ecuadorian Amazonia
take both into account when judging women (and weight comes first).
Connolly et al. [2004] showed female shillouettes to boys aged 6 to 17, and
found that the younger boys thought the more underweight and lower WHR images
were “nicer or more attractive”, and the preference shifted toward more average
weight and the above .7 WHR as they aged. I only have the abstract, and so can’t
go into further detail; also, we’ll never know whether the shift is due to hormones
64
CHAPTER 3. PEOPLE AND THEIR PATTERNS
or culture.
My overall personal impression is that yes, there are certain basic shapes that
people are hard-wired to recognize as human or female, but after that baseline is
established and we’ve determined what we’re looking at, a hundred other harderto-measure-and-standardize details become important.
Other things I learned
Here are some things I stumbled over while putting together the above that I
thought were fun/interesting.
Beer goggles Undergrad subjects were asked to rate faces of the same sex, opposite sex, and “non-face objects”, then given booze and asked to do the same.
Booze led to a positive increase only in the attractiveness ratings of the opposite
sex, indicating that booze is not about loving the world more, it’s about wanting to
sleep with people more. [Jones et al., 2003]
Earnings Hammermesh and Biddle found that yes, cute people do make more
money. There’s about a 7-9 percent penalty for being homely and about a 5 percent premium for being attractive. This is true for both boys and girls, and they
even claim (unconvincingly) that the effect is larger for boys. One reason for the
attractiveness premium could be things like self-esteem; self-esteem measures are
indeed correlated to both earnings and cuteness, but the authors find that including these measures doesn’t affect the significance of the attractiveness coefficients.
[But they don’t do the Right Thing, which would be a likelihood ratio test comparing the specifications with self-esteem and without. But that doesn’t affect the
results reported here, though.] [Hammermesh and Biddle, 1994]
Self-evaluation Boy and girl undergrads were asked to rate their own attractiveness and then photographed. Then, the photographs were rated by undergrads at
another university. Note that, as in all the other studies I’ve looked at, there was
a high degree of consensus among photo raters about who was attractive and who
wasn’t, and this was regardless of both rater and ratee’s gender. This study found
that girls’ ratings of their own attractiveness was significantly correlated to the ratings of their photo (i.e., girls know if they’re cute or not), while boys’ self-ratings
were basically uncorrelated with the ratings of their photos (i.e., boys have no
frigging clue). The authors conclude that girls spend all day fretting about these
things, and therefore have good information, while boys just don’t think about it
that much.[Rand and Hall, 1983]
3.1. MEASURING ATTRACTIVENESS
65
Finger length The ratio of (length of index finger)/(length of ring finger) is larger
for girls than for boys: [Fink et al., 2003]
The length of the second digit (the index finger) relative to the length
of the fourth digit (the ring finger) is sexually dimorphic as males have
a lower second to fourth digit ratio (2D:4D). The sexual dimorphism
is determined as early as the 14th week of fetal life, and remains unchanged at puberty. There is evidence that sex differences in 2D:4D
arise from in utero concentrations of sex steroids, with a low 2D:4D
(male typical ratio) being positively related to prenatal testosterone,
while a high 2D:4D (female typical ratio) is positively associated with
prenatal oestrogen.
To go even further, it is claimed that there is a link between male homosexuality
and high fetal testosterone, so the 2D:4D ratio, by extension, may be correlated to
homosexuality. I don’t wanna mess this one up, so here’s the entire abstract from
SJ Robinson [2000]:
Sexual orientation may be influenced by prenatal levels of testosterone
and oestrogen. There is evidence that the ratio of the length of 2nd and
4th digits (2D:4D) is negatively related to prenatal testosterone and
positively to oestrogen. We report that (a) 2D:4D was lower in a sample of 88 homosexual men than in 88 sex- and age-matched controls
recruited without regard to sexual orientation, (b) within the homosexual sample, there was a significant positive relationship between mean
2D:4D ratio and exclusive homosexuality, (c) overall, there was a decrease in 2D:4D from controls to homosexual men to bisexual men
and (d) fraternal birth order, a positive predictor of male homosexuality, was not associated with 2D:4D in a sample of 240 Caucasian men
recruited without regard to sexual orientation and 45 homosexual men.
Further work is needed to confirm the relationships between 2D:4D
and sexual orientation. However, these and other recent data tend
to support an association between male homosexuality and high fetal testosterone. Very high testosterone levels may be associated with
a sexual preference for both men and women.
The subsequent lit seemed to back these guys up. E.g., I found this study,
with a very descriptive title: “Are 2D : 4D finger-length ratios related to sexual
orientation? Yes for men, no for women”.[Lippa, 2003]
[[Before you start measuring all your friends’ fingers: since homosexuals are such a small sample of the population, the 2D:4D ratio is not a good predictor of homosexuality, even though there
66
CHAPTER 3. PEOPLE AND THEIR PATTERNS
Type of rating
Investment type
Target
sex
Participant
sex
Opposite sex
Short-term
Female
Male
Female
Male
Female
Male
Male
Female
Male
Female
Male
Female
Male
Female
Male
Female
Long-term
Affiliation
Same sex
Affiliation
Dominance
Assistant
6.8 ± 2.3
3.2±2.6
6.4±2.1
3.2±2.2
6.8±1.9
4.7±2.0
4.2±1.5
6.1±2.4
Coworker
6.3±3.2
3.1±2.6
4.9±2.2
3.2±2.3
6.5±1.6
4.2±1.9
3.7±1.6
5.7±2.0
Figure 3.2: Average (S.D.) males’ and females’ ratings of target person (nine-point
Likert scale: not at all-very much)
is evidently a strong correlation. You’ll get enough Type II errors to make your orientation-throughfinger-length project junk.]]
3.2
Maureen Dowd’s love life: a statistical analysis
2 February 2006
Ms MKW of Washington, DC, was the third reader to point out to me an article by
Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, so it’s evidently time to give Ms Dowd’s
thesis a closer look. She explains that educated women have a disadvantage on
the marriage market because boys prefer girls who are nonthreatening, less smart,
and less successful. She cites an article by John Schwartz, also of the NYT, that
cites an article by Stephanie Brown of UMich. Ms Dowd explains that this study
demonstrated that males have a genetic aversion to dominant females.
You know I have no patience for ’they did a study’ hearsay, so here’s the data
in figure
The experiment is pretty simple: researcher shows to subject a photo with a
story attached. The key point of interest in the story is that the person in the photo
is a subordinate, a coworker, or a superior. The subject is then asked if the person
in the photo is attractive for a one-time sexual encounter, for an activity partner
(“would you like to exercise with this person”), or for a long-term relationship.
Nine means absolutely and zero means absolutely not.
Generally, you can see that when the boys rated girls, the mean floats around
6.5; when girls rate boys, the mean floats around 3.5. For the “would you exercise
with him” question, the girls’ means went up about a point. So policy implication
Supervisor
6.2±2.6
3.44±2.9
4.2±2.7
3.1±2.2
5.2±2.5
4.5±1.8
4.5±2.4
6.1±1.5
3.2. MAUREEN DOWD’S LOVE LIFE: A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS
67
number one: boys, ask her out for frisbee.
Looking a little more closely, we see the anomaly that the paper and two New
York Times articles are based on: boys rating an assistant for a long-term relationship rated her at the usual mean of 6.4; boys rating a boss rated her at a mean of
4.2.
That’s it: a 2.2 point difference. The number after the ± sign is the standard
deviation, and you can see that the difference is approximately one standard deviation for either side. The authors ran F-tests to determine that this is significant.
A t-test, and I contend basic intuition about numbers one standard deviation apart,
would find that they are not significantly different.1
Part of this may come from the experiment’s design. Ms Dowd is interested in
the question ‘do boys like smart and successful girls’, but the narrative in the study
was:
Please imagine that you have just taken a job and that Jennifer/John
is your immediate supervisor. She/he is the person you report to on
a daily basis. She/he has the responsibility for disciplining absence
or poor performance on your part, for rewarding reliable or creative
performance. . .
Firing power is a whole ’nother bundle of goods beyond generally successful. If
you want to claim that the data above as showing a statistically significant difference, then you can just as easily take the results to mean that boys are more
concerned about their careers, or that girls are more trusting of those who could
help or hurt them.
Finally, and this is the least of my issues here, this is a study of 120 male and
208 female UCLA undergrads. The sample size of a few hundred is normal to large
for this sort of work; for example, this academic study of pick-up lines had only
142 F and 63 M subjects. But to say that UCLA undergrads speak for all of homo
sapiens seems a bit much.
The discussion links this to evolutionary theories about boys trying to work out
who the father of a baby is. Our NY Times correspondents confidently cited the
evolutionary results as proven by this paper. Me, I will refrain from commenting,
1
I was a little surprised by the use of the F-test here, because we’re comparing two means, which
just screams of t-test to me. I checked some undergrad readings, and yes, this is the correct procedure
for ANOVA on a multi-way hypothesis. Here’s the summary: the t-test is generally preferable, but it
can only test for a difference between two numbers. To compare three means, or to test the hypothesis
‘all the numbers in this subset of the table are not equal’, you’ll need the F-test. So to check how
males rate subordinate, equal, or boss females would need an F-test, but to compare males rating
subordinate or boss females, you can take your pick. Evidently, you’ll get different results with the
data they gathered. Which is all just to say that it is valid to apply a t-test and it fails to reject the
hypothesis that the means of the two treatments are identical.
68
CHAPTER 3. PEOPLE AND THEIR PATTERNS
since I’m unfamiliar with the evolutionary lit. But the structure of the paper itself is
that nothing about how boys evolved is proven. Instead, the researchers ran a survey, and stated that it supports a certain existing hypothesis in the lit. Appropriately
modest.
Unfortunately, Ms Brown is not so understated in the press, and in another
Dowd editorial, Ms Brown is directly quoted as stating “Powerful women are at a
disadvantage in the marriage market”, and of course, the press eats it up.
I have no clue how to find the study Ms Dowd attributes to “researchers at
four British universities”, so I can’t comment on whether it correctly supports Ms
Dowd’s claims or not. An SF Chronicle article says that that study only surveyed
people born in 1921(!?).
Assortative matching
Since the micro-level literature left us flat, let’s look at the demographic regularities. These are all based on education, which we take as a proxy for intelligence
and success and what-have-you.
Educational attainment means less marriage Well-educated women marry less.
They’re too busy working at their high-paying careers. On a related note, motherhood also takes a dive with higher education. [[See the tables in Rose [2003], but bear in
mind that most of them have a truncated Y-axis.]]
People in school often marry each other Yes, I know it’s obvious. When people
in (or just out of) school randomly float around and bump into each other, they are
more likely to show a high correlation in spouses’ education levels than older outof-schools bumping into and then marrying random people of broader educational
attainment. [Mare, 1991] So Ms Dowd’s problem is not that she’s well-educated
but that she didn’t get somebody during or just after grad school. Now that she’s in
the real world, the number of boys she will meet in the upper tail of the educational
distribution will take a nosedive relative to the number she was meeting in grad
school. But notice again that one could explain this with statistical mechanics
(particles bumping into each other) without any recourse to a ‘boys seek out dumb
chicks’ story.
Level of education given married Kremer [1997] looks at the aggregate scale:
some quick math shows that the correlation between spouses’ educations was 0.649
in 1940 and 0.620 in 1990, indicating more disparity in spouses’ education levels.
But I find this to be too broad to answer the question we have. Education rates are
going up over this period, marriage rates are shifting, and our question is primarily
3.2. MAUREEN DOWD’S LOVE LIFE: A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS
mate’s schooling
<10
10-11
12
13-15
>16
boys,
1940;
>16 yrs
5.75
3.01
31.46
28.04
31.74
boys, 8587; >16
yrs
0.40
0.93
12.96
25.19
60.52
girls,
1940;
>16 years
6.98
3.35
6.98
17.88
64.8
girls, 8587; >16
years
0.22
0.58
14.44
17.75
67.01
boys,
1940; 12
years
14.13
18.69
57.21
7.89
2.08
69
boys,
85-87; 12
years
3.03
8.17
63.14
17.74
7.91
Figure 3.3: Level of education given married
about the well-educated: do they show more or less assortative matching? For
this, we look at page 21 of [Mare, 1991], who provides more direct, disaggregated
numbers:
Here’s what we’re looking at: I took the column for boys and girls with ¿16
years of education (i.e., a college education) and boys with 12 years of education (high school) in these periods, and calculated what percentage of them are
matching with a spouse of the years of schooling at left. Each column sums to
100%. So in 1940, 31.74% of married college-educated boys were married to
college-educated girls, while in the mid-80s, 60.52% of married boys were wed
to college-educated girls. That is huge, and we see a corresponding drop in the
college-educated who marry the high-school educated.
The high school educated boys were still mostly marrying high school educated
girls in the second period, but both of the categories about marrying better educated
girls showed an increase, and both of the categories about marrying less educated
girls showed a decline. So this data says that even those with a high school diploma
showed a stronger preference for an educated wife.
For college-educated girls, the rate at which the married among them is matching to a college-educated boy is not moving nearly as much—2.2 percent in forty
years. [[I leave as an exercise to the reader the fun of designing a data set where all of the above
facts are simultaneously true. Hint: the unmarrieds have not been mentioned in any of the data
above.]]
Overall, in 1940, 55.6% of married women were sub-high school educated;
in the mid-80s, 11.1% were—about five times fewer. In 1940, 3.85% of married
women were college educated; in the mid-80s, 22.37% were—a proportion over
five times larger. [Mare, 1991]
But, you retort, the number of college-educated girls has gone up significantly.
Which is true, and the post-college girl-boy ratio is closer to 1.0 than it was in the
1940s, but the shift in this ratio is not at the scale of the shifts above. Here’s the
70
CHAPTER 3. PEOPLE AND THEIR PATTERNS
% boys w/college ed+
% girls w/college ed+
College girl/college boy ratio
1940
5.39
3.71
0.69
1985
23.14
16.00
0.77
2004
29.41
26.11
0.96
Figure 3.4: Educational attainment over time
data [(from historical tables A-1 of the Census Bureau’s educational attainment page)]
You can see that the rate of college (plus postgrad) completion is way up all
around, and the college-completed girl/boy ratio has gone from 69% to 96%. This
is great, but is clearly only a fraction of the the doubling and quintupling of the
percentages that we saw above.
Probability married given level of education Table two is from 20 years ago;
I’m mostly using it because it’s so nicely broken down and says something about
who boys are marrying. You are no doubt wondering about girls’ odds today. The
answer: college educated girls are doing increasingly better relative to high-school
educated girls. Rose [4, table 3, p 42] defines the “success gap” as the probability
that a college educated or more gal is married minus the probability that an exactly
high school educated gal is married. In 1980, the success gap was 10.0 percent for
her sample (U.S. women 40-44); in 1990, the gap was 5.0 percent; and in 2000 it
was -0.7 percent. That is, in 2000, a 40-44 year old college graduate girl was more
likely to be married than a comparable high school graduate girl. So this measure
also fails to indicate any retrogression to the old days of dumb girls.
To summarize my story of Ms Dowd’s love life: educated women marry less.
People who have been out of school a long time are less likely to marry those who
match them, just as a matter of statistics. A person who only wants to date the top
5% on any scale is going to be rejecting 19 out of 20 comers by assumption. This
sums up to mean that a single, graduate-educated gal over 40 will have a much
tougher time marrying a graduate-educated boy than she did twenty years ago.
Also, a single graduate-educated boy will have a tougher time marrying a graduateeducated girl than he did 20 years ago. However, none of this has to do with cultural
trends regarding what boys want: the trend since the 1940s has been toward boys
of all levels marrying increasingly well-educated girls, and any education penalty
that may have existed for women in the past has evaporated. There will always
be the arse at the bar who turns tail at the first sound of education—and I as an
overeducated boy have at times had exactly the same experience—but that does
not quite make for a national trend.
3.3. DOES ECONOMICS MAKE PEOPLE EVIL?
71
PS Our educated liberal desire to find a mate of equal abilities directly contradicts
our educated liberal desire to reduce inequality. Kremer [1997] argues against this
one, but it’s so intuitive that the common economic wisdom takes it as all but
given: assortative mating increases class inequality. Back in the day, the poor girl
could marry the rich boy and thus become un-poor. But now, Ms Dowd thinks
it is a condescending affront that the rich boy marry anyone but a rich girl, and
that means that poor girl is going to stay poor. We lament the widening of class
boundaries, but what could widen them more than a New York Times editorial
excoriating upper class boys for associating with lower class girls?
Reader comment:
[1998].
3.3
Ms. DH of Ann Arbor, MI refers the reader to Kalmijn
Does Economics make people evil?
14 October 2004
Girls are less cooperative than boys.
This has been demonstrated by literally over a hundred lab studies. (The
first:Rapoport and Chammah [1965]. But there are hundreds more.)
The setup is a prisoner’s dilemma game. For those who are unfamiliar, each
player has two options, which are usually called ¡i¿cooperate¡/i¿ and defect. If both
cooperate, both get a high payoff, but if one defects, then she gets a higher payoff
but the other gets shafted. This is still true if the other player also defected: by
switching to defection, her payoff rises and the other person’s falls. Since defection
gives a higher payoff regardless of what the opponent does, the only equilibrium
in the game is for everybody to defect. Here is an example in table form; the pairs
are (row’s payoff, column’s payoff) given the actions listed:
C
D
C 10,10 3,12
D 12,3
5,5
To give the stats from Rapoport & Chammah, in girl-on-girl play, girls play the
cooperation strategy 34% of the time; in boy-on-boy play, boys play C 59% of the
time, in girl-vs-boy play, C is played about 50% of the time. A hundred studies
have been run, with subjects face-to-face (which increases cooperation, by the way)
or behind screens, or with male administrators or female, or with different stories
attached, or with every other variation you can think of, and the result is consistent
enough that we can be comfortable with the first sentence up there: girls play the
cooperative strategy less than boys. The 50/50 girl-vs-boy outcome is probably due
to the fact that when different types play, their cooperation rates generally meet in
72
CHAPTER 3. PEOPLE AND THEIR PATTERNS
the middle.
Desperate to maintain gender stereotypes, some authors rewrote the results:
it’s not that there’s a cooperate or a defect strategy—it’s a choice between a riskyhigh-payoff strategy and a safer-low-payoff strategy, and girls tend to take the safe
option. So the studies, it turns out, safely save our gender roles without any boats
being rocked. Phew.
B-schoolers
A reader asked me about a study that They once did about business school students.
(e.g,Frank et al. [1996]; I’m sure there are many more.) Here’s the typical setup: on
the first day of class, the students play a few rounds of prisoner’s dilemma games,
and we measure their cooperation rate. Then they learn economics and business
and stuff like that. They read Dixit & Nalebuff’s Thinking Strategically. Then they
play the P.D. again, and we find that the rate of playing C has fallen. We conclude
that business school has made the students non-cooperative, defective, or just plain
evil.
If you want to accept that business schoolers play D more often because they’ve
become evil, then you’ll have to also accept that girls play D more often because
they too are evil. But clearly, both situations are much more complex.
My studyette
Here’s the Beauty Contest game, cut and pasted from my game theory class’s
homework #1:
Write down a number between 1 and 1000 (inclusive). We will find
the average of all responses (µ), and the person who writes down two
thirds of this average (2/3 * µ) will receive ten bonus points on this
homework. [If there are multiple winners, they will all get ten points.]
It’s called a beauty contest because the original story is from Keynes, about
printing the photos of some chycks in the newspaper. People bet on who the winner
will be, so your task is not to pick the one whom you find cutest, but the one you
think everybody else will think is cutest. This is relevant to Macro because money
is like this: you don’t really care about the value of a dollar to you, you care about
what everybody else thinks a dollar is worth, and they only think a dollar is worth
something because they think you think it’s worth something.
The game here has similar properties: you have to guess what everybody else
thinks the mean will be, and outdo them. If it’s totally random, the mean will
be 500, so you should bid 333—but everybody can think this, so you should bid
3.3. DOES ECONOMICS MAKE PEOPLE EVIL?
73
two-thirds of that, which is 222—but everybody can think this, so you should bid
two-thirds of 222, which is 148—but everybody can think this, so you should bid
98—but eventually, following this along, you should bid 1.
This game was the first thing I did on the first day of class. I told them only the
first step, that if bids were purely random that 333 would win. I got 99 responses,
which looked like this:
Figure 3.5: The before picture
Three bids were the ‘correct’ value of 1, and you can see the others ranged
pretty widely. I can only assume that those who bid over 700 just didn’t understand
something. The mean from the game was 259, two-thirds of which is 173. This is
in line with prior beauty-contest studies. The implication is that people can do this
thinking about what other people are thinking about twice: they get to 222, so if
you can think three steps down you’re a winner.
On homework #1, I ran the experiment again, with the text above. This is after
students had all seen what a Nash equilibrium is, and that the only one in this game
is one, and I even mentioned the above studies that naive humans generally wind up
around 222. They knew the outcome of the first game, but didn’t see the histogram.
63 responses were distributed as below:
74
CHAPTER 3. PEOPLE AND THEIR PATTERNS
Figure 3.6: The after picture
There are still a couple of people at 1000, but the curve as a whole has definitely
shifted downward. The mean from the game here is 100.08, two-thirds of which is
66.7. There were sixteen ones (and four bids less than one, and two around two).
[Notice that the peak of the histogram is higher in the second chart; making better
spreadsheet charts is not a skill I have much interest in investing in.]
There is a clear difference between the two outcomes, but what does it mean?
Are people better at thinking of what other people are thinking about what they’re
thinking, now that they’ve had a game theory class? There are a whole lot of possibilities. One is that everybody saw me proclaim that one is the only equilibrium,
and so they can expect that other people are much more likely to play one, because
I created a common-knowledge focal point. Another is that people are just replying
to the last game: just as they were able to think two steps past 500, they saw the last
game was at 259 and thought two steps past that (which would be 115, which is
close enough to 100 for me.) It could be that people are just more familiar with the
game and less likely to screw up, as demonstrated by the fact that only two people
bid over 700 the second time. But people didn’t all bid one, because everybody believed that the other people were somehow not brilliant enough to work out to play
3.4. THE WEB AS HUMAN NETWORK
75
one, so they had to bid a little higher to accommodate those thousands out there.
Maybe they just cared more, since the prize in the first game was a loaf of bread
I’d baked the night before while the second prize is real live points. The reader can
surely come up with a few more stories.
Subjects are supposed to just respond to the payoff table, but then there’s an
interpretation on top of the payoff table where C is good and societally beneficial
and D is self-interested and bad. There’s an interplay between the story and the
payoff table which we just don’t really understand, and until we do, we should
be circumspect about saying that somebody who plays D often in the lab will be
uncooperative here in the Lab of Life. But such problems of generalization are true
of any experiment in any field.
Unique to game theory is the difficulty of ferreting out what subjects’ actions
indicate about what people are thinking. If a hyperrational person played the beauty
contest on day one, s/he’d still not want to play one, because our hyperrational
friend knows the others won’t play one; the graduate TA is in Figure 1 somewhere,
and his bid was in the hundreds. The class changed nothing about him but did
change his knowledge of what other people are thinking, so that if he’d bid again
the second time around, he’d surely bid lower. Other students may just be better at
math having churned through too many algebraesque problems. The whole point
of game theory is to study the interactions of your beliefs with your beliefs about
the beliefs of others with their beliefs about your beliefs about them, ad nauseum;
one game can never disentangle simultaneous changes in all of these things.
Barring a slip from time to time, the authors in the game theory literature know
this. However, studies reported in the popular press always drop the subtlety of
the field entirely, so we get the sort of conclusions above: business school makes
you evil. Actually, it updates your information about other business schoolers,
and makes you more familiar with cooperation, and helps you better disentangle
payoffs from the stories told about payoffs, and maybe makes you evil—and does
all of these things at once. All of these studies (gender, b-school, beauty contest)
show that there’s definitely something going on that’s worth paying attention to,
but it’ll be a few decades before we can ferret out exactly what.
3.4
The Web as human network
14 May 2005
I’d like to discuss the question of how technology has changed personal relations.
That’ll come next time. For now, let’s look at a specific, vaguely related question:does the link structure of the Net mirror the link structure of human networks?
Back when Alta Vista was the highest view in Internet search, a few IBM and
76
CHAPTER 3. PEOPLE AND THEIR PATTERNS
Alta Vista researchers did a rather detailed study of the Web’s structure [Broder
et al., 2000]. They, as with many others, found that the distribution of links on
the Net looked a lot like the distribution of human links. There is a power law
distribution where there are a few sites that are linked endlessly, and a long tail of
sites that only have a few links.
9
Nominations by ranking
8
7
Nominations
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
Rank
Figure 3.7: Junior high class photo. That’s me on the far right.
To give an example of a power law, here is a graph based on data from junior
high classes. The most popular student is on the X-axis at the far left (at X=0),
and was nominated as a best friend by a mean of 9.75 other students (over 88
classrooms in the sample). Over on the other end of the X axis, the 25th through
35th ranked student in the classroom was nominated as a best friend by a mean of
less than one other student. So you’ve got a few very well-connected students and
a lot of students who have no connections at all.
We see this pattern in social networks of all scales, and among Web pages. The
nomination count graph is typically a little more curvy than this one, with even
more of a steep slope down from the most popular members of the group and a
longer tail at the other end.
It sounds like the WWW as interpersonal network metaphor is working OK,
but two caveats: first, there is much debate as to whether the best fit for the link
3.4. THE WEB AS HUMAN NETWORK
77
distribution of the Web is a Negative Exponential, a Gamma, a Zipf, or a variety of
other distributions that all look identical to a non-expert. Unless you hope to study
this stuff seriously, you don’t have to care about this caveat and can just call it a
power law. The best fit to the student data is a Gamma distribution, by the way.
Second, human networks are pretty symmetric, in that there are few face-toface contacts where one party is ignorant of the other. This is true of celebrities,
whom we know but don’t know us, but we can throw those out and have a reasonably symmetric set of acquaintance links. The popular kids may not want to
hang out with the unpopular ones, but they know them nonetheless. But with Web
pages, it happens all the time that a page makes no indication of what other pages
are linking to it.
Figure 3.8: The Insidious Bowtie of Nyrothænim, aka The Internet.
Broder et al found that this asymmetry occurs on a grand scale. They divide
the Web into a giant Strongly Connected Component (SCC) comprising about a
quarter of the Web; these are sites that interlink with each other. Then there’s a
quarter that only links in to the SCC but does not receive links. That would be
blogs from losers like me. Then there’s a quarter that is linked from the SCC but
does not link to anything in particular, comprising corporate sites that just go in
internal circles and things like online books and manual pages that are informative
78
CHAPTER 3. PEOPLE AND THEIR PATTERNS
but not filled with links. The final quarter, they called tendrils, indicating a trail of
limited links that doesn’t readily fall into the first three categories. Thus, because
a web page is not a person, the symmetry of human networks does not map to web
links.
Another important distinction is that the whole small world game, where we
try to find a chain of people from a guy in Katmandu to a guy in Omaha, does
not work for the Net, because if you start on the right side of the bowtie, you can
not get to the left side. For humans, you can almost certainly find a chain, and
it’ll be well under ten people in almost all cases; for the Net, you only have about
a 25chance of being able to form a chain from any randomly selected site to any
other randomly selected site. E.g., try getting from your favorite online manual to
your favorite friend’s blog. When you can form a chain, say from the in-feeding
region to the SCC region, then it can still be hundreds of nodes long if one element
is well-buried in a subculture.
Now, with human networks, we can distinguish between acquaintance, which is
almost by definition symmetric, and friends, which is depressingly unidirectional,
typically from low-status to high-status. I don’t believe this metaphor is particularly well-studied, but it doesn’t work very well. The net receivers of links for the
Net are not high-status pages, but pages that just provide information (corporate,
technical, whatever).
But getting back to the part of the metaphor that does work, there are two characteristics to both networks. First, there’s a cost to linking both socially and online,
because you need to find the subject of your interest and know them. Second, there
is a cost to searching for new links. An immediate corollary to expensive search is
a principle that the rich get richer: the easiest way to find new links for your own
personal address book is to ask others for their contacts, so well-linked people/sites
are more likely to get more links.
3.5
Invariants
26 May 2005
This is about two technological revolutions that didn’t happen, and aren’t going to
happen any time soon.
To some extent, this is also about a recent revolution in economics, where the
study of how people interact has shown that there ain’t nearly as much variation
as we’d thought before: what we thought was wide variety is actually just a combination of invariants. [More generally, it’s a result of computational progress that has allowed
us to pay more attention to distributions that are not in the Gaussian family (binomial, Normal, t, F,
chi-squared) like the exponential, Poisson, Zipf, &c.]
3.5. INVARIANTS
79
The problem is that we humans have limits, and they have not in any way
changed thanks to technology. The key limits are time and memory.
[Who here bought R.E.M.’s Out of Time on vinyl or cassette?]
The first result of these limits is the size of our comprehensible network. That
is, how many people do I know well enough that I could hold a friendly conversation with them?
We can connect faster via cellular telephones, email, ntalk, or whatever pointand-talk technology has emerged since I wrote this, and so the time spent connecting is shorter, and we can cheaply connect to more distant people. But once the
connection is made, we still have to resort to just talking or writing as before. This
takes time, and the new toys don’t speed this up at all.
Sure, you’ve got Friendster (or whatever the cool kids are using these days)
allowing you to browse through photos of your pals, but back in the day, you had a
paper address book, with scraps of everything hanging out of it, that let you do the
same thing.
de Sola Pool and Kochen [1978/79] made various attempts at estimating the
number of acquaintances that a person has, and found that folks generally have
about 1,500 immediate acquaintances whom they will see over the next two months
once or twice and say hi to, and then about 4,500 less direct acquaintances, like the
people from college whom they’ll only see every few years. Perhaps our online
networks have sort of blurred the lines on the close-by acquaintances and distant
acquaintances, but how many hundreds of your high school pals have emailed you
lately?
But that’s all scale: what about structure? Are our social hierarchies flatter and
more egalitarian now that we’ve got the Net? Again, no. We still see the same
sort of pattern we saw in last episode: a few people who are very well connected
and a lot of people who are minimally connected. The debate (about which I am
no authority) is whether this is because some people have a higher capacity to
maintain pals, due to more time dedicated to it or an innate name-and-face memory;
or because of a rich-get-richer story that people find new pals via their old pals, so
those who are well-networked will only wind up better-networked in the future.
The true story is no doubt a bit of both.
Costly maintenance of links and costly search for new links have not changed
for us humans. Generally, if you’ve got both of those characteristics, you’re going
to have a network that looks like standard social networks, and if those limits are
set by the human brain and our 24 hour day, then the scale of those networks is set.
80
CHAPTER 3. PEOPLE AND THEIR PATTERNS
Content
Moving on from social networks, the second limit is in what we can produce. If you
spent every minute of the next year typing away at your keyboard, your computer’s
hard drive would barely notice it all. [[1 word= about 6 bytes. Given 60 words per minute
times 1440 minutes per day = 518,400 bytes/day; in a year that’s 180MB.]] For most of us,
everything we ever wrote would easily fit onto a single CD. That is, the technology
of text processing has blown past the human ability to produce text.
For music and still pictures, we’re in about the same place. The roadblock is
not in storage and transmission, but in the process of finding artistic inspiration
and the time and skill needed to execute it. Moving pictures are not far behind,
and twenty years from now, downloading a movie won’t take a moment’s thought
by anybody. Nobody will worry about the price of film stock, but the process of
writing and producing a movie will still be a massive effort.
On the consumption side, it still takes 70 minutes to listen to Beethoven’s
Ninth, though you no longer have to get up and flip the disc in the middle. It
still takes 90 minutes to watch a ninety-minute movie. The articles that I have on
my hard drive in the ‘read any day now’ pile has certainly grown, but the ‘articles I’ve read’ pile grows at the slow, steady pace it always has, and the ‘articles I
remember reading’ pile continues to wither.
So scale is again set. As for structure, we find that there is again the same
power-law type distribution in consumption. If we plot sales and Amazon sales
rank on a log-log scale, we find that it’s linear. In other words, the top ten bestselling books sell ten times as much as the bottom of the top 100, and those sell
ten times as many as the bottom of the top 1,000, and so on down into the millions.
[Below the top sellers, by the way, the ranking is basically the order of last sale, by
the way.] That is, content is another power law, and that structure doesn’t change
with onlineness: before millions of blogs only read by three people, there were
‘zines only read by three people, and before that, letters.
So the distribution of book popularity happens to match the distribution of
people popularity, which is no surprise, because the same two problems—costly
search and costly linking/consumption—are an issue in both cases.
Policy implications
We are all more-or-less as networked as we’re going to be by maybe age sixteen
[socially; sexual networks follow different patterns from social networks, and tend
to take more of a rich-get-richer form.[Lijeros et al., 2001]]. When you meet somebody new, they’re crowding out somebody else, as time spent cultivating your new
pal is not time spent cultivating the old. The same works for entire networks: just
3.6. RISK V AMBIGUITY
81
as advertisers must compete for your few dollars, networks must compete for your
limited networking resources. Similarly, having a wealth of new content available
just means that we have a wealth of things that we’ll never read because they’re
crowded out by the other things we’re reading.
I don’t mean to say that the Web as a whole is a stagnant waste or that our
information processing abilities are irrelevant. But with regards to certain basic
human desires, we arrived about fifteen years ago when everybody got a PC, and
everything since then has just been adding more features, giving you one more
place where you can start a blog and one more list of contacts to keep synced.
3.6
Risk v ambiguity
6 December 2004
So two prominent economist-types, Gary Becker and Richard Posner, have put
together a blog. In their first post, they have already revealed one of the great
failings of economics today: it has no means of handling ambiguity.
Definitions: risk is a situation where there are a few known probabilities—like
playing the lottery. People screw up the math sometimes (e.g., they tend to round
ultra-small probabilities up until they’re just small probabilities), but generally do
OK with it. Ambiguity is a situation where there are a number of possible outcomes,
but you have only a vague idea of which will occur.
The economist approach is to turn ambiguity into risk. Posner & Becker implicitly do this by talking about expected payoffs with regard to terrorist acts, implying that we can write down the probability that the U.S.A. will suffer a terrorist
act in the next week, month, or year. But there’s no way to assign such probabilities. Terrorist acts are like earthquakes: there may be some fixed set of events that
cause them to occur with a fixed probability, but we humans have no frigging clue
what those events are, and how to turn them into probabilities.
‘Oh, B’, you’re thinking, ‘you’re just hairsplitting. We can’t come up with a
perfect estimate of probabilities, but we can try to the best of our abilities.’ I used to
think the same way, but there is an abundance of evidence that we humans process
ambiguity and risk in truly distinct ways.
The most oft-cited is the Ellsberg paradox. In urn A, we have 51 red balls and
49 white balls. In urn B, we have 100 red or white balls, but we’re not telling
you how many of each. That is, A is a risky urn and B is an ambiguous urn. In
experiment 1, we tell our subjects we’ll give them ten bucks if they draw a red ball;
they consistently choose to draw from urn A. In experiment 2, we tell our subjects
we’ll give them ten bucks if they draw a white ball; they still consistently choose
to draw from urn A.
82
CHAPTER 3. PEOPLE AND THEIR PATTERNS
The standard risk-as-ambiguity model says that people just assign a risk of
white ball to urn B, probably using the Principle of Insufficient Reason, which
says that if you don’t have any information, just call it a 50-50 chance. But there’s
clearly no way to assign a single white ball count to urn B that would cause you
to prefer urn A in both cases—either there are more than fifty red balls in urn A
or there ain’t. [The terrorism issue shows parallels to this: we don’t know the
probability of terrorism, so no matter the true circumstances, we assume the worst,
in a manner that turns out to be inconsistent with any clear view of the world. We
respond to ambiguity with irrational fear; then decisionmakers set policy based on
this.]
There is also some evidence (I can dig up citations on request, but brain scans
are a bit questionable; if I gave the name I’d have to give critique) that our brains
process risk and ambiguity differently. Ambiguity is processed in the reptilian part
of the brain, some claim, where gut instinct gets formed; risk happens in the usual
upper math-processing frontal lobe.
Even without brain scans, this seems sensible to me: as innumerate monkeys
we faced ambiguity all the time, and only in the last few millennia have we managed to come up with means of describing risk. It’s hard to come up with natural
selection schemes that select only those who are most capable of matching their gut
instinct with correct probabilities. If something has a small likelihood of occurring,
a population may best evolve by ignoring that event entirely. This is textbook evolutionary stuff [especially if your textbook is Gintis’s Game theory evolving, which
I’ve been teaching from. He repeatedly quips that “Nature abhors low-probability
events.”].
The other cause of all of this is that there is no way to prove a probability
wrong. When the weatherman says that there’s a 90% chance of rain, he can’t be
proven wrong no matter what happens tomorrow. This is especially the case with
sporadic catastrophic events like earthquakes or terrorism. There’s no consistent
data to gather, and so no way to verifiably prove somebody right or wrong. All of
the usual narrow-path yarns about how we could repeatedly trade with somebody
who does the math wrong and bankrupt them, or that evolution will select them
out of the population, don’t apply. Ambiguity is not risk, and there’s no reason to
presume that one is a fair approximation of the other.
So there is no way to fit ambiguity into an expected utility calculation, since we
can’t just come up with our best risk estimate and call them equivalent. The result
is that, frankly, economists have no way to describe an objectively correct decision
procedure in the face of ambiguity. I’m not prepared to throw up my hands and
say it’s impossible, but right now we don’t have the technology; there’s a Nobel
in it for whomever finds a robust ambiguity-is-not-risk way to apply narrow-path
economics to ambiguous situations.
3.7. THE MAIL BAG
3.7
83
The mail bag
26 March 2004
90% of the mail to [national feminist organization] is renewal slips and assorted
other forms that just have to be put in little piles and processed; for those, see
yesterday’s rant about re-entering numbers off of printouts. The other ten percent
has handwritten notes on it which may or may not require attention.
These forms with handwritten notes are the embodiment of a conflict. The
sender, off in Manhattan, KS, or LA, CA, is looking for a little voice, a momentary
connection with somebody who agrees with them. The receiver, me, just wants
to know what string of numbers to type in to the ‘source’ field in the database. I
don’t want to imply that the entire process is purely impersonal—somebody in the
organization looks at the big box o’ letters and gets some feel for public opinion
therefrom. But the reply envelope is a lousy place for both human contact and political debate. Almost everything, whether a single line or three pages, is marked in
the database with a single capital letter, so brevity, the soul of wit, is as encouraged
as ever. Some of the things in the big box o’ letters:
• Empty envelopes. By mailing back the business-reply envelope, the sender
costs the organization something like fifteen cents and five seconds of labor.
Way to stick it to ‘em, Mr. Puerile. [Thrown out.]
• Apologies from people who sympathize but can’t afford to contribute. These
vary between one line and three pages. The mode are pensioners, who write
a paragraph about how they can’t contribute like they used to, sometimes
with a little something about Bush ruining the economy. The typed letters
go into great detail about the author’s life, how they make their money, and
how things have been in recent times. [Flag Q.]
• Political rants. These come on both sides of the debate. The opposition
usually works in one liners: ‘GO BUSH’, or ‘Please take me off your list,
because I don’t support murderer. [sic]’ The support goes into much more
detail, often mailing in clippings or diatribes. ‘We must free our bodies from
the laws males have oppressed us with. [...] This is our jihad! [writing in
Arabic]’ From a man who enclosed a ten dollar check: ‘I am a Black man,
and you White women have been bad to us in the past. You lied about being
raped and had us lynched. You must never lie.’ This organization endorsed
Carol Mosley Braun for President, and many people wrote in to express their
displeasure with the endorsement. [Anti- rants are flag R.]
84
CHAPTER 3. PEOPLE AND THEIR PATTERNS
• Name corrections. Most are just polite fixes, but the amusing ones are the
people who are totally pissed off about it, as if you’ve just peed on their
family crest. ‘No person named “Eller” at this address. My name is Feller.
Please correct and resubmit.’
Many people write in titles like Ph.D.; I am qualified to say that this is hopelessly gauche. I use my title of ‘Doctor’ for only two purposes: grant applications and reaching my pals at work when the boss picks up. I really don’t
understand the benefit of informing somebody that they need to fix their
database to indicate a successful thesis defense. I have yet to see anybody
with an M.S. insist on being called ‘Master’. [Put in the ‘address corrections’
pile.]
• Requests for less mail. Some are just a line, ‘Please, no more requests until
next year,’ and some are very vehement. The vehement ones are typically a
form letter on a separate page, which the person is sending to all the charities
that send the person mail. They threaten to withdraw funding—or worse—if
they get more than two pieces of mail per year. [Flag T.]
The requests for less mail make a lot of sense: this organization sends faithful
members about a mailing a month. Any of you with a pulse have received mailings
like these, and know that they have little informational content, and are basically
just begging for more cash. As such, they are annoying, and sort of a waste of
resources (paper, the receiver’s time).
You can identify it from the outside, with the printed image of handwriting
which doesn’t fool a single person on this Earth into thinking somebody handwrote something onto your form. The type is funny, because each letter has to be
printed separately, to personalize the greeting and the amounts asked for. People
who have contributed in the past get boxes with larger numbers than others. The
majority of people check off the lowest box, regardless of the amount listed therein.
[And the neoclassicists say people spend their money rationally...]
I remember when I got my first letter like this from the LA County Bike Coalition. When I first joined, the LACBC was a small organization, with maybe a few
hundred members. To me, that letter was sort of the end of the early era where Ron
the president knew everybody in the organization, and the beginning of the earnest
lobbying phase.
The other thing worth noting about these mailings, by the way, is that they are
immensely profitable. They really are an effective way for the organization to raise
the funds it needs to keep lobbying and informing the public. From what I’ve seen
poking around in the database where I shouldn’t, a typical mailing by this organization will cost $15,000 and bring in $25,000 in contributions, which probably makes
3.8. BUSINESS MODEL
85
impersonal and annoying mailings like these hard for an organization to resist. I
mean, what else in this world almost guarantees a 70% return in two months?
3.8
Business model
2 July 2004
I hate the term. Better than this neologism is the term ‘fee structure’, which better
gets across the idea. There are probably two reasons why ‘business model’ has
replaced ‘fee structure’ or even ‘price list’: the word ‘model’ sounds much more
scientific and thought-out than the alternatives (even though these are not models
in the sense that I as a modeler would use the term); and the closely-related term
‘business methods’ refers to something that can now be patented, so that term has
seen increasing play.
Anyway, the fee structure goes a long way toward the affect one has toward a
company. Generally, the less often I am reminded that I’m engaging in a business
transaction, the better I feel. There are abundant examples of people who get this
terribly, horribly wrong. The big winner are hotels.
First, if I’m in a hotel, that means that I’m staying in a city where I have no
friends, or at least no friends who like me enough to let me sleep on their floor. So
I’m already a little depressed. The paintings are reminiscent of the starving artists
sales that I used to see advertised on TV, selling couch-sized art in a wide variety
of color schemes. Appropriately enough, these sales were always held at a Holiday
Inn.
Speaking of the color scheme, many of the hotels I stay in are stuck in a 70s-ish
earth-tone theme, which now reminds me of a hotel every time I see somebody’s
house in those colors. I imagine this is because the central tenet of all hotel design
is: hide the stains.
And then, sprinkled throughout the room, are things you can buy. It’s a bit
like living in a convenience store with a bed. The bottles of water are $2.50 at the
cheap hotels or $4 at the pricier ones. Hotels advertise that they have an in-room
fridge, but then the fridge is crammed full of more snacks and drinks that you can
inadvertently purchase. I always wonder if I should feel bad about taking all this
crap out of the fridge so I can fit in my fifty-cent sandwich.
Wireless net access used to be free, until the hoteliers of the world got together
and all agreed that they could be charging for it. The places usually come with free
coffee, but I never trust it—will someone take inventory and bill me? The only
thing definitely free is the soap, which (except at W hotels) is guaranteed to be a
lard byproduct.2 Thanks, guys.
2
Ms AMJ of Richmond, VA noted: “Most of the Kimpton hotels can also be counted upon to
86
CHAPTER 3. PEOPLE AND THEIR PATTERNS
My checking account is like this. Free: write checks, deposit or withdraw
money at an ATM. Everything else has a fee. Of course, none of these fees are of
the ‘it costs us money to do this, so we pass the cost on to you’ variety. Receiving
a wire transfer, a fully automated, no-humans involved, microsecond operation,
costs me $15.
The interesting thing about receiving a wire transfer is that it can happen without any action on your part. If somebody really wants to piss you off, they can wire
you a nickel, and you’ll lose $14.95 in the process. [I verified this with a SunTrust
employee. You really could ruin somebody you hate like this. He then tried to sell
me things.]
Sprint: another one of those companies which offers you a host of opportunities to get billed. Every time you call their customer service, they mention at the
end (and the good ones make this sound ultra-casual and just-for-you) that Sprint
has a wonderful for-fee service for which you qualify. Last time, I didn’t say no
vehemently enough and the little service got added on. Two phone calls later—and
therefore two sales-pitches later—I am promised that I will be able to get a refund
for the fee next time I call.
This is a horrible mistake because there are two things that determine the emotional recollection of an experience. [This is me generalizing from the recollection
of pain described in Redelmeier et al. [2003], in the journal Pain. How can you
not love a journal named “Pain”. Think of the poor Frenchmen looking for bread
recipes.] The first influence on recollection is the emotional extreme (the lowest
low), and the second is the state at the end of the experience. That is, if you argue
on the phone for an hour and give a cursory ‘I love you anyway’ at the end of the
conversation, the entire hour will be recalled as not so bad.
Sprint totally screws this up. At that vital end of the conversation, where you’ve
finally resolved your problem (hopefully for a positive resolution), the representative is obliged to remind you that you’re dealing with a corporation which is in a
slightly adversarial relationship with you and wants your money. I’m not sure how
many of these ‘by the way’ pitches actually succeed in making money for them,
but it is a business method which leaves every person’s affective recollection of
their interaction worse than it was. Gosh, if we humans are nothing but a series of
recollections, then this business method literally makes its customers worse off.
stock Aveda soap stuff; they’re where I accumulate my stash of tiny bottles of rosemary mint hair
stuff.”
3.9. ACCOUNTING FOR HUMANS
3.9
87
Accounting for humans
18 May 2004
I’ve been using this accounting program, and have been having trouble wrapping
my brain around its philosophical implications.
Figure 3.9: My name is Luca.
Your modern accounting programs are based on a system written down by Luca
Pacioli in 1494. The underlying idea is that of a stock and flow model: you’ve got
a few stocks of cash (your employer’s bank account, your savings account, your
PayPal a/c, your expenditures on chocolate) and cash flows from one stock to the
other. The accounting books record the flow of cash from one stock to another by
recording a negative entry in the book for the ‘from’ account and a positive entry
in the ‘to’ account (and thus the name, double-entry bookkeeping).
88
CHAPTER 3. PEOPLE AND THEIR PATTERNS
Credit and debit
The names for the two entries always sounded backward to me. When you take
money out of an account, that’s a ‘credit’ and when you put it somewhere, that’s
a ‘debit’. This makes sense at the ends of the system: when you take money
out of your employer’s account, that’s definitely a credit to you, and when you
buy chocolate, thus putting money into the chocolate account, that’s definitely a
debit from you. The weird part is that there’s always an intermediate account
in there somewhere, and that’s where it seems confusing. You get a credit halftransaction from your employer, and then counter it with a debit half-transaction
to your savings account. Debiting money into your a/c sounds painfully backward,
unless you think about putting cash into the savings account exactly as you think
about putting cash in the chocolate account, except that instead of comestibles,
you’re purchasing the right to future money. That is, the labels only make sense if
you think of all accounts as being external and divorced from you. Money flows
among accounts surrounding you, but never to you directly.
Converting things
My biologist pals point out that they do similar things with the ocean. A region
can have a carbon budget, for example, wherein there’s a water stock, an algae
stock, a bacteria stock, a fish stock, and each of these stocks hold various levels
of carbon, and when one blob eats another blob, then carbon gets transferred from
one stock to another. There’s also a parallel nitrogen stock-and-flow model, and
another oxygen model, et cetera. These elemental models are distinct, in that you
don’t have to worry about a bunch of oxygen suddenly turning to carbon.
Ms. JATMM of Mount Vernon, VA sent me some examples of things you
can do once you’ve written down the budgets.3 The stuff humans account for is a
bit different, so if you wanted to have a cash stock-and-flow system, and a parallel
system for cotton, corn, chocolate, cars, and tea, then you’ll have to start converting
things. When you buy chocolate, you do not alchemagically convert cash into
chocolate: in the cash stock-and-flow model, you have a flow of cash from your
account to 7-11’s, and in the parallel chocolate accounting system chocolate flows
from 7-11’s account to yours (a very pleasant image, if you ask me). The price
determines the relative velocity of the two parallel-but-opposing flows.
But since we’re not dealing with elements, there are the actual conversions
involved, which need equations in the way of (1 unit tea leaves) + (1 unit hot water)
+ (1 unit sugar) = (1 unit warm beverage). If you were organized enough, you could
write down all the things we humans use, and then put together a big-ass conversion
3
http://fluff.info/blog/asst/seeding.html
3.9. ACCOUNTING FOR HUMANS
89
matrix representing every means of converting one thing to another. [This is a
Markov-style transformation matrix, so if you start with a vector of commodities,
you can repeat production until something breaks, or an equilibrium is achieved, or
stuff like that.] Wassily Leontief did this for the entire U.S. economy, which won
him a Nobel prize in economics (1973) for such an astonishing feat of accounting.
The one thing missing from the model
People. You’ve got this whole set-up to put money into sinks such as ‘cash in my
wallet’ or ‘cash I’ve spent on chocolate’, and could expand this to include nonmoney accounts like ‘chocolate I have purchased’. But in disaggregating you the
person into a million little accounts, it is impossible to include you the person in
the model directly. The closest you get is to make a note somewhere that certain
accounts are somehow tied to you the person.
Most notably, there is no place in the model for value or enjoyment or utility.
The reason for this is that value is not conserved. For every dollar into one account,
there’s exactly one dollar out of another—but for value, exchanges happen all the
time such that both people are better off. Through some sort of magic, value is
created by exchange. The mind of double-entry bookkeeping has been blown, and
there’s nothing we can do about it.
Books have been written about this. Notably, there’s Mirowski’s More Heat
than Light, a book that traces the history of economic theory back to Physics.
‘Physics envy’ is pretty palpable among neoclassicists, but Mirowski does a pleasant job of documenting its evolution, including the evolution of conservation laws
in Physics. Conservation laws are the archetypal bookkeeping laws—e.g., for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Mirowski then condemns all of
economics to failure because it has no conservation law for value, and never will.
The conclusion really doesn’t follow, [and his critique of Varian is just mean,] but
the trip is occasionally fun.
The resolution, which hadn’t occurred to me until I wrote this, is to use the
transformation matrix. After all, cars and cups of tea aren’t conserved: some days
there are just more of these things than other days. So you could put into the inputoutput matrix rules like: (1 100g chocolate bar) + (1 2-liter Slurpee) = (200 utils
of fun for me). But since everybody’s utility functions are different, you’d need
another equation in the matrix to represent how Stevana or Joe turn Slurpees into
value. You can see the model quickly becomes far too complex to write down,
even for Mr. Leontief. Also, there are issues about how this value thing works:
does it keep over time, and if not, where does it go? Can it be spontaneously
generated? But Mr. Mirowski, once we’ve written down the rules of production
for our imaginary commodity, the structure is consistent.
90
CHAPTER 3. PEOPLE AND THEIR PATTERNS
But even after we include billions of value-creating equations, people still don’t
appear in the model. The closest we come is to set up stocks for value, and attach
one of these value stocks to each person. I think that’s as close to a representation
of humans as accounting will be able to do.
3.10
Taxing value
14 December 2006
The question for the day: when should you count transfers among third parties
as part of your taxable income? Here are two examples.
• Your pal gives $1,000 to Amnesty International in your name. Gifts are
counted as income; since this is a gift to you with a fair market value of $1,000,
does this count as income to you?
• Instead of giving you a rent check, your tenant sends the rent directly to
CitiMortgage, who apply it to the mortage on the house where your tenant is living.
You never see the cash, but pay a smaller mortgage. Does it count as income to
you?
To the intuition of most of the folks I’ve spoken with, the gift donation should
not count as income, and the sidelong rent payment should be. So that’s an easy
consensus, but the next question is why one third-party transfer should count and
the other shouldn’t. Both are a transfer from one third party to another that benefits
you, and at that level, are equivalent. The fact that one is a gift is irrelevant: if
Grandma slipped a $1,000 check into your birthday card, you would have to claim
it like any other income. Amnesty is a charity, but that just means that after you
claim the $1,000 gift as income, you can deduct it as charitable giving. I mean no
offense to the many people who have tried, but I have not yet seen a reasonable
explanation as to why we should treat one of these cases as income but not the
other.
Defining income is hard. A great deal of title 26 of the US Code is about
questions like these. When your employer pays your health insurance for you,
is it income? What if they reimburse you for it after you pay for it? Since you
sometimes declare your income tax over a year after you earned it, other problems
can arise: ¿If you live in Maryland but work in DC, to whom do you pay state
income taxes? [Hint: only one of these areas has Congressional representation.]
We put the Service in Internal Revenue Service I called IRS’s customer help
line, because this question actually has some relevance to my own tax situation.
This was probably mean. I’m looking for a valid definition of income—a ques-
3.10. TAXING VALUE
91
tion which is fundamentally hard, as I’ll discuss below—and they’re armed with a
couple of publications on the IRS website that I’ve already read.
The first, IRS representative #2504624, decided that a mortgage counts as
rental expenses. At this point I’m torn. Even I know this is false, but is it rude
to call her on her made-up interpretation of tax law?
Her: As you can see from this publication, tenants paying rental expenses count
as income.
Me: It also says here that you can deduct the full value of rental expenses, so
would that mean that a person could deduct their full mortgage?
Her: No. You can never deduct your full mortgage.
Me: But you declared that it’s a rental expense, and those are deductible.
Her: Mortgages can’t be deducted. They don’t count as rental expenses.
Me: So if it’s not a rental expense, then it’s not income when a tenant pays.
Her: Yes, it is income. When a tenant pays rental expenses, then it’s income.
This went on for a while, as I politely pressed her for a consistent definition of
rental expenses, or of income. She eventually hung up on me.
Which is why I’m bucking my normal habit of using only initials and am printing her full name here. That’s right, IRS Representative #2504624, every time anybody searches for your name, the first hit will be this post about how you rudely
treated a taxpayer after giving him blatantly false, made-up advice.
The second try gave similar results, albeit much more politely:
Him: This counts as income under the doctrine of constructive receipt. Let me
transfer you to somebody else who will explain that to you so I don’t have to talk
to you anymore.
While on hold, I looked up this doctrine. Constructive receipt is about the
timing of income. If you get a paycheck on 20 December, but don’t deposit it until
2 January, it still counts as income as of 20 December, because there was nothing
keeping you from receiving it then. But this doesn’t apply to either of the above
cases, because there’s a whole lot keeping you from receiving money from either
Amnesty or CitiMortgage.
The conversation with the third person went about the same, but he had the
grace, wit, and courtesy to admit that he had neither the text of 26 CFR nor the
wherewithal to interpret it, and wrote out an email inquiry that was to be replied
to within 48 hours. [You can’t directly email the IRS’s service desk—you have to
phone in and ask the operator to type out an email for you.] Naturally, I never got
a response.
I checked 26 CFR myself and learned an interesting factoid: it doesn’t actually
define income, beyond the basic ‘income is money you receive’ definition that does
not to justice to any of the above.
92
CHAPTER 3. PEOPLE AND THEIR PATTERNS
The root of the problem My purpose in elaborating on the Service part of Internal Revenue Service is to show how even the full-time professionals have little
idea of how to define income. It is a hard problem. On the one hand, there’s some
intuition that when you gain value from an action, like when somebody pays your
mortgage for you, then it is income. Many countries explicitly use this definition
and call it a value-added tax (VAT). But on the other hand, we recognize that you
sometimes gain value in ways that are not the government’s business, like when
somebody gives you a nice backrub or gives money to Amnesty in your name.
There are the no-brainer cases—if somebody hands you cash, then it’s income—
but what if you loaned them fifty bucks that they paid back the next month? Is that
$50 income for them in month one and $50 income for you in month two? Nothing
is consumed and relatively little value is added, but it’s ambiguous whether there’s
income. The law also considers things like large gifts to be income. Remember
when Oprah Winfrey gave her audience members cars, and they then each got a
$7,000 tax obligation with the gift? The idea here is that any item that you receive
is equivalent to its fair market value. But this opens the door for massive ambiguity:
that backrub has a fair market value, after all.
The tax code is a mess because the problem of defining income is fundamentally unsolvable, because it starts with a fundamentally unsolvable question—
¿Where does value come from?—and then adds on top another fundamentally unsolvable classification—¿What portion of value should be taxed?
The IRS only makes things more difficult by refusing to acknowledge that the
income tax is a tax on value. But it remains in denial, both in order to sound smart
and for political reasons (The VAT is unpopular because Europeans do it, and the
IRS doesn’t want to admit that the income tax is a botched VAT). If we could
use the word value, then the Amnesty-CitiMortgage conundrum is easy: the gift
contribution adds a small amount of value to your life, while a $1,000 mortgage
payment adds $1,000 in value. As the IRS’s service representatives demonstrated,
when you can’t use the V word, you’re stuck making up ad hoc stories about rental
expenses and constructive receipt that don’t quite work.
Solutions First, let me quickly dismiss one faux solution to the conundrum. Under a flat tax, we retain an income tax but lower tax rates on the rich and raise tax
rates on the poor so everybody is paying the same tax. The painfully disingenuous
justification for this is that it simplifies the tangle of tax forms. But the root of the
mess is not in the problem of working out whether to multiply taxable income by
0.3 or 0.18, it’s defining taxable income—a problem that the flat tax doesn’t touch.
A tax form for the flat tax would be exactly as long as the current 1040.
Another, much more effective alternative: the consumption tax. It has some
3.10. TAXING VALUE
93
æsthetic appeal: we aren’t bothered by the rich for making lots of money, we’re
bothered by how they buy big yachts and overpriced shoes. We want to encourage
savings, which is why there are so many exceptions in the income tax for savings
like 401(k) plans (i.e., retirment plans conforming with 26 CFR 1.401(k).). By the
simplified equation Income - Savings = Consumption, the current tax code makes
you calculate income—already hard, as above—and then excruciatingly subtract
every element that could somehow count as savings. The consumption tax just has
you total up consumption, by billing you at point of sale like any other sales tax.
The consumption tax also reconciles the Amnesty-CitiMortgage problem. First,
we would decide whether either of the above counts as consumption or not right
off the bat. Instead of the situation we have now, where we tax your income and
then if you contribute to Amnesty then you get to deduct that portion of income
(under a number of caveats), you would instead pay tax when you give money to
CitiMortgage (depending on how you wanna count buying a house), and then not
pay tax when giving to Amnesty.
Second, all those issues about who who is the final recipient just evaporate: tax
is paid by the person making the outlay. Oprah pays taxes on the car when she
bought them. There’s the social problem of whether the tenants should pay the
landlord’s taxes, but that isn’t complicated by the accounting issues.
Sure, there are still questions of how one defines consumption—like whether
your house is consumption or an investment. But once we have an arbitrary decision on that question, the accounting is much easier.
We like progressive taxes, where poor folk pay a lower percentage than rich
folk. There’s intuition behind this, that economists can readily formalize: a dollar
to a poor person that buys a loaf of bread is worth much more—has much higher
value—than a dollar to a rich kid who uses it to buy a portion of jewellery or
other useless items. [In formal terms, there is a diminishing marginal value to income, which is
evidenced by risk-averse behavior, especially as shown by those who are well past the survival level.
McCaffery [2002]
proposes fixing this via a refund on the taxes paid on the first $20,000 in spending.
If the tax rate is 5%, everybody just gets handed $1,000. Those who consumed
less than $20,000 are now making a small profit on the tax system, and thus pay a
negative rate; those who spent $20,000 last year are paying 0% taxes, and the yacht
buyers are paying 4.999%.
So, the consumption tax really is a simplification of the tax scheme, because
it takes taxes at the door, replacing the problem of defining income minus savings
with the simpler problem of defining cash purchases for consumption. It encourages savings and discourages yacht purchasing. The only problem is that there are
several industries built from the ground up around avoiding income taxes. Lindblom explains in his Market as Prison essay [Lindblom, 1982] that the market is
A progressive tax on cash terms approximates a flat tax on value terms.]
94
CHAPTER 3. PEOPLE AND THEIR PATTERNS
the perfect system for preventing change, because no matter the change, somebody
will resist it because they are optimized to make money the way things are now. So
when you have a massive system like the income tax, no matter how fundamentally
screwed up it is, there will always be a chorus of defenders.
So we’re stuck with the tax law we have, that attempts to codify the answer to
two impossible-to-answer questions. We’ll get tax laws that simplify the situation a
bit, and tax laws that complicate it a bit, but as long as the law requires a definition
of value and a definition of what value is to be taxed or untaxed, the law will remain
a mess.
4
E CONOMICS TODAY
4.1
Etiquette for economists
10 March 2006
Today’s recommendation, for my usual audience of mathematicians and social
scientists: Miss manners. No, not because of the usual reasons that no doubt sprung
to your head when you saw mathematician and manners in the same sentence. I
recommend the etiquette column because it is a paragon of social science analysis.
The first rule you need to bear in mind when reading on etiquette is that none
of etiquette is arbitrary. Take this as axiomatic; if you believe that a rule violates
this axiom, then you don’t understand the rule and should try again.
The problem of etiquette is exactly the problem of law, economics, and the
social sciences in general: given that people have competing objectives and perceptions which are often in conflict, what is the mechanism that minimizes conflict
and maximizes social benefit? The problem is more difficult than most economic
problems because etiquette is not law, and therefore not everyone is following it.
[I.e., we need a mechanism which is a Nash equilibrium for an asymmetric game where one side is
playing the rule of etiquette and the other side may or may not be. This can be orders of magnitude
more difficult than the symmetric problems with which we economists satisfy ourselves.]
Etiquette columns are fun because each summarizes a conflict and its resolution, often in a clever-in-a-good-way manner. Miss Manners (aka Ms JM of
Washington, Columbia) does an especially good job of keeping upbeat in the face
of conflict after conflict.
I picked up a copy of Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
[Martin, 1982], wherein she explains her own frustration with the misunderstanding of etiquette:
If Miss Manners hears any more contemptuous description of etiquette
as being a matter of ’knowing which fork to use,’ she will run amok
with a sharp weapon, and the people she attacks will all be left with
95
96
CHAPTER 4. ECONOMICS TODAY
four tiny holes in their throats as if they had been the victims of twin
vampires. [p 119]
[Of course, this doesn’t keep her from spending six pages on the question. We have to let that
slide, along with the occasional letter in the way of ‘I was reading a historical novel that described an
odd item. What is it?’ We must allow Miss Manners her turn-of-the-last-century fetishes. And I find
the third person tone amusing—some of our more trendy columnists below emulate it directly—but
some tire of it1 .]
Many of her columns are about simple restraint. Don’t gossip, don’t go around
pointing out other people’s errors of etiquette, don’t indulge in rudeness in response
to rudeness. In the context of economic jargon, it’s a simple question of internalizing externalities, reminding the reader to time-discount appropriately, and establishing default norms to minimize cognitive effort regarding which fork to use so
people can focus on the important things. Such principles seem simple enough,
but like the principle of utility maximization, there are endless applications and
variants.
She also frequently receives and prints letters in the way of “Dear Miss Manners: I was an arse, but I have a justification. Back me up here—I was right, right?”
Those columns rather literally write themselves.
And then there’s the clever reply. Economists eat this stuff up: given a system
of rules, how can one elegantly achieve some seemingly difficult goal?
As for the rudeness of others, Miss Manners finds that is conquered by
politeness. For example, a gentleman of Miss Manners’ acquaintance
dislikes being honked at by impatient drivers for not starting his automobile quickly enough when a traffic signal turns to green. Instead
of honking back, however, he puts on his emergency brake, emerges
from his car, presents himself to the honker in the vehicle behind, and
inquires gently, “Did you summon me?” [p 4]
Many inquiries are of the form ’this used to be the standard form of etiquette,
but it’s obsolete now, right?’ These letters are the most informative, because they
are another way of saying ’I think this rule is arbitrary’, which, as above, is false
for any sustainable rule of etiquette. There is a limited set of rules that are obsolete,
primarily because we no longer have a fairer sex whose members do nothing but
bear children and swoon from time to time. But determining whether a rule is
indeed no longer valid requires an honest knowledge of why it was in place before,
rather than a dismissive ’oh, how Victorian’.
One or two pals of mine have pointed out that different societies have different
manners. I’m no stranger to the idea of multiple equilibria, and there are always
1
http://www.5ives.com/archives/2005/11/15/five-people-of-whom-i-confess-to-being-a-
4.2. NEOCLASSICISM WATCH
97
surface issues like shaking with the left hand or showing the soles of one’s feet, but
I can think of no cultures where fundamentals of interpersonal relations, general
courtesy and some set of default social norms that people can fall back on, are not
observed. The reader is invited to leave examples for discussion in the comments.
Advice Why recommend Miss Manners over more sensational advisers? It is the
difference between an etiquette column, focused on balancing competing goals to
form a society, and an advice column, focused on helping people to think more
clearly where irrationality sometimes prevails. ’Dear sex advice columnist: I was
thinking with my crotch and now I’m miserable. What should I do?’ The advice
column presents interesting stories and solutions, but is a different animal from the
etiquette column.
Further, many such columns work hard on maintaining the sensationalness by
focusing on surface novelty of the ‘I recently became a man, and am seeking someone who recently became a woman, but I’m running into difficulty’ variety, instead
of the never-changing basics of human relations. Miss Manners’ advice works for
boys, girls, and everybody in between. E.g., “It is the essence of social flirting
that no one—not even the participants—should be positive that anything more was
intended than simple enjoyment and admiration.” [p 276] Such advice will work
as well in the tea room as in the dungeon.
4.2
Neoclassicism watch
9 September 2004
I’ve spent a lot of time complaining about neoclassicists, as have many others—
Mirowski comes to mind, but a huge amount of non-economist social scientists
talk about this; a very active anti-Chicago-school club of political scientists called
Perestroika also stand out. But despite the alarmists, I think the purist neoclassical
worldview is on the wane, and the hardcore neoclassicist is becoming a rare breed.
Academia [Some readers may want to skip to the policy section, below.] My
impression of the last decade or so of economic theory is that it has been concerned
with going beyond the standard ‘everybody perfectly maximizes a self-interested
utility function’ framework. There are a few reasons for this, the first being that the
framework is obviously too narrow. The pro from overnarrowness is that you can
explain a lot of behavior using a few simple rules, which is generally a scientifically
good thing and worth pursuing as far as it’ll go. The cons are that from a few
axioms you only get a few results before you have to start trying too hard. After
98
CHAPTER 4. ECONOMICS TODAY
so many decades of pushing a handful of axioms, even the most driven and devout
are basically running out of things to explain, and the explanations are becoming
increasingly tenuous.
Where to from here? The prevailing method is not to throw out the whole
framework, but to expand things. People are still maximizing a utility function,
but the utility function may be allowed to have other elements. E.g., I am a fan
of including an axiomatic desire to emulate others. That plus the standard framework leads to more (and more plausible) results. Others, notably the Kahneman
and Tversky school, are revising the ‘perfectly maximizing’ part to take into account that people commit systematic errors in perception and reasoning. From my
perspective, these wide-path approaches are the prevailing standard in economics,
and will be for a long time. There are other approaches as well, where people have
rules of behavior that don’t use the word ‘maximize’ at all, but I think they remain
on the fringes (which is not to imply that they are less valid or should remain on
the fringes).
There are still defenders. In my own limited experience, I think that people
starting off life as an economist are very likely to be attracted to narrow-path
neoclassicism, and in an ontogeny-recapitulates-phylogeny sort of way, they go
through the process of finding out that the narrow path has basically found all it
has to find, and that it has valid critiques. And, as below, politics influence methods.
So to summarize this section: the narrow-path Chicago school has become a
straw man that few if any academics fully believe in. I acknowledge that I myself
am very guilty of beating this straw man at times, and narrow-path fans do certainly
still exist, but the energy of the non-economist social scientist could probably be
better spent just ignoring the narrow-path people and working on making the wide
path work for everybody.
Policy I met an IMF economist last night. To overgeneralize the overgeneralizations made in the past, IMF economists are famous for being obnoxiously narrowpath; this is in contrast to World Bank economists who are a bunch of hippies, most
of whom have little faith in the narrow path, while others are off the path entirely.
Ms PM of Washington, Columbia, has been an economist at the IMF for about a
year now, but being young and hip and two degrees of social separation from me,
she was not inclined to be a cold-hearted conservative. So I asked her about these
critiques of the IMF.
Her first response was that it’s the politicians. The Treasury and even the U.S.
Congress have a say on what the IMF publishes, and can veto research. She bitterly
cited examples of political censorship. The narrow-path Chicago school is as pro-
4.2. NEOCLASSICISM WATCH
99
business as a methodology can get, meaning that political influence (invariably by
conservatives) filters out anything that isn’t narrow-path. I have hung out with
many more WB people, and have never heard them mention political censorship of
WB research.
Her next argument was that the neoclassical methodology is the only one that’s
relevant to the currency-type issues that the IMF studies, so all the wide-path stuff
is just off track. I think this isn’t wholly true, but it is true that the macro literature
is behind the curve on widening the path, meaning that the bulk of established
literature is indeed hardcore neoclassical. On top of this, the IMF senior staff is
another decade or two behind the curve, because that’s when they stopped learning
new tricks (that’ll be us someday). This is also consistent with another of Ms PM’s
explanations: that those who are interested in other methods (which are evidently
still cutting-edge) tend to leave the IMF for academia. Maybe fifteen years from
now, their wide-path research will become IMF orthodoxy.
The other prevalent complaint about the IMF is that they are maximizing currency stability where they could be maximizing education, class or gender equality,
or any of a number of touchy-feely things that we humans care about. P was moreor-less unapologetic about this: although economists come to the IMF because they
care about the developing world and truly want to help, it’s the IMF’s mandate that
they focus on money issues and leave development issues to the World Bank.
But this is a truly problematic stance because IMF policy clearly, obviously
affects development. Most directly (and P has the literature to prove this), if the
IMF cuts off a country, then nobody will lend to them ever, regardless of the reasons
for the IMF’s decison. When the WB tries to fund a project to build a sewer system
in a few villages in that country, it won’t be able to get backing. As a result, the
IMF pretty much never truly excommunicates a country.
More indirectly, every IMF loan comes with conditions. All loans of any sort
do, of course: it would take me all day to list the conditions on my mortgage.
P gives the example that a loan to Ethiopia a few years back with the condition
that the money be used to pay the wages of workers who were on the verge of
revolt. The IMF started the funding, saw that it was all being stolen by kleptocratic
governors, and cut off the loans. What are ya gonna do.
Other conditionalities are a bigger deal, notably about size of government. This
harks to the competing macroeconomic schools: the Keynsian school says that government spending can expand growth, while the narrow-path Chicago school says
that big government is always bad. The Chicago school won at the IMF on this
point, and cuts in government are often demanded, without regard to the development and distributional impact of these cuts.
It is my opinion that the conditionalities can and should be development oriented. Why not demand that a country take steps to put more girls in schools before
100
CHAPTER 4. ECONOMICS TODAY
loaning them cash? Is this really more interventionist than a demand that a country cut government bureaucracy before lending cash? I’d like to write a whole lot
more on this, but you get the picture: the IMF is an interventionist institution which
places conditionalities on its loans, and those conditionalities need to be written in
concert with the people who care about development, even if the narrow path dicates that accommodating these other issues may hinder the IMF’s core goals. But
you knew that.
All of these are probably factors in the overall story of why the WB is filled
with wide-path hippies and yet there are no recycling bins in the IMF public spaces.
There are probably other ineffable issues: Bob Lucas is said to have said: ”Once
you start thinking about growth it is difficult to think about anything else”; the
WB’s economists think about growth all day long nonstop, and that’s just not the
job of the IMF’s economists. That plus political pressure can create a different
mindset where the narrow-path isn’t unattractive.
Generalizing beyond the IMF, the narrow path is convenient for a certain set of
conservative beliefs (as I’ve discussed endlessly in this essay), and so the narrow
path will always have a place in propping up the conservative side. I’d like to say
that there’s a trickle-out effect where as academic research becomes more widepath, the discourse in the rest of the world will gradually take on the same direction,
but this is probably too optimistic. So long as conservatives still walk the Earth, the
narrow path will never die in public discourse and the policymaking community.
4.3
The future of economics
22 February 2005
Here is my terminology: Narrow Path economics is the Chicago school stuff
that everybody loves to hate, in which people perfectly maximize a narrowlydefined utility function. The Wide Path expands upon this, with people who can’t
do the reams of math necessary for perfect maximization and who include more
squishy things in their utility function, like other-regarding preferences and personal identity.2
To date, my mental model of the future of economics has been the wide path.
That is, at the current course, we’ll still be writing down utility functions twenty
2
Am waiting for you guys to pick up on the terminology. I remain the only hit on the planet for
“wide path economics” in all the major search engines. I’m stealing the terminology from Buddhism,
by the way: the Narrow Path is based strictly on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, and is cynical
and individualistic. The Wide Path incorporates teachings from all over the place, and is generally
what we think of when we think Buddhism.
4.3. THE FUTURE OF ECONOMICS
101
years from now and trying to somehow maximize them (or satisfice them, or whatever).
I hate to name drop, but I had dinner with Lord RL of London, UK, the other
day, and I asked him where he thought economics was going. Is there anything
beyond utility functions?, and he says yes, there’s the problem of where those
utility functions come from. And that, in turn, may best be explained by the groups
and the environment in which a person lives.
[Lord RL’s work, both on wages and on human happiness, is based heavily
on the context in which a person finds him/her/itself. A wage which is miseryinducing in the U.S.A. would let you live an easy life in other parts of the world.
So how do people get away with modeling preferences in absolute terms which
wholly ignore the surroundings?]
For the fanatical individualist, who sprung whole from his own head, this is
controversial, but I think the rest of us are not surprised. Of course preferences
come partly from some internal milling and partly from some external influences.
The problem, though, is how we should model that. As noted, we have the
machinery to write down and study existing preferences in a thousand different
ways, but we’re basically lacking in describing ways by which preferences are
formed. This is basically another rephrasing of my favorite economic question:
where does value come from?
The answer is a no-brainer for only the most rudimentary of goods—maybe
sugar and water. Go past that, and it’s a mystery world which we assume away.
Sociologists do not. There are two approaches in the psychology and sociology
literature, which compete but dovetail. The first is identity theory, which posits that
all of us have an identity, which is an arbitrary position invented via interaction with
others. Notably, it comes from play. We assume certain roles—daughter, boss,
economist, schlamazel. The magic occurs in that once we are assigned these roles,
they start to matter. I could care less about knowing how to clear clogs in my sewer
line, because I’m not a plumber, but I care deeply about my ability to calculate the
ratio of a distribution’s kurtosis to its variance squared. It’s a long, hard road to
explain why this has value to me in terms of getting fat and reproducing, but if we
base my utility function upon my self-identification as a mathematical economist,
and my desire to play that role well, then my unyielding interest in calculating the
properties of probability distributions is obvious.
So there’s one way that we can assume utility functions into existence: posit
that people engage in social roles—they play—and that preferences come from
those forms of play. This leaves us only to describe how these roles are formed.
The other option, which sociologists call social identity theory, involves simple
group membership: we join or are forced into certain groups, and the preferences
of those groups become our preferences. Now we have only to model why we wind
102
CHAPTER 4. ECONOMICS TODAY
up in the groups we wind up in.
In both cases, individuals derive value from some things and not others because
of the social position they find themselves in. First the society defines their utility
function, and then they shape society based on their utility function.
The next step in economic theory, which has already begun in some circles, will
be to eschew the Ayn Rand-like individualistic streak which runs through most
of economic theory, which is providing us with diminishing theoretical returns
anyway, and to describe people as both shaping their environment and being shaped
by their environment.
4.4
The statistics style report
10 September 2006
It may sound like an oxymoron, but there is such a thing as fashionable statistical analysis. Where did this come from? How is it that our tests for Truth, upon
which all of science relies, can vacillate from season to season like hemlines?
Before answering that question, note that statistics as a whole is not arbitrary.
The Central Limit Theorem is a mathematical theorem like any other, and if you
believe the basic assumptions of mathematics, you have to believe the CLT. The
CLT and developments therefrom were the basis of stats for a century or two there,
from Gauss on up to the early 1900s when the whole system of distributions (Binomial, Bernoulli, Gaussian, t, chi-squared, Pareto) was pretty much tied up. Much
of this, by the way, counts not as statistics but as probability.
Next, there’s the problem of using these objective truths to describing reality.
That is, there’s the problem of writing models. Models are a human invention to
describe nature in a human-friendly manner, and so are at the mercy of human
trends. Allow me to share with you my arbitrary, unsupported, citation-free personal observations.
Number crunching The first thread of trendiness is technology-driven. In every generation, there’s a line you’ve got to draw and say ‘everything after this is
computationally out of reach, so we’re assuming it away’, and the assume-it-away
line drifts into the distance over time. Here’s a little something from a 1939 stats
textbook on fitting time trends:
To fit a trend by the freehand method draw a line through a graph of
the data in such a way as to describe what appears to the eye to be the
long period movement. . . . The drawing of this line need not be strictly
4.4. THE STATISTICS STYLE REPORT
103
freehand but may be accomplished with the aid of transparent straight
edge or a “French” curve.
As you can imagine, this advice does not appear in more recent stats texts. In
this respect, a stats text can actually become obsolete. However, true and honest
approximations like this are relatively rare. Instead, more computing power allows
new paradigms that were before just written off as impossible.
Computational ability has brought about two revolutions in statistics. The first
is the linear projection (aka, regression). Running a regression requires inverting
a matrix, with dimension equal to the number of variables in the regression. A
two-by-two matrix is easy to invert (ad − bc, remember?) but it gets significantly
more computationally difficult as the number of variables rises. If you want to run
a ten-variable regression using a hand calculator, you’ll need to set aside a few days
to do the matrix inversion. My laptop will do the work in 0.002 seconds. [It’s still in
under a second up to about 500 by 500, but 1,000 by 1,000 took 8.9 seconds. That includes the time
it took to generate a million random numbers.]
So revolution number one, when computers first came out, was a shift from
simple correlations and analysis of variance and covariance to linear regression.
This was the dominant paradigm from when computers became common until a
few years ago.
The second revolution was when computing power became adequate to do
searches for optima. Say that you have a simple function to take in inputs and
produce an output therefrom. Given your budget for inputs, what mix of inputs
maximizes the output? If you have the function in a form that you can solve algebraically, then it’s easy, but let us say that it is somehow too complex to solve
via Lagrange multipliers or what-have-you, and you need to search for the optimal
mix.
You’ve just walked in on one of the great unsolved problems of modern computing. All your computer can do is sample values from the function—if I try these
inputs, then I’ll get this output—and if it takes a long time to evaluate one of these
samples, then the computer will want to use as few samples as possible. So what is
the method of sampling that will find the optimum in as few samples as possible?
There are many methods to choose from, and the best depends on enough factors
that we call it an art more than a science.
In the statistical context, the paradigm is to look at the set of input parameters that will maximize the likelihood of the observed outcome. To do this, you
need to check the likelihood of every observation, given your chosen parameters.
For a linear regression, the dimension of your task was equal to the number of regression parameters, maybe five or ten; for a maximum likelihood calculation, the
dimension is related to the number of data points, maybe a thousand or a million.
104
CHAPTER 4. ECONOMICS TODAY
Executive summary: the problem of searching for a likelihood function’s optimum
is significantly more computationally intensive than running a linear regression.
So it is no surprise that in the last twenty years, we’ve seen the emergence of
statistical models built on the process of finding an optimum for some complex
function. Most of the stuff below is a variant on the search-the-space method. But
why is the most likely parameter favored over all others? There’s the Cramer-Rao
Lower Bound and the Neyman-Pearson Lemma, but in the end it’s just arbitrary.
Gauss had no theorems that this framework gives superior models relative to linear
projection, but it does make better use of computing technology.
Hemlines The second thread of statistical fashion is whim-driven like any other
sort of fashion. Golly, the population collectively thinks, everybody wore hideously
bright clothing for so long that it’d be a nice change to have some understated tones
for a change. Or: now that music engineers all have ProTools, everything is a wall
of sound; it’d be great to just hear a guy with a guitar for a while. Then, a few years
later, we collectively agree that we need more fun colors and big bands. Repeat the
cycle until civilization ends.
Statistical modeling sees the same cycles, and the fluctuation here is between
the parsimony of having models that have few moving parts and the descriptiveness
of models that throw in parameters describing the kitchen sink. In the past, parsimony won out on statistical models because we had the technological constraint.
If you pick up a stats textbook from the 1950s, you’ll see a huge number of
methods for dissecting covariance. The modern textbook will have a few pages
describing a Standard ANOVA (analysis of variance) Table, as if there’s only one.
This is a full cycle from simplicity to complexity and back again. Everybody was
just too overwhelmed by all those methods, and lost interest in them when linear
regression became cheap.
Along the linear projection thread, there’s a new method introduced every year
to handle another variant of the standard model. E.g., last season, all the cool kids
were using the Arellano-Bond method on their time series so they could assume
away endogeneity problems. The list of variants and tricks has filled many volumes. If somebody used every applicable trick on a data set, the final work would
be supremely accurate—and a terrible model. The list of tricks balloons, while the
list of tricks used remains small or constant. Maximum likelihood tricks are still
legion, but I expect that the working list will soon find itself pared down to a small
set as optimum finding becomes standardized.
In the search-for-optima world, the latest trend has been in ‘non-parametric’
models. First, there has never been a term that deserved air-quotes more than
this. A ‘non-parametric’ model searches for a probability density that describes a
4.4. THE STATISTICS STYLE REPORT
105
data set. The set of densities is of infinite dimension. If all you’ve got a hundred
data points, you ain’t gonna find a unique element of <∞ with that. So instead,
you specify a certain set of densities, like sums of Normal distributions, and then
search for that subset that leads to a nice fit to the data. You’ll wind up with a
set of what we call parameters that describe that derived distribution, such as the
weights, means, and variances of the Normal distributions being summed.
But ‘non-parametric’ models allow you to have an arbitrary number of parameters. Your best fit to a 100-point data set is a sum of 100 Normal distributions.
If you fit 100 points with 100 parameters, everybody would laugh at you, but it’s
possible. In that respect, the ‘non-parametric’ setup falls on the descriptive end of
the descriptive-parsimonious end of the scale. In my opinion.
I don’t want to sound mean about ‘non-parametric’ methods, by the way. It’s
entirely valid to want to closely fit data, and I have used the method myself. But I
really think the name is false advertising. How about distribution-fitting methods
or optimal distribution estimation?
Bayesian methods are increasingly cool. There are the computational problems, that if you want to assume something more interesting than Normal priors
and likelihoods, then you need a computer. Those have been surmounted, leaving
us with the philosophy issues. In the context here, those boil down to parsimony.
Your posterior distribution may be even weirder than a multi-humped sum of Normals, and the only way to describe it may just be to draw the darn graph. Thus,
Bayesian methods are also a shift to the description-over-parsimony side.
[ Method of Moments estimators have also been hip lately. I frankly don’t know where that’s
going, because I don’t know them very well.
Also, this guy really wants multilevel modeling to be the Next Big Thing in the linear model
world, and makes a decent argument for that. ]
You can see that the increasing computational ability invites shifting away from
parsimony. Since PCs really hit the world of day-to-day stats recently, we’re in the
midst of a swing toward description. We can expect an eventual downtick toward
simpler models, which will be helped by the people who write stats packages—as
opposed to the researchers who caused the drift toward complexity—because they
write simple routines that implement these methods in the simplest way possible.
So is your stats textbook obsolete? It’s probably less obsolete than people will
make it out to be. The basics of probability have not moved since the Central Limit
Theorems were solidified. In the end, once you’ve picked your paradigm, there
aren’t really many methods out there for truly and honestly cutting corners; most
novelties are just about doing detailed work regarding a certain type of data or set
of assumptions. Further, those linear projection methods or correlation tables work
pretty well for a lot of purposes.
But the fashionable models that are getting buzz shift every year, and last year’s
106
CHAPTER 4. ECONOMICS TODAY
model is often considered to be naı̈ve or too parsimonious or too cluttered or otherwise an indication that the author is not down with the cool kids—and this can
affect peer review outcomes. A textbook that focuses on the sort of details that
were pressing five years ago, instead of just summarizing them in a few pages, will
have to pass up on the detailed tricks the cool kids are coming up with this season—
which will in turn affect peer reviews for papers written based on the textbook’s
advice. All this is entirely frustrating, because we like to think that our science is
searching for some sort of true reflection of constant reality, yet the methods that
are acceptable for seeking out constant reality depend upon a bit more on human
whim than I’d really like.
4.5
An annoying economist trick
20 October 2003
So Jack Snow, Secretary of the Treasury, stopped by for lunch. We had lunch in
the press room, which made it feel like a press conference with salad.
Secretary Snow has been around: he was a professor of Economics for a while,
head of a business coalition, stuff. Not a dumb guy. He was also smart enough
to acknowledge that many of the people in the room knew more facts and/or were
better economists than he.
So one of the primary points of interest among these economist people was
around Bush’s proposed tax cuts. Consensus among the economists was that they’re
a dumb idea, which will blow up the budget deficit to immense proportions. The
logic being: if the government cuts taxes, it gets less money. See how that works?
Now, economists are enamored of something which some call ‘The law of unintended consequences’, the gist of which is that everything is interrelated, so when
you change one variable, you need to take into account everything else in the system too. The usual application is as follows:
1. Advocate of policy P makes a claim that it will change variable X for the better.
2. Opponent of policy P then invokes the law of unintended consequences, by
expanding the framework to include variable Y. If the effect on variable Y is detrimental, then opponent satisfactorily proclaims that policy P is dumb and should
not be implemented.
This has the rhetorical benefits that it makes the opponent look like a more subtle
thinker, and allows him/her to keep pointing out variable Y every time anybody
says anything about policy P. It has three rhetorical problems: it leaves open the
question that maybe we could open up the framework a little further to include
variable Z, where policy P is the best thing to happen to variable Z since frigging
sliced bread; it fails to take into account the (often extremely difficult) question of
4.5. AN ANNOYING ECONOMIST TRICK
107
whether the benefit to variable X outweighs the detriment to variable Y; and after
the third or fourth time opponent points out variable Y, it gets really annoying and
frustrating.
So Secretary Snow points out that cutting taxes will help to make the economy
more efficient. A more efficient economy means a larger tax base, and therefore
more tax revenue.
We can apply the above critiques in sequence: it doesn’t take into account other
possible expansions of the framework, like how not taxing dividends breaks the
corporation-as-person metaphor, and allows for shifty dealing between the CEO’s
personal accounts and those of the corporation. Don’t tax dividends, and suddenly
every corporation is going to be paying huge dividends instead of paying salaries
or keeping that money in the corporation.
Next, it doesn’t take into account the relative weight of two effects: we’ve cut
tax rates but raised the tax base. Determining which effect will prevail is a hard
question, which we should defer to the economists who put out the effort to analyze
this question in detail. Their verdict: there is no fucking way that the expanded tax
base will make up for the cut in rates. The cuts will absolutely, positively, balloon
the budget deficit. This is using any model you want, including the super-optimistic
model of the Congressional Budget Office, which reports to Secretary Snow.
The sad part comes from that third critique of the law of unintended consequences: confronted with a room full of really smart economists (and me) who
were unanimously in agreement that making these tax cuts permanent is a supremely
bad idea, he had no recourse but to annoyingly keep repeating that the tax base will
grow. He did this in a number of ways, affably joking about how those silly people
in the business press don’t know the difference between debt capital and equity
capital (like it matters here), talking about how we need to encourage innovation,
and the other usual neoconservative chestnuts.
Though the lunch was ‘off the record’, I don’t really feel that I’m betraying
anything here: somewhere between most and all sane economists agree that Bush’s
tax cuts will expand the deficit—at a time when Baby Boomers are about to start
claiming social security and the USA needs to rebuild Iraq, since it’s broken; and
Secretary Snow stands by his boss in supporting these cuts. The big question I’m
left wondering is whether Secretary Snow believed what he was saying. He’s married to this position, either by his own beliefs or those of President Bush; how many
experts does it take to get a person to divorce himself from a bad belief?
108
4.6
CHAPTER 4. ECONOMICS TODAY
Economists as mystics
16 February 2005
One could divide the mystical world into those who believe that there’s an indescribable power which comes from within us humans, and another side which believes that there is an indescribable power which comes from without. Some of the
Eastern religions are of the first class, expounding on how we need only channel
and focus our forces to achieve better outcomes in life; Western religions typically
advise that people should focus on keeping in good standing with the outside force.
But I’m an economist, so why am I talking about mysticism? Because neoclassical economics, the hyper-rational, overanalytic discipline which we all love
to make fun of, is simultaneously a form of both types of mysticism. The first level
is the purely individual. The neoclassicist writes down a thousand equations which
take us an hour to consciously work through, but, he explains, a human can intuit
the result and act according to his or her best interests without even breaking an
intellectual sweat. Somewhere deep inside, people just know what’s best for them,
and how to get it.
I was at a presentation on the economic study of happiness the other day, and a
listener from the Cato Institute raised his hand and asked, ‘Why are we maximizing happiness? If somebody wishes to seek out something else, why stop them?’
Again, our friend from Cato is espousing his mystic beliefs. That which people
seek out is not something we can meter or even put a cute word on; it is something
deeply personal and unique to the inner, unexaminable souls of every individual.
Whatever it is, our inner being knows what it seeks and how to find it.
The second level of mysticism is at the group level. The invisible hand acts in
the role of a deity in some of the most traditional senses of the word, except for the
minor detail that it is entirely comprised of humans. It is a traditional deity who can
readily be described as having a will, whose actions may be generally predictable
but who still has any of a number of incomprehensible whims, and who is of course
omniscient, affecting all of us and the whole of the Earth on which we live.
If we treat this deity well, then things will go well for us, but if we do not—
by fighting against it or attempting to restrict it—then we ourselves will be worse
of. Debates about the beneficence of this deity are very much like debates with a
Christian pastor about why bad things happen to good people: the Hand moves in
mysterious ways, which we as humans can’t necessarily understand on a personby-person level. But we must remain confident that humanity as a whole is better
off because of the Hand’s plan, even if it works badly for some poor souls. Besides,
those people probably did something to piss the Hand off. If laziness is a sin, we’re
all sinners.
However, the difference between this sort of deity and that of the more tradi-
4.7. ETHICAL TACOS
109
tional mystic traditions is that this one is clearly comprised entirely of humans. Its
scope is exactly the size of the scope of humanity, and before mankind existed, it
did not. The cynics will argue that all this holds for the Christian deity as well, but
that is to deny the axioms of the faith.
The Hand is a unique deity, but there is a faith in it nonetheless. While the rest
of us fret and worry about how we will get along next year when there are so many
problems to be had, the neoclassicist is reassured and confident. The Hand will
provide.
By describing neoclassicism as a mystical faith, I do not mean to belittle it;
there’s something to be said for having faith in something. We’re dumb. There are a
host of things that we will never understand, and these things are rather threatening,
and would fill our heads with worry if we let them. Faith is immensely beneficial,
because it reassures us that our deficiencies are not so bad, and good will prevail in
the end (if only we define good correctly).
The neoclassicist has the deepest of faith, both in our individual human ability
to find what is best, and the society’s ability to provide. It is those of us who
question that faith, who insist on trying to accommodate individual failings and
who do endless, fruitless calculations to determine what the future will bring, who
deny that which is incalculable in humanity.
4.7
Ethical tacos
8 October 2004
asked me about this article3 ,
Mr. JE of New Orleans, Louisiana,
which is a libertarian commentary on a boycott of Taco Bell. The story is one we’ve heard a hundred
times before: workers are mistreated, in this case the Immokalee Indians of South
Florida who harvest the tomatoes, then liberal college students hear about it and
a boycott is organized, causing a couple of college campuses to close their Taco
Bells and many a chalupa to not get sold.
The libertarian response is predictable: the boycott is interfering with the market, which only hurts the people whom it is intended to help. “It is an attack on
capitalism and an attempt to impose moral connotations to simple purchasing actions of consumption goods. [...] Prices are not set by arbitrary moral standards,
but rather by available levels of supply and demand in the market.”
But the people who are boycotting Taco Bell are the market. The first piece
of confusion in the libertarian view is the belief that there are millions of perfectly
atomic consumers within the market, who don’t interact, and then there are these
Jesuits and labor unions who come to them, from outside the market, and stick a
3
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1630
110
CHAPTER 4. ECONOMICS TODAY
screwdriver in the works. But the students who boycott are as much on the demand
side of the market as the guys who still buy their tacos from TB, and it is an error to
suddenly exclude somebody from a model of the market because they care about
ethics. The above article acknowledges this: ”Boycotting Taco Bell lowers the
demand for tacos” and in the same paragraph denies it: ”Staging a boycott against
Taco Bell does not change the guided self interest of taco eating teenagers.”
Why would a libertarian make such selective inclusions and exclusions? The
root problem is in the narrow-path presumption that a person’s utility function may
only include a limited set of elements. Taste, convenience, price: OK. Ethics,
affect, peer influences: forbidden. Academic economic models facilitate this, since
price is much easier to model than ethics, and it’s generally true that ethics really
don’t enter into most people’s utility functions as strongly as price.
But ethics do matter, for everyone. I believe that every one of us could think
of one product out there that they would never buy, whose production is somehow
repulsive: maybe Metallica CDs, snuff videos, copies of the Communist Manifesto,
or Krupps coffee makers. I’m a fanatic vegetarian, so I’ve got my list. It would
be silly to put these considerations outside of the market mechanism: my utility
from a Taco Bell taco stems directly from the fact that many franchises use animal
fat in their rice (according to this source4 . Last time I saw an official ingredients
list, it listed chicken stock in the rice, but that’s apparently changed). To the extent
that I’m a part of the market, the demand curve is directly affected by my ethical
beliefs.
An interesting feature of ethics is that the vast majority of people don’t care, but
for those that do it’s a deal-breaker. This is hard to model for the economists, and
hard to deal with for the companies: do you alienate a thousand people for the sake
of saving a penny on a million units? Part of the equation is the contagion problem,
that if a person is sufficiently alienated then they will not only stop consuming, but
they’ll complain about you to all of their friends, which could hurt sales still further.
The cost/benefit analysis would be different for every case: it’s surely true that a
company would have to shut down if it tried to satisfy all the ethical qualms of all
of its consumers, but it’s also surely true that a company which ignores the ethics
of all of its consumers shoots itself in the foot.
Affect also matters. The clearest proof of this is that companies like Taco Bell
spend billions of dollars a year on it. The narrow-path economists insist that advertising exists only to inform the consumer of new products or perhaps demonstrate
the company’s stability, but people who actually work in advertising would laugh
at this: most advertising is about making the product emotionally appealing, by
implying that attractive and desirable people use the product, or otherwise making
4
http://www.tofuchick.bravehost.com/safe2.html
4.7. ETHICAL TACOS
111
you feel warm and fuzzy when you see their logo. If you can get people to have
an emotional attachment to your product, then you can charge more for the same
product—that is, emotional attachment is the best investment a perfectly rational
producer can make.
The academic economists downplay affect for the same reasons they downplay
ethics: hard to model, and price generally matters more. Many will argue that
it’s reasonable to ignore it in the design of an academic model, since many of
the features of emotional attachment can be explained using other things like a
desire for consistency or shared preferences between producer and consumer. But
regardless of whether it should be included in a good model, it is certainly a realworld issue on which real-world companies spend billions of dollars.
Ethics and affect are tied. My affect toward Taco Bell is based upon all my
information, including both the advertisements and my knowledge of how their
proverbial sausage is made. The aforementioned libertarian article is happy to
acknowledge half of this, by the way, pointing out that much of Taco Bell’s demand
comes from that frigging dog that says ‘Yo quiero Taco Bell’. [Better would have
been ‘Quiero el taco bello’, meaning ‘I want the beautiful taco’. But, alas, Taco
Bell is named for its founder, Mr. Bell.] I can not explain why our libertarian
friends say that demand can be shifted by something as squishy as a talking dog
but not from the squishy issues of ethics.
Consumers are irrational. We can make up general rules about how they’ll
behave (like how demand falls with price, though we can’t even prove that), but in
the end they’ll buy what they darn well please to. The role of the companies on the
supply side of the market is to work out what those irrational desires are, regardless
of where they came from, and cater to them. And the role of the think tank, by the
way, is not to wish away those irrationalities or define those people it considers to
be irrational as somehow outside of the market, but to discuss how society can best
facilitate suppliers meeting those arbitrary demands. This is a hard question when
the strong desires of a few (for fair-pay tomatoes) directly clash with the weak
desires of the many (for cheap tomatoes), but the article I’m critiquing ignores it,
and I must acknowledge that I really can’t offer a generalized solution.
For Taco Bell’s owners, paying its workers more should be part of the advertising budget. If behaving within the bounds of the consumer’s ethical beliefs helps to
improve consumers’ visceral affect, then it makes as much sense as spending millions on affect-improving advertising, no matter how irrational or arbitrary those
ethical rules may be.
In this context, the boycott absolutely makes sense for the laborers, although it
is potentially risky. Consumers with certain ethical beliefs will want to maximize
the cost to Taco Bell for ignoring those beliefs, which means not buying tacos and
convincing as many people as possible to not buy. This works entirely within the
112
CHAPTER 4. ECONOMICS TODAY
market mechanism, by moving demand. To repeat the quote from above: “Prices
are not set by arbitrary moral standards, but rather by available levels of supply
and demand in the market.” This is true, but levels of demand are influenced by
arbitrary moral standards, which then influence price. The more vehement the
arbitrary moral standards, the more influence they will have on price.
What T.B.’s managers will do about the increasing effect its labor policy has
on demand is hard to guess. It may acknowledge that a penny a taco, shifting
everybody’s demand down a touch, is worth the benefit from restoring lost demand
among boycotters and their expanding network. It may also find other means; such
as buying tomatoes from some other group of laborers who aren’t as organized; or
maybe just ignoring the whole thing and reducing tomato purchases, losing money
for the workers (which is the libertarian prediction; see below). The boycott has
both costs and benefits to the workers, and I certainly don’t have the numbers in
both columns calculated—but then neither does our libertarian friend. Meanwhile,
I have no reason to think the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is run by idiots,
and I expect they are aware that sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the grease
and sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the shaft. They are aware that Taco Bell’s
decision will be based entirely on costs and benefits, not the board of director’s
heart strings—and so they are doing exactly the right thing to convert their ethical
complaints into the largest possible shift in demand, which Taco Bell’s managers
(being rational market actors) will respond to.
5
T HE ECONOMY
5.1
The CLT again
24 November 2003
Ms AC of Pasadena, CA, writes: “If you’re taking suggestions for blog topics, I’d
appreciate a little economist speak on Wal-Mart. Everyone’s talking about WalMart in SoCal. Here’s an LA Times article about it.” [You’ll need a login.] You’re
right, Ms AC, that much ink has been spilled on the Wal-Mart question, but I think
our cognitive efforts are best spent on other topics; I’ll explain why.
Picture the following graph: at X = 1, we have the number of companies with
only one employee (Y =many), at X = 2, the number of companies with only two
employees (Y =not quite so many), and so on up to Wal-Mart. You get a curve that
starts off very tall and quickly descends, until you get to X = 1.4 million, where
Y = 1—Wal Mart.
[ [Technical part: This graph takes a particular shape, the Pareto Curve [Y = K/ exp(x), K
an arbitrary constant]. You get a Pareto distribution when you have a Normally distributed rate of
growth (expressed as a percentage of current size). I’m glossing over many details, and the sources
of variability that do exist; if you want more see Sutton [1997].]]
So the funny thing is that the shape of this curve doesn’t change. This graph
has been drawn for a century back, and it’s always the same. [Because Normally
distributed growth rates are a direct result of the immutable law of nature known
as the Central Limit Theorem (CLT, puerile pronunciation optional).] The scale
changes: if you haven’t noticed, there are more people on Earth now than there
were a century ago, and this means the entire curve gets bigger. There are many
more one-person businesses, and the point at which the natural Pareto curve is high
enough to support another business is now over a million.
Then observation bias kicks in: we pay little notice to the number of one-man
operations, and our mental count of corner shops increases in direct proportion to
our mental count of corners. But when the largest company in America is suddenly
surpassed by a still larger company, this is something we all take notice of.
113
114
CHAPTER 5. THE ECONOMY
So there’s my best economist-speak on the topic. The largest business in the
world will continue to get larger, but this isn’t interesting unless the entire distribution of firm sizes shifts, which doesn’t happen so much. Sometimes the top
ranked firm will be ousted by another, inspiring a flurry of business press articles,
but any sea-change, sky-is-falling generalizations we make from two data points is
guaranteed to be spurious.
Further, there is nothing revolutionary about how Wal Mart gained its top spot.
Its size in the Internet-and-ubiquitous-highway era is as appropriate as that of
Sears, Roebuck, & Co. in the Mail-and-railroad era. Wal Mart’s ability to haggle
supplier prices down is not revolutionary, nor is its efforts to keep its employees out
of unions and away from benefits. I mean, trying to keep workers from organizing
is nothing new; and despite McDonald’s’s best efforts, ‘McJob’ has still made it in
to the dictionary.
Now, one important feature to the natural growth of the whole firm-distribution
curve is that the size-of-one-person curve remains entirely fixed, with six billion
individuals who all have size one. This leads to a gigantic market asymmetry:
when 1,000 people compete against one employer, the one employer has any of a
number of advantages.
The natural counterpart to the firm is the labor union, and what I get from the
constant expansion of Wal Mart and the corresponding labor problems is that labor
unions aren’t keeping up. To be honest with you, dear reader, I don’t have data on
this [submissions welcome], but am inclined to believe that unions have a harder
time of expanding.
The key difference is that unions attempt to be democratic. For a firm, adding
a new store which won’t be as profitable as the first store is still a profit-making
venture; for a union, adding new workers will be a potential strain on the union’s
benefits system and are a dilution of the current members’ votes. [[Still further, there
are loads of legal restrictions on union organization that are just plain evil. Next time you meet
a conservative, ask him/her if he/she/it thinks unions should be legally restricted. Well-meaning
types believe that markets work best when they’re symmetric, so unions should have no arbitrary
legal restrictions; evil conservatives think that businessmen, not the market, are best at allocating
resources, so unions shouldn’t exist.]] I’m going too far afield here, but the size of one
unit of labor needs to keep up with the size of one unit of firm. The way to do this is
not to try to influence the distribution of firm sizes, which is basically immutable,
but to change the unions so that they can expand in pace.
5.2. HOW A CONTRACT DETAIL KEEPS DC BUBBLICIOUS
5.2
115
How a contract detail keeps DC Bubblicious
18 June 2004
I’m trying to buy a house. My lease for this USD900/month tree house is over in a
month, so I thought I’d give it a try.
My first problem is that housing prices in DC are absurdly high. For what my
brother paid for his large house in the ‘overheated’ San Diego market, I could buy a
crackhouse in Southeast. A fixer-upper with an up-and-coming location, the broker
would tell me.
You can look up price of last sale on washingtonpost.com, and it makes me
want to cry. The house I’m most interested in sold for $200,000 two years ago.
The asking price now, after the owners installed a new fridge and the passage of
time stained the carpeting: $600,000. It’s a small enough market that I guess a
bubble is easy to form.
The key fact in all of this is that the seller pays both brokers 3% of the closing
cost of the house. [[Formally, 6% is paid to the selling broker, who splits it with the buying
broker. So if there’s no buying broker, it’s still a 6% charge.]] The selling agent has a strong
incentive, therefore, to get the highest possible price for the house. Meanwhile, the
buying agent has a strong incentive to, um, get the highest possible price for the
house.
Which brings me to a general rant about real estate brokers. The few that I’ve
met have been on par with the stereotypical used car salesman. The online listings
mess up the address to put it in the wrong neighborhood. ‘Oh, we meant NE, not
NW. Easy mistake, ha ha. When can you come out for a showing? Can I send you
some other listings?’ I went to see one guy so that he’d show me a house or two
that his company lists, and wound up in a windowless room in the basement of the
agency, as he worked on convincing me that I should be his buying agent, and why
the market is not a bubble despite house prices doubling over the last few years
(I’m told 98% profits in five years, on average).
The system is a really beautiful one in a number of ways. There are only a
hundred or two brokers in DC, and they all know each other. When a house is
listed, pretty much every broker in the area gets the listing at once, and one will
always be happy to give you the phone number of another. Everybody has the key
to every lockbox.
So, as an economist: the home buying system is collegial, impressively organized, and perfectly designed to get as much cash out of the buyer as possible. The
fact that the seller pays both agents and that every agency is on both sides of the
market at once makes for a fucked system—and within the limits of Columbia, it
is extra-fucked.
116
5.3
CHAPTER 5. THE ECONOMY
How to bid optimally on ebay.
24 January 2004
If you’re not familiar with ebay (its name is not capitalized), the way the bidding scheme works is that it lets you put in your true value for the item, and then, if
you have the highest value, your ‘bidding elvis’ will bid the price up to the secondhighest price plus a nickel.
The theorists call this a second-price auction, in which everybody submits a
bid, the winner gets the item, but the winner pays the second-place price (plus
a nickel). This idea is very well-founded in the theory, because a second-price
auction is strategy-proof. The best thing for you to do is to think hard about what
the item is worth to you, and bid that amount. You can check for yourself that if
you deviate from this strategy in a second-price setup, there’s some situation where
you’re worse off than if you’d used the honest valuation rule.
We’re used to the highest-bidder-pays-highest-price auction, which is the most
intuitive, but there’s much to be said for the alternatives. One example, which I
always wanted to see implemented, is an all-pay, lowest bidder charity auction.
Everybody at the fundraiser places a bid for the item, and the person with the
highest bid takes the item home, as usual. But then everybody pays the lowest bid.
This gives you a lot of pressure to raise your bid. If you’re not the lowest bidder,
then whatever, but if you are, and there are a hundred people in the room, then
knocking your bid up by a dollar would give your favorite charity another hundred
dollars. Further, nobody pays more than the amount they wrote down, so nobody
can complain about making a contribution they weren’t prepared to make. A paper
somewhere proved that this is revenue-maximizing for whomever can implement
the thing; the fact that it’s all-pay means that it’ll only work for a charity, though.
Back to ebay. The optimal strategy in a second-price auction is to bid your
true valuation for the item, which still holds for ebay. But there’s one more consideration: most of the bidders don’t have as many years of auction theory as your
dear author, and don’t understand that it’s not a high-bid auction. That is, half
the audience gets the second-price thing, or behaves as if they do, and bids once
and leaves. The other half—or maybe even just one bidder—will check the darn
auction every five minutes and place a bid just higher than whatever the high bid
is, turning the thing into a first-price auction. Placing a bid only encourages these
unenlightened folk; we want them to bid as infrequently as possible. But you have
to bid, of course, which leads to the strategy we all know and love: place a bid
which represents your true valuation, but at the last minute. Hopefully, the ‘keep
raising the bid’ people aren’t there, and if they are, they don’t quite have time to
respond.
5.4. HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE ESCALATION CLAUSE117
5.4
How I learned to stop worrying and love the escalation
clause
22 June 2004
OK, so I took y’alls advice and bought a house in Baltimore. Finding it was pretty
easy: we went to Baltimore, called the number on the first ‘for sale’ sign we saw,
and asked them for the addresses of all the houses in the neighborhoods we wanted
for under USD400,000. Since all Realtors(R) have all listings, that went smoothly
and easily. We looked at the cheaper four out of the six that they gave us, and
picked one of those.
Once again, a buyer’s broker is about 80% unnecessary here in the modern day.
But if the buyer doesn’t have a broker, then the selling agent gets to double-bill the
seller, for six percent of the house instead of the usual three percent. The real estate
industry gets its six percent cut no matter what.
The offer was basically dull. It seems like the only two variables are: what sort
of home inspection clauses do you want, and do you want an escalation clause (see
below)? You also get to call the agent on assorted other things, for example this
one downplayed the fact that there’s asbestos insulation on the pipes and my right
to get that inspected. We had to write that one in. As often as he pointed out how
he was sticking to the ethics rules, I kept having to ask him about things that he
should have revealed.
The escalation clause
So the traditional method is a first-price sealed bid auction. You give a number,
other buyers give a number, and one evening the buyer opens all the envelopes and
finds the highest number. If you expect that there will be multiple bids, then you
include an escalation clause that if somebody else’s bid is higher than yours, you’ll
raise your bid to match theirs, plus a few bucks. Your escalation clause puts an
upper limit on how far up you’ll go.
Ebayers, you’ll notice that this exactly matches ebay’s bidding system. Herein
I’m assuming you’ve already read my notes on second price auctions in the how to
bid optimally on ebay entry.
Anyway, I give the escalation clause a whole separate entry because every last
real estate type I met characterized the escalation clause as some sort of extortionary humiliation that buyers have to suffer because it’s a seller’s market. But
no, it’s just an alternative type of auction. You’re still bidding against other buyers,
just like you were before, and you’ll only pay an iota more than the next guy.
I think the real estate industry got this one right (except for the phraseology).
A second price auction is, in my opinion, a much more together way of doing
118
CHAPTER 5. THE ECONOMY
business, requiring less guesswork all around. But it doesn’t work if there’s only
one serious bidder, so there’s the backup of a first price auction, for those houses
that only have interest from one or two buyers.
So the moral, dear house buyer, is: don’t fear the escalation clause—run with it.
Determine your true valuation for the house (not an easy task, I know), then make
a too-low base bid and an escalation clause up to your true valuation. If you win,
you’ll then pay exactly what you need to get the house, and if you lose, then you
would’ve had to pay more than the house was worth, so you’re better off. If you do
this, you’re way ahead of the other bidders who fear the scarily-named escalation
clause and thus place a high base bid and a too-low maximum bid.
5.5
Asymmetries in bargaining
26 April 2005
The big lesson from Adam Smith is that people trade when there is benefit to both
sides from doing so. If the widget is worth a dollar to the owner, but it’s worth
two dollars to a potential buyer, then they’ll find each other and trade, maybe for
$1.50, and both sides are better off by fifty cents. I.e., the seller gave up a dollar
in value in the widget but gained $1.50 in cash while the buyer gave up $1.50 cash
but gained two dollars in widget value. We conclude that letting people trade is a
good thing, and the more trading the better.
The question that the rest of this column asks is: how is that dollar surplus
divided? Pricing at $1.50 seems fair, but any price between $1.01 and $1.99 will
work.
The bigger side wins
The next step in the evolution of neoclassical economics as taught to every econ
undergrad ever is to assume an infinite number of sellers. Then, they will out-price
each other until they are making zero profits. In the above example, prices would
fall to exactly $1, which is what a widget is worth to the seller. The buyer then
scores all the surplus, and gains a full dollar in value instead of fifty cents as above.
But there are also a potentially infinite number of buyers, who each would be
willing to trade for $1.99. Why is it that the model assumes that sellers score
all of the surplus of the trade? The question is especially poignant for the more
theoretical theorists, who are happy to think not of buying widgets with cash, but
of buying cash with widgets. In the reversed situation, the names in the sides of the
market are reversed, but nothing else has changed.
[The standard solution is to have heterogeneous buyers and sellers, some of
whom are scoring surplus and some of whom aren’t. But then, there seems to
5.5. ASYMMETRIES IN BARGAINING
119
be a mantra throughout the literature that profits go to zero, but no corresponding
mantra that consumer surplus also goes to zero. You can delay the creation of
asymmetry arbitrarily far through undergraduate micro, but it eventually turns up.]
Whatever the reasoning, the assumption that the buyers get all the surplus has
immediate political implications, because it means that the seller is barely scraping
by. Raise taxes, impose more laws, make any sort of costly intervention and the
price will immediately rise by exactly the cost of the intervention, because the price
is exactly the cost of production, no more. But with an infinite number of buyers
and only one seller, the story would be that there’s lots of fat in the price, and the
seller is indeed making profits and won’t go out of business if forced to comply
with environmental regulations. The practical effect of the assumption that profits
go to zero for all suppliers (and it is just an assumption in the end) is that companies
get to whine.
As a matter of fact, the vast majority of successful companies actually do make
a profit. That means that the widget is not getting sold for exactly a dollar, but
somewhere between a dollar and two.
There’s a standard little exercise they make you do in undergrad econ class, the
right glove/left glove problem, where you calculate the prices in equilibrium for
right gloves and left gloves when there are R right glove suppliers and L left glove
suppliers, and people of course want an equal number of both. You do the math,
and if R < L then the price of left gloves goes to zero, and L < R then the price
of right gloves goes to zero. It all seems so horribly lopsided, but the fact is that
with no specific means of describing the bargaining process, with no specification
of exactly where the surplus goes, then the side in the minority will generally gain
all the surplus.
Now consider labor. As anyone who has ever been on the market knows, there
are few openings and many people to fill them. The scarcity is on the hiring side,
and (barring the exceptions and caveats), the surplus will lean toward the hiring
side as well. That is, the surplus is going toward the company. There are more
people than companies, and that ain’t gonna change any time soon.
And so, point number one about policy: the side which is in the minority probably has no right to whine. That is usually the capital side of the capital-labor
team.
Meanwhile, the laborers are in quite a bind, because their prices can be driven
arbitrarily low. The solution to the asymmetry on the labor side of things is to
make labor more scarce: take a million workers and turn them into one unit for
bargaining purposes—that is, unionize. You can find a hundred cute stories about
unions have set arbitrary dumb rules, or historical corruption in these organizations,
or a million other details great and small that unions messed up. But they solve a
fundamental problem which really has no other solution: the bargaining process
120
CHAPTER 5. THE ECONOMY
between labor and employer is fundamentally asymmetric and so one expects that
most of the surplus will go to the employer. The only solution is to kill most of the
workers (the black plague solution) or to unionize.
The threat point
If one side can more easily threaten to walk away from the deal, then it will be
able to score more of the surplus. This partly explains the market asymmetry story
above: employers can readily walk away from dealing with any one worker because
there are ten more to fill the slot.
Again, capital wins out over labor on this one. If we’re on the job market, we
probably need that job to buy food; if we’re on the capital market, we’re probably
looking for maximum profit. Now say you’re the government and you’re deciding
who you want to tax: the capitalists will walk away if the tax rate is too high; the
laborers will just grumble at higher taxes and keep chugging on. And so, capital
gains are taxed at a lower rate than labor. [tech speak: the elasticity of capital
provision is higher than the elasticity of labor provision, so the distortionary effects
of taxes will be greater for capital.]
I would love to see the unions of the world protest when capital taxes are lowered and therefore labor bears a higher burden. I would love to see the Teamsters
go on strike until the President signs through a rise in the capital gains tax and an
according lowering of the general income or social security tax. But I guess that’ll
never happen, and labor has no threat point of any sort.
Another little detail of the law which gives capital an edge over labor is that
there are very few restrictions on the movement of capital across borders, but very
strong restrictions on immigration. A company can readily say ‘Lower my taxes or
I’ll move to France’ because France will be happy to take the company in; a laborer
in the same position would need to spend up to a decade dealing with paperwork
before moving. Wages may be higher for your work in Windsor or Vancouver than
in Detroit or Portland, but you’re not invited.
But, you’re thinking, all the companies move to Mexico, and I don’t really want
to move there myself. First, parts of Mexico are rather nice. Second, you should
still care because laborers and companies in Mexico are in the midst of the same
negotiations. Why is it so easy for companies to cut costs by moving to Mexico?
Because Mexican workers can’t leave; trapped, their wages can be driven to an
arbitrarily low level. That makes it easy for U.S. companies to threaten to leave,
which lowers the taxes on U.S. companies and thus raises the burdens on U.S.
workers. Worried that your wages will fall if an imaginary flood of immigrants
should cross the border? Your wages are already falling because capital can flood
across the border to where the labor is. There are loads of other considerations, but
5.6. THE RIGHT TO CONTRACT
121
generally, restricting labor’s movement causes labor to suffer.
To summarize all this: there is always some surplus to any fair trade, and there
is no economic law about how that surplus is divided. One general rule of thumb
is that the less populous side of the market will generally get more of the surplus—
that means employers, not laborers. Another general rule is that the side which can
walk away from the trade can get more of the surplus—that means employers, not
laborers. These facts about the world have immediate implications to anyone who
thinks that workers should be getting more of the surplus from selling their labor.
First, unions are a good thing, and laws which fetter their bargaining ability should
be stricken. Second, allowing immigration is good, because letting capital move
freely but tying labor down only limits the bargaining ability of the labor side. The
natural state of things is already an asymmetric bargaining position; why make it
more asymmetric by passing laws that restrict labor but not capital?
5.6
The right to contract
30 April 2005
Depending on how you look at it, collective bargaining is either the free market
freely being free, or the coercive denial of rights.
On the freedom side, firms can hire whomever they want to and sign whatever
contracts they want to. If the firm’s owners sign a contract in which the firm agrees
to restrict its hiring abilities in exchange for a better pool of new hires, more loyalty
from current employees, or two dozen free donuts, then the firm is free to do so.
The stylized story goes like this: 51% of the employees at a firm want to enter into
an exclusive contract with the firm they work for. The firm chooses to agree. The
other 49% of the workers now face a new situation, wherein they may either start
paying union dues or get fired as the firm complies with the contract it entered into.
On the denial of freedoms side, a series of free choices by most of the involved
parties led to what looks a lot like coercion to the 49% remaining, who now have
to pay union dues to the union they voted against. If the union signs a contract with
the firm, the individuals can not write side-contracts with the firm—in fact, people
who aren’t part of the union and didn’t agree to anything can’t sign side-contracts
with the firm either. In this sense, all of the workers of the world are bound by the
contract signed by the union and the firm.
Because of this, there are Right-to-work laws in many states which make it
illegal for a firm to sign a contract that it will hire exclusively from the union. Here
is a list of such states. Sample text (from the NC law):
Any agreement or combination between any employer and any labor
union or labor organization whereby persons not members of such
122
CHAPTER 5. THE ECONOMY
union or organization shall be denied the right to work for said employer, or whereby such membership is made a condition of employment or continuation of employment by such employer, or whereby
any such union or organization acquires an employment monopoly in
any enterprise, is hereby declared to be against the public policy and
an illegal combination or conspiracy in restraint of trade or commerce
in the State of North Carolina.
So the law is worded in terms of the coercive denial of the right to work. However, the freedom to be free story applies equally well to the contracts described by
this paragraph. Nothing here makes it unlawful for a firm to decide to gets its entire
supply of bolts from a single supplier—such vertical-integration contracts happen
all the time. But if a firm chooses to enter into an exclusive-supplier arrangement
for its labor, then that is a conspiracy in restraint of trade.
Let’s say that the local KKK wants to contract with the company to run the
company bar-be-que. No problem! Let’s say that a private temp agency offers a
discount to the company if it agrees to hire all of its temps from the agency. No
problem! Let’s say that any organization of any sort wants to enter into a contract
with the firm which compels the firm to restrict its behavior in some manner. No
problem—as long as it’s not a trade union!
The laws above are a state-by-state issue, but here is a list of types of workers
who can’t unionize throughout the U.S.A.
The mast
In traditional economics, with an infinite number of agents all trading on the free
market, it’s generally difficult to come up with situations where tying oneself to the
mast is beneficial—constraints are just generally bad. But in situations with only
a few agents—the domain of game theory—they come up all the time. Notably,
in the last episode, we had two people bargaining to split the surplus from a trade;
the one who could most credibly say ‘If you don’t give me my way, I will destroy
all surplus from this trade for both you and me’ was the one who got more surplus
from the trade. In equilibrium, the threat of getting nothing is never realized, but
the threat has a real effect on the division of the surplus.
The first level of tying to the mast is that the bargaining entity needs to be able
to credibly walk away. Employers always have the ability to walk away from an
employment contract, because there are always other employees at the door, especially in the low-to-moderate skill jobs for which unions are prevalent. Similarly,
labor as a whole must be able to threaten to walk away from the deal in order to
get any surplus from the trade. [Why so few unions for PhDs in Gaelic literature?
5.6. THE RIGHT TO CONTRACT
123
Because there are sufficiently few that if one walks away from a job offer, the
imaginary position for a Gaelic literature professional will go unfilled; no need for
a union.]
Which brings us to the second mast labor must tie itself to, aka the collective action problem. The firm can easily bind itself to not hire, because it is not
a democracy: if 95% of the firm loves the potential employee but the head of HR
hates him, then that guy’s not getting hired. Meanwhile, the union is an amalgamation of individual laborers, and therefore has no strict hierarchy; instead, it’s
vehemently a democracy.
Governance is coercive
The United States would not work if people could opt out of its laws—even though
everybody wants to. It’d be great if everybody had to pay taxes but me, and everybody had to wear pants in public but me. But governance is a bundle: if I want the
protection of the police and the benefits from other people’s taxes, I’ve got to pay
my own taxes and wear the darn pants. To the political scientist, volunteering to be
restricted is the most natural thing in the world—Constitutional Political Economy
has an illustration of Ulysses tied to the mast on the cover of every issue. He’s even
wearing pants.
[Since it makes an apropos aside, let me spell out what is probably obvious
to most of you: by restricting the ability of firms to contract with unions, it is the
unions which lose out. Because all firms in a state are bound by law to not deal
with unions, none can cheat and allow a union into their shop—the law ties them
to the no-union mast. Meanwhile, unions have one and only one contract which
which to work: exclusive hiring agreements. Binding them to not enter into those
contracts overcomes no collective action problem on the labor side; it just makes it
impossible for unions to function.]
All this holds for the labor unions too. They will bargain better than an individual will, but only if every worker—including potential employees—are tied to
the mast. Meanwhile, everybody will want to get out of paying their dues, and if
there’s a conflict, some number of members or non-members will want to selectively ignore the decisions of the organization.
Which brings us back to the conflict at the head of this essay. A market is
built upon free decisions by all parties, but a representative governing body is built
upon its members (voluntarily) restricting themselves. So how do we reconcile the
inherent conflict between democracy and a free market?
Sorry, this essay won’t give you an answer, but I will say that the answer is
somewhere between the two extremes where the union has complete control over
its workers and where the union is unable to set rules for the people it governs.
124
CHAPTER 5. THE ECONOMY
Some unions have a history of corruption, fraud, and stacked elections—which I
presume were the genesis of some pretty detailed rules from the Natl Labor Relations Board regarding union elections; e.g., “The color of the ballot must not be
disclosed to the parties prior to the opening of the polls.” With a corrupt leadership, freedom from the whims of the governing body is clearly desirable. But a
government which lets people opt out of taxes that they don’t like is not long for
this world, and an army which lets its soldiers opt out from the uncomfortable stuff
will not win any battles.
Most laws seems to strike the balance pretty well. For example, in most situations, a member who disagrees with union politics may refuse to pay that portion of
dues which would be spent on campaigning and lobbying. However, the right-towork laws trample any attempts at subtlety, insisting that the free market is about
freedom, darn it, and therefore democratically governed bodies—which by definition impose rules for people to follow—may not operate in the market. The irony is
that they eliminate these restrictive bodies by restricting the right of firms to enter
into contracts they would otherwise choose to enter into.
5.7
Long term capital gains tax rate discounts and you
20 April 2005
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who benefit from the capital
gains tax discount, and those who have no idea what capital gains are. With a setup
like that, it is not surprising that the first group has won out in the legislature.
Defining capital gains
For those of you in the second group, capital gains are profits from capital. If you
bought the stock or the house for $100,000 and sold it for $150,000, then you made
$50,000 from the rise in value of your capital.
As a general rule, the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to be living
off of capital gains instead of income from work. This isn’t just stereotypes about
capitalists in top hats—you can find the same results by taking a few ratios from
this IRS spreadsheet, which breaks down how people in different income brackets
made their money. [All data from 2002.]
I took the ratio of long term capital gains (column AC) to wages/salaries (col
E), and Figure One shows the result. For the vast majority of humans, the average
comes out to about 15%: for every dollar of capital gains, they’re making six or
seven dollars in wage/salary. But for those in the million plus range, the average
quickly rises: for those making ten million per year and up, they’re pulling down
5.7. LONG TERM CAPITAL GAINS TAX RATE DISCOUNTS AND YOU 125
$2.50 in capital gains for every dollar in salary (we’ll assume they’re not getting an
hourly wage).
Figure 5.1: Yes, the wealthy really are capitalists. The graph goes from $0 to $10
million, so you will find yourself in the clump at the far left.
¡b¿Figure One:¡/b¿ yes, the wealthy really are capitalists. The graph goes from
$0 to $10 million, so you will find yourself in the clump at the far left.
[To give a bit more detail, here’s a little table of the figures. The first figure is
the minimum of the income range (i.e., the first line is people making $1-$4,999),
and the second is (long term capital gains) divided by (wages and salaries). I’m
giving you the table because the chart clumps almost all of these brackets into a
little blob at the left—and thus gives a very clear picture of where we five-digit
earners stand in the grand scheme of things—but there’s something of an interesting side story in that blob in the corner. For very low incomes (less than $20,000
or so), the amount of capital gains is actually higher than for moderate incomes
($20,000 - $75,000). So we have a few people, possibly people who are kids or
otherwise not in the mainstream labor market, who are making a large portion of
their money from capital trading, but those who we would consider to be middle
class are really much more focused on working than on capital gains. Once we hit
six digits, there’s a steady increase in the focus on income via capital gains.
126
CHAPTER 5. THE ECONOMY
bracket
cap gains/wages
1
51.03%
5,000
34.66%
10,000
22.72%
15,000
19.66%
20,000
20.96%
25,000
15.22%
30,000
13.69%
40,000
12.38%
50,000
13.27%
75,000
12.52%
100,000
19.25%
200,000
33.14%
500,000
48.97%
1,000,000
67.35%
1,500,000
76.67%
2,000,000
93.60%
5,000,000
116.38%
10,000,000 241.65%
So the moral here is that the top-hat stereotype more or less holds out: the
wealthy get a larger proportion of their income from capital gains than the middle
class do, who make most of their money by working.]
Regressive taxation
For most of us, to the extent that we have an ethical belief about taxation, it’s
that the wealthier should pay more in taxes, both in relative and absolute terms.
This is based either on the gut ethics of it, or the formal Benthamic argument
that the marginal utility from income is decreasing. For wages/salaries, the tax
system takes this into account: you pay a lower tax rate if you earn less. If you
make under about $7,000 you pay a tax rate of 0%, while people making more
than $319,000 in taxable income are theoretically paying a 35% tax rate (ignoring
adjustments and exemptions and thousands of pages in forms). The lingo for a
system where the tax rate rises with income is a progressive tax system, and most
people generally approve of having a progressive system—or at least a neutral
system, where everybody pays the same rate.
Now back to capital gains. The tax rate on long term capital gains is generally
15%. Coincidentally, 15% is also the tax rate for those earning under $29,000/year.
[Again, lots of details, lots of brackets and rules. Capital gains taxes cap out at
5.7. LONG TERM CAPITAL GAINS TAX RATE DISCOUNTS AND YOU 127
28%, which is about the tax rate on income in the $100,000/year range.]1
To summarize, thanks to the discount in capital gains taxes, the guy making
$10 million/year pays a lower tax rate on his/her/its income than you do.
Political economy
Those making over a million/year reported total long term capital gains of $127.6
billion. The difference between a 15% and a 35% rate on that amount of bank
would be $25 billion. If we include those with six-digit incomes, then this would
be around $46 billion. I don’t know if $46 billion seems like a lot or a little to you;
in 2003, the US government took in $1.8 trillion, so $46 billion would have been
an expansion in government income of 2.5%.
Which brings us to the resounding question: why is is that long term capital
gains are taxed at a lower rate, thus giving the top-hat set an easy loophole that
allows them to pay a lower tax rate than you do?
The official story is usually about long term lock-in of capital. You pay taxes
when gains are realized. If you hold stock for a decade, and it rises in value by
$10,000/year, then you pay zero in taxes on that—it’s paper value, not cash in
hand, so it’s not yet taxed. Now say in the tenth year you sell the stock, so your
cash rises to fully $100,000 over the original price you’d paid. In the year that you
realize your gains, you have to pay taxes on all hundred thou at once. That’s a lot
in one clump, which gives you something of an incentive to just leave the money
there; that is, the cash is locked in, which is generally suboptimal for the economy,
which benefits from money moving freely. [This story is why most of the discounts
are on long-term gains held over a year, but long-term gains outnumber short-term
gains by ten-to-one, so either this incentive is working really well or short-term
gains aren’t all that interesting to investors to begin with.]
This is something of a fallacy: if you sell only some of the stock so you realize
only $10,000 in profits—one year’s returns—then you’d only pay one year’s worth
of taxes. It looks like a lot when you pay it all at once, but that doesn’t mean
that you’re actually somehow paying more in taxes. As far as only that $10,000 is
concerned, paying all your taxes at the end of ten years is the same as an imaginary
1
The rates I’m giving may be misleading for those unfamiliar with the rate structure. First, you
pay zero dollars on income up to the standard deduction/exemptions, meaning that your first $7,000
or so is untaxed. Then you pay a 10% rate, which means that if you make $7,010, you’d pay $1
in taxes: 10% of that $10 above the cutoff. Similarly at the next bracket, which starts at $7,150 in
taxable income: If you make $15,000, you’ll pay 0% on the first $7,000, then 10% on the next $7,150
(or $715), and then 15% on the remaining $850 peeking out over the bracket’s cutoff, for a total tax
of $843. So you’re in the 15% bracket, but you’re only paying 6% of your income in taxes. For this
essay, I decided to not to deal with all this, and just state that you’re paying the tax rate indicated by
the last dollar earned.
128
CHAPTER 5. THE ECONOMY
pay-as-you-go system where you’re putting down taxes for unrealized gains every
year. A single dollar in profits is no more locked in than before (especially for
divisible assets like stock).
But this rationalization, along with a ‘we need to give people incentives to save’
story, is a consistently given justification for letting the wealthy pay a lower tax rate
than you. Frankly, it’s a weak justification, so we need to look to other stories for
why this persists.
One is the opening paragraph: the only people who lobby about capital gains
tax rates are the people who profit from them. A concentrated few are saving
billions of dollars a year on this, and the rest of America has no idea what any of
this is about [which is why you should forward this essay to everybody you know].
The other story is that people are sort of myopic. The people in the middle
class in the above table are still realizing some amount of capital gains, and they’re
saving a few bucks on their returns because they’re paying 15% instead of 25% on
those gains. For our middle-class hero to lobby against the capital gains tax would
be to ask the government to impose marginally higher taxes on herself. But this
is indeed myopia, because if she could somehow get capital gains taxed as normal
income, then government revenue would expand on the order of $50 billion, which
may or may not mean that the overall tax rates could be adjusted down in the long
run, so our middle-class hero may wind up paying less in taxes. Alternatively,
the government may print less money, meaning that her savings won’t dwindle by
inflation as much, or she may just get more services out of that additional $50
billion.
I’m a bit reluctant to call the capital gains tax discount a loophole, because
that word implies that it is a detail of the law that you need to hire a creative tax
lawyer to piece together. Instead, it is a fundamental piece of the system, covering
well over half of the average millionaire’s income, which guarantees that they pay
a lower tax rate than you do.
Finally, a comment from Ms DH of Ann Arbor, MI: There’s a longitudinal
aspect to this too. From 1973 to 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90%
of Americans fell by 7% whil the capital gains for the top one percent rose by
148%.
5.8
Comparative advantage and capital
10 August 2004
5.8. COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE AND CAPITAL
129
The part the liberals miss So country A has the infrastructure to make cheap
stuff, like it costs twenty dollars to make a car worth forty, and it costs ten dollars
to make a bike worth twenty. Country B isn’t so efficient, so it needs to spend more
to make these things, as depicted in the following table:
Cars
Bikes
A production
$20
$10
B production
$30
$15
profit margin
$8
$3
value
$40
$20
So say that there are two people in Country A and two in Country B, and each
can produce one item at a time. The first option is the closed-borders option: we’ll
give them $60 to start off with, and one citizen of B produces one car (selling
for $38), one citizen of B produces one bike (selling for $18), and they buy each
other’s goods and make a profit of $11 total, winding up with a car and a bike:
Country B (self-sufficient):
cars
bikes
car profit
bike profit
cash
total
before
0
0
0
0
60
60
after
1
1
8
3
4
after value
40
20
8
3
4
75
[How to read this: we started with $60 in cash, and spent $38 of it to buy
a (domestically built) car and $18 of it on a domestic bike, so we have only $4
in original cash left. For the car, $30 disappears into the production of the car
(materials, wages), and $8 is cash profit which just moved from the ‘general cash’
row to the ‘car profit’ row; similarly for the bike. Finally, the car provides $40 in
value, even though we can’t convert it back to cash, so we count 1 car as $40 in the
final column; similarly for the bike.]
The second is the open-border option, e.g., buying a car ($28) and a bike ($13)
from country A:
Country B (buy everything from A):
130
CHAPTER 5. THE ECONOMY
cars
bikes
car profit
bike profit
cash
total
before
0
0
0
0
60
60
after
1
1
0
0
19
after value
40
20
0
0
19
79
[Buying from A is cheaper, so there’s more left in the ‘cash’ row, but all the
profits go abroad, so the ‘profit’ rows are left blank.]
B is better off, because everybody bought from the most efficient producer, so
they got more for their buck. Note well that we don’t really care where the cash is:
it’s the value that matters, in whatever form that value may be.
So point one: you want to buy from the most efficient producer, wherever that
producer may be.
But I’d ignored what country A will do. With only two people, it can only
produce two items. That leaves them the choice between making two cars, two
bikes, or a car and a bike. The biggest profits are in cars, so they will produce
two cars; country B will produce bikes, since nobody else is doing it. Both sides
will buy one car and one bike, since that’s what they want, so here’s the final score
after both countries buy one bike from country B ($18) and one car from country
A ($28):
Country A (free trade):
cars
bikes
car profit
bike profit
cash
total
before
0
0
0
0
60
60
after
1
1
16
0
14
after value
40
20
16
0
14
90
before
0
0
0
0
60
60
after
1
1
0
6
14
after value
40
20
0
6
14
80
Country B (free trade):
cars
bikes
car profit
bike profit
cash
total
5.8. COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE AND CAPITAL
131
So point two: even if a country has an absolute advantage in producing some
good, it’s the advantage compared to other goods that matters. Country A can’t
produce all the world’s bikes and all the world’s cars, so it has to choose, and it’ll
choose the cars, leaving country B to produce bikes even though it’s not as efficient.
It may look like the numbers are cooked, but the principle of comparative advantage is pretty robust to all sorts of shifts. This division of production is typically
the optimum both for society and all the players within, given the constraints on
each country’s ability to produce. You can try other options for country A and will
see that they can’t do better than producing all cars and leaving B to produce all
bikes, and that this is the value-maximizing setup for the world at large.
If the developing country, country B, were to close its borders to more efficient
markets elsewhere, it would protect its car market, but makes itself worse off in
the process because now people have to pay more for their cars. This ignores
adjustment costs, assumes that there exist alternatives like bike production, and
makes a hundred other simplifications; the real world can interfere with the theory,
but the theory by itself says that open borders are good for all involved.
The part the conservatives miss Around borders in the real world, capital flows
freely; goods sometimes flow freely; labor rarely flows freely.
Let us say that all of the factories in country B are owned by country A, which
will have two effects: thanks to good ol’ country A know-how, production is now
more efficient, so instead of $30 to produce a car, it now takes $25, and instead
of $15 to produce a bike, it takes $12.50; also, all profits from production go to
country A. Now let us say that the borders are closed to goods, but capital moves
freely: then country B will produce a bike and a car, buy a bike ($15.50) and a car
($33), and be left with:
Country B (no free trade, capital owned by A):
cars
bikes
car profit
bike profit
cash
total
before
0
0
0
0
60
60
after
1
1
0
0
11.50
after value
40
20
0
0
11.50
71.50
Country B is worse off than it was with completely closed borders, because it
is more efficient but much of the value added from production leaves the country.
The reader is welcome to do the math with free trade and free capital movement
simultaneously, and will see that country B is marginally worse off [If you don’t
132
CHAPTER 5. THE ECONOMY
feel like doing the math yourself, look at this essay’s HTML comments], but I could
have just as easily cooked the numbers so that the combination makes country B
better off. Plus we have a comparable list of practical issues, which I won’t bore
you with.
The moral Comparative advantage in the trade of goods has nothing to do with
the effects of capital movement. Although there are robust results that tell us that
free trade in goods helps all parties, that doesn’t tell us anything about whether it is
good for countries to open their borders to capital investments from the outside. A
country which opens its borders to both the import of goods and capital investment
may or may not fare as well as one which has totally closed borders.
It may be advisable for a country to allow full movement of goods, but remain
reticent in accepting those capital investments which could drain value from the
country in the long run. But in real life this is impossible because the two are
bundled together: opening a McDonald’s in, say, Sudan means that food is being
exported cheaply, but U.S. capital comes with it in the form of a restaurant where
the food will be served. NAFTA allowed everything that isn’t a human being to
drift across the border, so there are now both U.S. goods and factories in Mexico. The economic analysis of such a situation is not very simple. The hardcore
liberals are wrong to ignore the benefits from trade for developing countries, and
the hardcore conservatives are wrong to chant the comparative advantage mantra
when dealing with the unrelated question of capital investment by wealthy nations
in developing countries.
5.9
Tax subsidies for the wealthy, part 287
18 November 2005
Argument A:
• Homeowners are better citizens: they keep their properties in better condition, vote more, et cetera.
• We should encourage homebuying via a tax break
Argument B:
• Tax breaks are distortionary
• The real block on homebuying is capital constraints, so an eventual tax refund ain’t gonna help except those who already could have bought homes.
5.9. TAX SUBSIDIES FOR THE WEALTHY, PART 287
133
The current status is that yes, there is a tax deduction for home ownership. The
president’s tax advisory council currently recommends modifying but not eliminating it. In this context, here is some discussion of the above arguments.
Really, do homeowners vote more?
Gilderbloom and Markham [1995] compiled cross-sectional stats on whether people turn conservative when they buy a home. The abstract claims no statistically
significant effect. For example, renters in the data set were 44.9% Dem, 26.2% Republican; homeowners were 45.9% Dem, 33.9% Rep (the rest are independents).
They projected the opinions of the subjects onto various dimensions such as civil
liberties, domestic spending, sexual tolerance, whether they voted for Bush Sr., and
whether they voted at all. They found that the strongest and most consistent effect
was on voting—to answer the question directly, yes, homeowners vote more.
[ As for the liberal-conservative questions, this paper faces the classic problem of ferreting out
causation: being older, wealthier, and more rural make you more likely to buy a home and to be a
Republican at the same time, so to what extent can we attribute Republicanness to homebuying and
to what extent is it just becoming old and stodgy? On p 1600, we get a table of 136 or so coefficients,
eight of which are coefficients on home ownership. The coefficient on support for spending on innercity problems indicates that homeowners dislike such spending more than renters, but the authors
reject the coefficient (-0.05, versus +0.68 for voting) as too small to be worth caring about. I don’t
get this, since it’s a unitless number and statistical significance means that it is not a question of
variance in a small sample (y’know, under the right assumptions).
The positive result about home ownership provides some confidence, but the null results are
hard to use without a real live model being tested. We know that age and income and race affect both
homebuying and politics, so they just throw ’em in on the right-hand side and let them all duke it out.
On top of just being sort of lazy, this method reduces the power of the test: if homebuying and age
are highly correlated, then including age in the regression will reduce the coefficient on homebuying,
and this is true no matter what is being regressed. If we ran a regression of the form (frequency
of trips to Home Depot) = A * (homebuying) + B * (age), then A will be smaller than the A’ in
(frequency of trips to Home Depot) = A’ * (homebuying). So loading up the right-hand side seems
sensible, but biases the results toward a null result. In most papers, this is OK because the author is
rooting for big coefficients, and so is making it harder for the pet theory to be proven right, but if the
author is hoping for null results, then loading up the right-hand side with correlated coefficients is
sort of cheating. Not that I could do better: the problem of using statistical techniques to determine
causality is not yet solved.]
Do tax discounts on home buying induce more home buying?
OK, so as an empirical fact, people vote more when they own, and we’ll grant
the causal direction that somehow homebuying induces voting. We like having a
voting, involved population, so we want to encourage more home buying. And so,
134
CHAPTER 5. THE ECONOMY
the U.S. government allows homeowners to deduct the interest they pay on their
mortgage. For me, that’s a $5,000 deduction this year, which will turn into about
$1,000 in taxes I don’t have to pay because I don’t rent. [[If I take the deduction. I
honestly don’t know what tax bracket I’m in, and have better things to look up right now, so I’m
arbitrarily assuming 20%.]]
[ At the level of detailed rules, the tax deduction is the usual mess. For example, you can deduct
interest on a home equity loan. That is, if you take out a loan for $100,000 using your home as
collateral, and then spend that on strippers and coke, then you can deduct the interest on that loan.
You used your home as collateral so it’s a home loan, see. The new plan will eliminate this.]
So, does the deduction actually induce more home ownership?
The report below [on Tax Reform, 2005, p 72] notes that current U.S. owner
occupancy is at 69% in the U.S.A., but Canada, the UK, and Australia have no
mortgage interest deduction and are at 66%, 69%, and 70%, respectively. That is,
the U.S. isn’t very much out of line from the non-deduction world.
The first of a pair of relevant papers in the academic literature is Rosen and
Rosen [1980]. It opens by pointing out that ”Since World War II the proportion
of the U.S. housing stock that is owner occupied has risen from 48 to 64 percent.”
(that was in 1980) The question, then, is how much of this is due to the mortgage
interest deduction. The deduction was in effect for this entire period, so we don’t
have a before-after picture to look at; instead the authors went with a simple time
series analysis.
I am well-aware that everybody is sick of me ranting about time series models. Fortunately, the authors point out the key critique about a time-series model
themselves: ”The most important is that it lacks a choice-theoretic foundation.” (p
62) That is, there is no serious model of decision making behavior here, just an
exercise in numerical correlations. That said, the model finds that: ”If all personal
income tax benefits for home ownership were eliminated, our model indicates that
in the long run the proportion of homeowners would drop by about 4 percentage
points.” (pp 69-70) But before telling your friends, see below.
[ They find this by calculating coefficients using net housing prices (with the tax) and then
recalculating the rate of homebuying with prices modified to pretend there is no tax rebate. That is,
they are estimating an elasticity with respect to price (if we lower prices by 1%, by what percentage
will homebuying go up?), and then multiply that by the reduction in price implied by the tax rebate.]
This paper also finds no effect for their measure of capital constraints. Don’t
have the time to investigate this one further, but this is a point of evidence against
my claim at the head of this article and below that it’s capital in the traditional
sense that’s keeping people from buying.
But wait! Rosen et al. re-estimated the change in an article entitled ”Housing
Tenure, Uncertainty, and Taxation”. The article takes into account the investment
properties of housing (and as the title suggests, takes into account the riskiness of
5.9. TAX SUBSIDIES FOR THE WEALTHY, PART 287
135
the investment), and they find that eliminating the deduction would induce not a
4% change, but a 0.4% change. This is the most recent I could find (It’s only cited
by one other basically unrelated article), so I’m going to say that the cutting edge in
the econ literature—bearing in mind all the modeling caveats above—finds a very
small effect on homebuying from the interest deduction. Of course, by lowering
prices there is some effect, but a 0.4% change isn’t much bang for 69 billion bucks.
For the liberal homeowner
I am writing this based on a request from Ms LB of Baltimore, MD. She is landed
gentry and can therefore take the interest deduction, but wonders whether a good
liberal kid like herself should support the deduction or should support the proposed
elimination of the deduction.
First, you may want to go read the Slate article entitled ”End the MortgageInterest Deduction!: Why the left should embrace the Bush tax commission’s most
radical proposal.” That article makes a number of good points that I will try not to
repeat here. The key point is that this, like many tax exceptions, just benefits the
wealthy. [Also, don’t miss this PDF linked from the above article.]
However, an important point that the Slate article discusses but seems to downplay is that the tax deduction is not being outright eliminated, but is being replaced
by a tax credit. This mitigates the benefit to the wealthy, but still subsidizes those
who had the capital to help themselves.
The official recommendations from the President’s Advisory Panel on Tax Reform begin on page 70 of this PDF [2]. The story given for cutting the homeowner
tax credit is wonderfully Republican: Why favor investment in residential real estate over other forms of investment? Noncorporate business is taxed at 17%, corporate at 26%, home investment at 0%. What kind of bleeding-heart welfare is this!?,
the report asks. The claim is that people are making the decision to either invest
their capital in a business (via stocks, no doubt) or in a home, and we shouldn’t
bias them toward investing in a home. Making what is no doubt a wise political
decision, the report ignores the arguments above about how homeowners are better
citizens, or that the deduction is inequitable.
The details
The proposal will change from a deduction to a credit. To make the distinction as
clear as possible, here’s the process of calculating your taxes: you calculate your
net income by subtracting your deductions from your actual cash in, and then you
multiply net income by your tax rate to find what you owe your government; then
you subtract credits from what you owe. That is, deductions are subtracted from
136
CHAPTER 5. THE ECONOMY
actual income, and then various twisting factors will convert your fictional lower
income into savings on total taxes, while credits are directly and simply subtracted
from taxes owed.
The distortions that deductions suffer turn what looks on the surface to be an
equitable tax discount into a regressive tax discount (i.e., one which favors the
wealthier). You have two choices with deductions: go through the tax code and
find all the deductions that match your life and itemize the full list, or just take the
standard deduction, which is fixed and can not be augmented with new revisions.
The trouble with deductions, therefore, is that most of us po’ folk don’t bother
and just take the standard deduction. Thus, deductions are more likely to be taken
by the wealthier. Additionally, $1,000 less net income for someone in a 35% tax
bracket means $350 in pocket, and for someone in a 15% bracket it means $150 in
pocket, so the deduction is almost by definition regressive.
Figure 5.2: On the surface, it is an equitable tax discount, but the details create
bias.
[There’s a problem with credits too, by the way: if your tax burden falls below zero, you don’t
get a refund on the credits. [The one exception: the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is actually
a form of welfare in the guise of a tax rebate. If you have zero tax burden, the fed will send you a
check for remaining EITC.] So a person who has a near-poverty job but had the wherewithal to buy
a house won’t be benefiting from mortgage interest credits, but probably wasn’t benefiting from the
current system anyway. Nor is this an absurd proposition: 27% of the homeowners in the data used
by Gilderbloom and Markham [1, p 1594] earned under $11,250/year [in early 90s money, or about
5.10. VELOCITY, RISK, AND THE CRASH
137
$17,000 in 2005 dollars, which is pretty close to the poverty line for a family of three].]
So converting to a credit is a major shift away from the regressive nature of the
tax. Therefore, I side with Slate’s recommendation that we equity-oriented liberals
should support the switch to a credit. But the reader will note that this has nothing
at all to do with housing: any time you see a recommendation to convert a tax
deduction into a basically equivalent tax credit, the system will be more equitable.
[I could not find a source that would state whether the mortgage interest credit system will cost more
One
question that those better with trench-level politics may be able to answer: why are
we switching the mortgage interest deduction to a credit, but not the thousand other
deductions?
The deduction/credit switch will make any tax more equitable, but it doesn’t
address the basic inequity to the mortgage interest deduction: why are we subsidizing people who own over those who rent—and why are we doing it with a tax
rebate? The problems with making the transition from renting to owning are all
about hard constraints people face in the immediate present: no cash to pay down
payments, escrow fees, inspection fees, insurance fees, and the six percent cut to
the National Association of Realtors(R); no month free to be spent drowned in paperwork, and no time to get an education in legalese and accounting. A promise
that at some point in May of next year the Fed will hand you $1,000 does nothing
to mitigate any of these present constraints. One can directly address these constraints via cash up front, when people actually need it; there are programs (PDF)
that cost a whole lot less than $69 billion/year that use these methods to directly
target those who could not buy a home without help.
The President’s Advisory Panel decided on a half-measure, eliminating the deduction but replacing it with a credit, which is probably as much as is politically
feasible. As such, we should support it, even though the entire $69 billion cash
transfer to homeowners does nothing but benefit people who write a monthly check
to a mortgage company instead of a landlord.
or less than the deduction system, so I am maintaining a neutral prior and assuming no change.]
5.10
Velocity, risk, and the crash
10 October 2008
OK, about every day, somebody asks me to explain the bailout package, the
credit crunch, the subprime mortgage thing, or the concept of ownership of land.
There are so many sources that can give you the basics of what’s going on that
I’m not even gonna bother to give you a list of links; ask your local newspaper or
search engine. I’ll touch on that, but this will primarily be a topic essay going back
138
CHAPTER 5. THE ECONOMY
to my favorite question: the creation of value.
Or, in this case, the creation of money. You know the government prints money
(economists call this M0), and for the purposes here, that’s all easy enough. But
there are other means.
The first, still in the hands of the government, is simply to print bonds. A
promise from the U.S. government to hand you cash 90 days in the future is basically equivalent to cash.
But it gets more interesting when other parties throughout the economy get to
produce money.
Reserves We’ll start with our banks, who re-loan the same money repeatedly.
Say the bank has $100 million in deposits, in air-conditioned quarters (i.e., cold,
hard cash). It then lends out $90 million. The people getting the loans will tell you
‘we have $90 million,’ and the people holding savings accounts will take out their
bank statements and say ‘we hold $100 million.’
The bank has just generated $90 million in cash.
In fact, the requirements for banks are to hold in the ballpark of 10% of actual
savings, and they can lend out the rest. Naturally, every bank will lend out to the hilt
of that allowance. So if the Treasury prints a $100 bill and hands it to somebody,
who puts it in the bank, the Treasury has really just put $190 in the economy.
Margin The brokerage firm can do the same sort of trick with its clients. Using
the deposits and positions on hand, it can lend cash to investors, so somebody
who walks in with $100 can buy $200 worth of stock. This is known as buying
on margin. Your $200 worth of stock is probably only going to shift a marginal
amount in a week or two, to maybe $180 at the worst, so the $100 that the brokerage
lent you is just going to sit there doing nothing under most conditions. The name
margin emphasizes that we just care about the variation at that last 10% or 20%
of the price. A person buying on margin deposits only 50% of the stock price and
thus comes closer to just buying and selling the marginal changes.
Despite the story in the last paragraph, the 50% requirement is not insurance
or an attempt to ensure that you’ll be able to pay back the brokerage’s loan. No,
the margin deposit comes from Federal Reserve Regulation T, and it’s the Federal
Reserve that sets the rules because borrowing on margin is another means of printing money. At the brokerage firm’s accounting department, it’s very much like the
bank’s lending out of savings.
We typically only sell items we already own, but that’s just how squares think.
Why not sell the stock first, thus having a debt of so many shares, then buy them
later? It’s what you would do if you expect the share price will fall: sell today at
5.10. VELOCITY, RISK, AND THE CRASH
139
$100, buy tomorrow at $90, and pull a $10 profit. This is known as a short sale.
For our purposes, in that first step, you walked into your brokerage house with a
50% margin deposit of $1,000, and after selling your imaginary shares, walked out
with $2,000. Sweet: you just printed yourself some cash, which you can use for
other purposes anywhere else in the economy, until you decide to flatten out your
short.
Returning to a prior example, the Treasury prints a $100 bill, and I put it in the
bank, which then lends out $90 to a trader, who hands it in as margin requirements
to make a short sale, walking away with $180. And my savings account still says
I have a hundred bucks in savings. What will the trader do with her newly-minted
$180? Maybe she’ll put it in her own saving account, so the bank can loan $160 to
somebody else.
All is full of value So, back to value. Picture somebody handing you $100. I
don’t know how you’d respond to that. Maybe you picture what you’ll buy with it,
or maybe you have an inherent sense in your gut, down where you feel love and
hate, that you’ve been given a piece of paper with some value.
Now consider the papers above. If somebody hands you a $100 90-day bond,
you don’t get to contemplate the size of Benjamin Franklin’s forehead, but you can
more-or-less have the same experience of weighing the paper and contemplating
the same sort of purchases.
Although we don’t often get handed stocks or loan certificates, they have the
same weight, and can be traded for the same sorts of things that one could buy with
cash. If holding a $100 stock in your hand doesn’t have the right weight in your
gut, then just sell it for the equivalent value in Benjamins and go back to buying as
normal.
The point here is that our currency—the store of our economy’s value—is not
just bills printed by the Treasury, but all of these financial papers. We care about
the velocity of all of it, including the bonds, loans, stocks, and whatever else.
Velocity Mortgages and other loans are frequently bought and sold. E.g., my
own mortgage was sold even before I could make my first payment. There are
many reasons for selling a debt: one company may be good with retail customerwrangling but another may be more efficient with monthly servicing; a company
may want to offset the risk from another position with the semi-reliable income
from being on the receiving side of a debt; a company may have an opinion that
interest rates will move in a way the first company didn’t expect; a company may
want to bundle several loans to pool risk.
Whatever happens, selling the loan frees up the original lender to make more
140
CHAPTER 5. THE ECONOMY
loans.
If you’ve been following all the subprime mortgage stories, then you know
that these subprime mortgages were re-packaged and sold, then re-re-packaged
and resold, and so on. Then, as the loans at the base of all this reselling started to
default, the loans stopped moving.
Money has a velocity—the rate at which it changes hands; macroeconomists
have reduced the measurement of this velocity to a two–decimal-point science.
High velocity is the sign of a good economy. Getting back to a fundamental axiom
of microeconomics, every trade makes both sides marginally better off, so more
trades mean more marginal improvements. Money sitting in the bank is sitting;
money being traded is hopefully building something and making people happy.
Or if you think I’m being too airy about perceived value, then go back to the
above examples: I put $100 in the bank, and Joe borrows $90. Joe put it in the
bank, and Joe’s bank now has the reserves to loan out $81 to Jane. Jane puts $81
in the bank, and Econ 103 students have to work out how much money is in the
system after a hundred such deposit-loan steps. [hint: a thousand bucks.] If we cut this
off at the third loan, then there’s only about $340 in the system. So not only does
trading add value in a conceptual sense, but in the context of the reserve/margin
system, it creates value on the accounting ledgers, too.
At this point, you can see that one of the most fundamental questions the U.S.
government faces is also one of the most difficult: how many dollars are there
in the system? If we print a billion more, how many billions more will spawn
therefrom? If we nudge the various requirements by half a percent, how will that
grow or shrink the dollar count? This column is of course leaving out a thousand
details, like how Panama, El Salvador, and Ecuador officially don’t have their own
currencies, but just use US dollars for all affairs, and have their own wheels-withinwheels of dollar multipliers, while many other countries unofficially do the same
thing.
The dollar count is fundamental, because too much leads to inflation spirals
and too little leads to a sort of block in the economic plumbing where nobody can
pay each other or get cash for new projects, and yet we can only make educated
guesses about how much cash is in the system. But the overwhelming consensus
at the moment is that we’re on the blocked-plumbing side of things—the so-called
‘credit crunch’ that the recent bailout bill is intended to alleviate. These banks
deputized to produce money can’t do it unless they sell off the existing loans, but
those loans aren’t moving, because so many of them are terrible and worthless
investments. Those lousy mortgages are simply sinks of value, where it sits and
waits and prevents banks from re-using it for other purposes. These loans have
become brakes on money’s—and thus the economy’s—velocity. So the bailout bill
gives the government a means to produce a few billion more dollars by buying
5.10. VELOCITY, RISK, AND THE CRASH
141
those crappy loans, and thus freeing the banks to re-use their money-producing
powers.
[ Of course, our government frees up this money partly by printing bonds. Why don’t they just
print a few billion in $100 bills and then drop them from helicopters? There are explanations for this,
but they involve ritual goat sacrifice, which I’m not willing to make for the sake of this superficial
discussion. If you want my official opinion about the bailout bill, I personally remain skeptical.]
Risk We like velocity, and elements of the system, like the margin allowance that
lets traders make twice as many trades, are intended to maximize velocity. But the
risks inherent in all of these velocity-generating and money-producing tricks are
clear enough. What if all the depositors come asking for their money at the same
time? What if you short sell a stock, making $100, and then the stock price rises
to infinity? You’ve just lost infinity minus a hundred dollars, and now you can’t
pay back the bank that lent you the original $100, and once you default on that
loan they don’t have the cash depositors entrusted them with. [Authors often use game
metaphors here: maybe house of cards or domino effect. Things are not so fragile as that implies.
Me, I think the appropriate metaphor is to Twister.]
One intuitive response to a disastrous calling-in of all risks at once, like we’re
seeing now, is to say that we shouldn’t be taking all these risks, and should go back
to just having the darn Treasury print money and leave it at that.
First, we can’t go back. The size of the economy, in the sense of how many
dollars people think they have, is calibrated to this system where banks and others
can contribute this multiplier effect to the cash printed by the treasury. There’s
a right amount of money in the system to keep things lubricated, and the current
balance depends on these margin-type rules. Also, I really can’t picture how banking would work without inducing at least some multiplier (though you can easily
argue that 90% is too loose). This doesn’t mean that we can’t have checks on the
system—and more are clearly needed—but the basic contours of the system aren’t
going anywhere.
If we repealed Regulation T and banned stock trades on margin, then the Treasury would more-or-less have to print that money itself. Same with the bank loans
that turn $100 into $190. The government hands off the responsibility of producing
money to others, and the cost of that delegation is a risk that the so-entrusted banks
will fall apart.
So, you pull out your bank account statement, and it says you have $100 in
checking. Where does that value come from? It is partly based upon a promise
from the Federal government, but partly a chain of promises from your bank, other
people who deposited money into the bank, the other side of the loan or stock
transaction that let people make that deposit, and so on and so forth. That $100
142
CHAPTER 5. THE ECONOMY
is not backed by trust in the U.S. government, but by trust in the whole of the
economy.
5.11
Crime rates and PR: an ode to Baltimore
5 November 2006
I live in Baltimore.
OK, so what was the first image that came to your head when you read that?
For most folks, the associations with the word Baltimore are either crime, poverty,
or general blight. Maybe you got that impression from a TV show like The Wire,
or from a TV show like Homicide: Life on the Streets, or even from a pop song
like Baltimore by Randy Newman, or a pop song like Baltimore by Lyle Lovett.
I recall everybody’s reaction at my high school when I got accepted to the
University of Chicago: “Y’know, it’s cold there.” I got that line maybe twenty
times. Yes, it does get cold there. But what these people didn’t realize is that half
the year, Chicago is obnoxiously hot.
I suppose it’s no real surprise that when I tell people I live in Baltimore, they
assume I’m shot at every day. But they fail to realize that half the town is kinda
nice. The Borders & Noble just opened four blocks from my house, bringing with
it the eighth Starbuck’s in the city, and an exceptional stats shelf. And if that’s too
pricey and megacorp for ya, the Book Thing is two blocks away. But nobody says
to me ‘Oh, you’re from Baltimore? That’s the city that reads!’
How do these stereotypes develop? How does a city get summarized into a
verbal postcard that nobody bothers to think about anymore? More importantly,
how do we get those stereotypes changed?
Detroit: Capital of the Rust Belt ⇒ Slowly returning to nature!
Baltimore: Stab wound or gun wound? ⇒ A hospital on every corner!
San Francisco: Everybody’s gay!! ⇒ The rising creative class!
Seattle: Kurt Cobain drank coffee here ⇒ Monorail!
Variance There’s a reason for Baltimore’s portrayal in the media: crime rates
really are significantly higher Baltimore than in other cities. Glaeser et al. [1996]
point out that the variance in crime rates is absolutely gigantic. [The theory part of
the paper always bothered me, though. OK, so you’ve proven that crime isn’t a series of Bernoulli
draws. Neither is anything else that’s Normally distributed with variance not equal to the mean times
(1-mean)/n.]
By the FBI’s data, Baltimore had 11,248 violent crimes per person and a population of 641,097, for a violent crime rate of 1.75%. But the great majority of
5.11. CRIME RATES AND PR: AN ODE TO BALTIMORE
143
crimes are property crimes like larceny from vehicle (aka ‘stealing from somebody’s car’), which is not the sort of thing that keeps people up at night. There
were 269 murders and 162 rapes in Baltimore in 2005, giving us a rate of 41.96
homicides per 100,000 and 25.27 rapes per 100,000.
Now let’s look at a few other haphazard cities:
pop
crimes/100,000 murder/100,000 rape/100,000
Detroit
900,932
2,357.56
39.29
65.38
Bmore
641,097
1,754.49
41.96
25.27
Washington, DC
550,521
1,401.58
35.42
29.97
Houston, TX
2,045,732 1,172.54
16.33
42.63
Columbus, OH
730,329
836.75
13.97
70.93
Salt Lake City, UT 184,627
694.91
5.42
39
New York
8,115,690 673.05
6.64
17.4
San Diego
1,272,148 519.04
4.01
29.56
San José, CA
910,528
383.51
2.86
28.88
First, GSS’s point is well-supported by the table: the variance in crime rates,
by any of the above measures, is gigantic.
Also different types of crime vary differently. San Diego’s murder rate is almost a tenth Baltimore’s, but the rape rate is slightly higher. The murder rate
generally follows the overall crime rate better, but is not a particularly close proxy.
Among the top 100 cities by population, the correlation is 72%. [Correlation between
rape and overall crime among the top 100: 49%; rape/murder correlation: 31%.]
Part of the problem is that we’re talking about events per 100,000. With 72
rapes in Salt Lake City in 2005, the city beat out Baltimore on that scale–but what
does that say about the odds that any one person will be raped in either city? If
there had been 26 fewer rapes in SLC, then the rankings would be reversed.
Then there are aggregation problems. There are parts of Baltimore where I
would not dare to tread. But the same could be said of every city in the entire
country. The statement “around here, things go from rich neighborhood to poor
neighborhood in just a block or two” has been made regarding every city I’ve ever
lived in (which is many). This only makes it more difficult to work out what exactly
the crime rates mean. If we have one city where the crappy parts are extra-crappy
but the city center is average, it will look worse on the endless stream of Safest
City stats than a city with an average crappy part and an average city center. But
nobody in the city center, walking home from the Borders & Noble, would notice
a difference.
LA County did us the favor of fragmenting things into over 80 submunicipalities. For example, the two highest crime-per-100,000 resident cities are Vernon,
CA (pop: 94, crimes: 48) and City of Industry, CA (pop: 840, crimes: 140). Without the endless averaging of high- and low-crime areas you have a clear picture that
144
CHAPTER 5. THE ECONOMY
that Vernon, CA, which seems to be a one block wide and five block long stretch
just South of LA proper,2 is a bad neighborhood, without all the averaging of good
neighborhoods getting in the way.
The summary: we’d like to read the stats above as a probability, so that when
the FBI says that Detroit has a 2.4% crime rate and New York a 0.7% rate, that those
are your odds of suffering a crime over a year. But there are too many complications beyond the simple numbers, especially for the very rare events like murder
and rape. What neighborhood you’re in, where you’re walking at night, and with
whom you’re associating will all have a bigger effect on your odds of being raped
or murdered than where your city ranks on a somewhat arbitrary unidimensional
scale.
5.12
Why DC needs more Republicans
20 January 2004
[Just got back from a conference on voting. I learned a few things. First, I learned that I don’t
learn nearly as much from public presentations as from conversations and reading papers. Presenting
technical material using bullet points is a complete waste of time. I learned that being at (name of
institution) really is ideal for me, because the standard methods of academic political theorists are
still too Chicago School Wannabee for my tastes. I learned that there there is no such thing as a
gerrymander-proof district in a democracy (conclusion: do away with the frigging districts already).
I got to meet Dr. NS of Saint Louis, MO, who is a pretty fun guy, and actually did seem capable of
learning from bullet-pointed lists of equations. Finally, I was reminded of how DC is fucked.]
Why DC is fucked DC has three electors in the Electoral college (3 out of 538
members=0.56%), making it basically irrelevant. One elector even abstained in
2000, in protest of the fact that DC gets a full 0% of Congressional seats. Where
other state license plates have mottos like ‘the Show-me state’ or ‘Ski Utah!’, DC
license plates say, ‘Taxation without representation’.
But beyond that, there’s another fact that puts DC in a much, much worse position in terms of getting the ear of the politicians: it’s solidly Democrat. Here are
the votes cast in DC for the 2000 election (FEC source3 ):
Gore: 171,923
Bush: 18,073
Nader: 10,576
2
By which I mean La Ciudad del Rio de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula.
If I had my way, the city would be referred to as Nuestra Señora, which is hipper in so many ways.
3
http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/2000presgeresults.htm
5.12. WHY DC NEEDS MORE REPUBLICANS
145
So Bush would need maybe another 80,000 votes before anybody took him seriously in DC. This means Republicans aren’t gonna waste limited resources making
concessions, and that Democrats, knowing Republicans will make no efforts, won’t
make any efforts either. DC is punished for its loyalty by being ignored by all parties.
In fact, the Democratic party has so little respect for DC that it doesn’t even
recognize its primary. DC, in return, is OK with this, and will still be solidly
Democrat in 2004.
Part of the problem is that DC is mostly a city of urban Black people—the most
solidly Democrat group out there. Blacks need to learn from Hispanics, who have
shown a strong willingness to vote for the Devil. In return, Hispanics get endless
concessions from both parties such as those I discussed on 10 January. Similarly,
DC needs to learn from New Hampshire, which is a very centrist state, and therefore gets loads of concessions from the Democratic party, such as going first in the
primary cycle (which translates to agenda-setting power, which translates to a real
effect on people’s lives).
[One thing DC can do (and has begun doing) is attempting to get white suburban types to move
in to the city. These White folk are more willing to vote Republican, allowing DC to look more
centrist, and weakening the equation between DC and politically exiled urban Blacks. But this is a
rather cynical way to go.]
The more direct yet more uncomfortable conclusion is that more urban Blacks
and more DC residents need to tell the pollsters that they’re willing to vote Republican. I’d like to think that a liberal third party would do the trick, but Nader got
half as many votes as Bush, even after every research assistant between Capitol
Hill and Dupont Circle voted for Nader. Google says: “Your search - ‘africanamericans for nader’ - did not match any documents.” The only real threat to
Democrats are Republicans, so a vote switched to a third party (-1 for the Dems) is
half as threatening as a vote switched to Republican (-1 Dems, +1 Reps). Support
for a third party could conceivably allow DC and urban Blacks to gain attention, but
that support is not forthcoming, the third parties don’t have the resources to bring
that support about on a sufficient scale, and it’s not as effective as the strategy of
demonstrating Republican support.
So there you have it. More analysis with queasy results from your pal B: until
DC and Black Americans in general start showing some support for Republicans,
they’re fucked from both sides.
146
CHAPTER 5. THE ECONOMY
Figure 5.3: Columbia, holding a torch.
Columbia Pictures.
5.13
From an older stock certificate for
Columbia
24 December 2008
¡Columbia! No nation is complete without a female personification wearing a
loose-fitting robe, and the United States of America has Columbia.
Much has been named after Ms Columbia, including a space shuttle, a movie
studio, and a ten mile by ten mile parcel of land carved out of Maryland and Virginia. But there isn’t much ambiguity. When talking about NASA, we simply
say the Columbia; when talking about a new movie, we’d just say it was made by
Columbia; and when referring to that parcel of land—wait, I suppose there’s always ambiguity when referring to the land, because we refer to it as the District of
Columbia every single time. Referring to the area just by its name, Columbia, is a
rarity indeed.4
We don’t do this with any other territory. We say things like the State of Maryland for added formality or bit of color, but it’s mostly just referred to as Maryland,
and it’s left to context for people to work out that the word refers to a state and not
the residence of some gal named Mary.
Other things that are not states don’t remind us at every single usage. We don’t
talk about the Commonwealth of Virginia all the time, or the Territory of Guam.
No, we just have this one linguistic glitch of referring to one and only subdivision
of the U.S.A. by that verbose the-division-of-name format.
By a crazy coincidence, this is the one subdivision that is trying to change its
4
Thanks to Ms SEG, of the City of Baltimore, State of Maryland, for suggestions. And a PS: the
country is Colombia, named after the explorer Cristobal Colón.
5.13. COLUMBIA
147
status, from the District of Columbia to the State of Columbia. That word District
has bite, because it means that the over half a million residents of Columbia have no
Senators, no Representative, and that the federal government can routinely overturn
their votes on local issues in manners that would be unconstitutional if the word
District were not attached to Columbia’s name.
Names do matter. As the marketing people would say, Columbia is heavily
branded as a district, not as a state. Every time anybody refers to the District of
Columbia, they effectively say Columbia, which I will once again remind you is a
district and not a state. This is not helpful.
Maybe you think concerns over nomenclature are silly, and won’t affect Columbia’s
chances of becoming a state. Well, great then: soon enough, the term District of
Columbia will actually be incorrect, so you might as well change now and start
calling it Columbia.
I myself dislike great efforts to rewrite nomenclature, and tire of people who
cut me off mid-sentence to correct my usage. But I’m talking about the Columbia
issue because the District of habit just so darn easy to fix. It’s like when people say
I typed my PIN number into the ATM machine. It’s just an I-didn’t-think-about-it
habit that’s easy to re-habit into something better.
There are ways to introduce a term without inducing confusion. E.g., use District of Columbia once, and then Columbia thereafter.
Or I suppose you could just refer to Washington. At inception, Columbia included a few distinct cities—Washington, Alexandria, Georgetown—and some unincorporated wilderness, but now Washington and Columbia are identical in scope.
Politically, I don’t like this option because in the system of the U.S. government,
land votes, which is why Wyoming—253,000 square kilometers, 523,000 people—
has two senators, while Columbia—177 sq km, 588,000 people—has none. Our
founding fathers felt that half a million people in a state deserve representation,
while half a million people in a city do not. And anyway, there is annoying ambiguity with the State of Washington.
Or, there’s the ol’ acronym trick. Kentucky Fried Chicken is KFC, National
Cash Register is NCR, Volkswagon is VW, and you don’t notice that they were
originally the product of a fascist enterprise to fry cash registers. Thus, dee cee,
which doesn’t mean anything at all, and could just as easily be the name of a soul
singer as of a region. This is even correct, in the sense that Columbia’s postal
abbreviation is indeed DC. So you yuksters who always call Kentucky K-Y are
entirely consistent in calling Columbia D-C.
So, dear reader, that’s all I have today. If you believe that taxation without
representation is tyranny, and you believe that Columbia should be a state and not
a district, then drop the references to the district’s second-class status, and start
referring to it simply by its name: Columbia.
6
P OLITICS
6.1
A tour of DC for Political Scientists
14 April 2007
I was merrily chatting with a pal who is a well-regarded Political Science associate prof at a well-regarded school, and he was complaining about how the ratio
of citizens to Congressmen varied so widely from state to state. He proposed a
simple solution: double the number of Representatives. He’s right: this would improve things, and in the process we would surely fix the fact that Montana has a
Rep and DC doesn’t, even though DC has a larger population.
And my reaction, as one who has spent a fair amount of time floating around
DC, was ‘golly, where are they gonna put them all?’
Geography matters, and not just in the broad sense that that phrase is typically
used. The geography of DC reveals some details of the workings of the US government that are not apparent on paper. So, let us take a tour of DC from the polsci
perspective.
Congressional Our tour will generally go East to West, beginning with Congress,
which is the center of DC, in the literal sense that it divides the four quadrants
and the street numbers/letters count up from it, even though this means the NW
quadrant is much bigger than the SE.
The Capitol building itself is pretty large—by law it is the tallest building in
DC.1 But that’s the tip of an iceberg. Capitol Hill really is a hill, which means
that you can dig under it. The Capitol is flanked by several office buildings where
everything actually happens, and they are all connected by underground tunnels,
creating a sprawling complex covering about ten buildings, including the three
Library of Congress buildings. This is convenient because vampires can run for
1
From 1899–1910, the law was that no building could be taller than the Capitol (280 feet). After
1910, the limit was width of street plus 20 feet, which is actually a shorter height limit in all cases.
148
6.1. A TOUR OF DC FOR POLITICAL SCIENTISTS
149
office without having to worry about ever seeing daylight. There are even House
and Senate monorails so they don’t have to walk.
About an even amount of stuff happens in the flanking office buildings as the
Capitol itself, yet security is lax and easy in the several office buildings. Feel free
to visit your Senator’s office and maybe grab a coffee at the seedy cafeteria downstairs. But if you want to enter the Capitol itself, you’d better not be squeamish
about anal cavity searches. This shows the split between the iconic points of interest and the places where work gets done, which are rarely the same place. The
Congress building itself is almost a giant decoy. If you want to go to a committee
meeting, it’ll probably be in one of the six flanking buildings. [It’s easy to attend any
public hearing: just show up several hours early. If you’re a lobbyist who has a lot of money and
wants to ensure a seat, you can hire a bike messenger to show up at 6AM, and then take his/her place
in line after you get some coffee.]
The flanking areas are also necessary because of how public-facing Congress
is. Any crackpot anywhere can visit their Congresspeople’s office building. The
aides I’ve spoken to say that true ‘I’m gonna break something’ security risks are
very rare, but people who talk a little bit too much are a daily matter. Thus,
there’s a sort of balance between easy public access and making sure that Congressfolk don’t actually have to meet random public. For example, every office has
a Congresspersons-only elevator.
By the way, South of the House office buildings, there are a few open spaces
taken up by parking lots. So there actually is room to expand the House. There’s
lots of parking on either side of Congress both because most Congressfolk live in
the suburbs, and probably as a security perimiter.
Tourist tip: the bars by the Congress are of course crawling with low-grade
staffers fresh out of college (who are basically powerless, but haven’t yet realized
it). But pass on the Hawk and Dove and go to the Capitol Lounge. Throw on
something half a step up from office attire and tell them you’re there for the party
upstairs. On any given night, there’ll be a reception for something, and corresponding drink specials or free booze.
Judicial, by the way Directly behind Congress, one finds the Supreme Court.
It’s one building. Given that the Capitol is really the Capitol complex, the Supreme
Court is actually surrounded on three sides by Congress, which makes it look still
smaller. So right off the bat, we see how asymmetric the three branches are. We
learned in grade school that there are three branches that each balance each other,
but the map reveals that they are by no means equal in power. Nobody cares about
the Supreme Court, there’s no easy-access public building for lobbyists to visit,
and as far as I understand it, the Supreme Court is fine with that.
150
CHAPTER 6. POLITICS
R
Figure 6.1: At left, the National Association of Realtors
. At right, how the NAR
hopes to stay afloat.
OK, back to Congress. Just West of the Congressional complex, you get the
lobbyist offices. Nothing says industry in decline like an office with a view of the
Capitol. For example, it will come as no surprise that the National Association
R
of Realtors
, the organization that is in a sort of ongoing antitrust scrutiny by the
DoJ and is well on its way to obsolescence as a pre-Internet information aggregator,
has a quite attractive building jaunting distance to the Capitol. Nor was I surprised
when, a month or two ago, the Cable Industry opened a little storefront a block
from the NAR.
Executive Continuing West from the Capitol, we cross the National Mall, featuring many Smithsonian museums. [The Smithsonian is not one museum, but a chain of
them, including the National Zoo.] But to the North and South of the Mall is a host
of bureaucracies. To the South is the Department of Agriculture, which takes up
what would be four city blocks if we built streets through it (and there are already
bridges connecting the N and S halves). From which we learn that the Department
of Ag got built back when agriculture was important and DC wasn’t yet crowded.
They ain’t giving up their land now, of course. The Ag department runs a miniuniversity for all branches of the Federal govt, so if you want to learn a language
or such, you’re probably going to go to the Dept of Ag to do it; I imagine it’s part
6.1. A TOUR OF DC FOR POLITICAL SCIENTISTS
151
of their continuing efforts to remain relevant.
The more modern departments, such as NIST, NOAA, the NSA, NASA, and
the NIH are in the Maryland suburbs, which was all that was left at their founding.
But note also that these are all technical bureaus, as if the scientists collectively
said ‘excuse me, but I’d rather be doing resarch in a nice office than becoming more
politically connected.’ And then they complain when science funding shrinks.
Back to the Mall’s surroundings, the EPA, the IRS, the executive-branch DoJ,
the FAA, the DoE, the SEC, all your favorite three-letter acronyms (TLAs) are
there. This is a nice place to put them, I suppose, because they are spanning the
space between the Congress and White House. I don’t have much to say about
these buildings, though, ‘cause they’re just kinda boring.
Many cities have a Zero Mile Marker for distance-to-city calculations. DC’s is
just south of the White House, which seems a bit odd given that the intuitive zero
marker would be the center of the grid system (the Capitol). I suppose this was
some sort of political compromise, to have two centers to DC. [Once again, we
don’t care about the Judicial branch.]
The Executive offices impress me as a smaller body. There are a few flanking
the White House itself, which is a squat little building compared to everything
around it. This means, by the way, that you can only see the White House from
one or two non-Fed buildings. I am told by an ex-employee of one of the hotels
that can see the White House that they had to call ahead every time they wanted to
do roof maintenance, so as to ensure that nobody gets shot by snipers. [The Hotel
Washington has a rooftop deck which gives a pretty good view, but their prices are $$. Go during
happy hour, nurse a drink or two for an hour, and enjoy the view.]
The rest of the White House’s environs are park-like: to the North is Lafayette
park, featuring a 24-hour, decade long peace vigil by a few homeless folk, and to
the South is the Ellipse and Washington Monument. It’s certainly a much nicer
security perimeter than the Capitol’s mix of parking lots and semi-untended parks.
There are of course far fewer people than there than Congress so there are naturally
few office buildings, but I get the impression of much more iconic activity than
actual work out of the White House area.
The White House’s immediate neighbors are diverse. To its East is the Treasury, whose South face you will recognize from the $10 bill. The street just North
of the Treasury (closed to auto traffic) is a popular hangout for Segway riders.
Next to Lafayette park, one will find the Federal Courthouse, which houses
the US Court of Claims (where suits against the U.S. government go), the Court
of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (the guys who invented software and business
method patents, as well as a few other innovations), and I’m not sure who else.
This should strike you as odd, because the Supreme Court is on the other side of
town. The space East of the Supreme Court is nothing that couldn’t be torn down
152
CHAPTER 6. POLITICS
via eminent domain, so a Judicial Complex would have been possible. But instead,
the top of the Judicial pyramid got spread out across DC. This says something to
me about how the different branches work: Congress needs to network, network,
and network more, while the Court of Claims judges and the Supreme Court judges
don’t talk very often. The clerks at the Supreme Court have a basketball league,
which meets in the basketball court in the top floor of the Supreme Court building
[the highest court in the land!!! Yuk, yuk!], and the Court of Claims guys aren’t
even invited.
Further West Keep going two blocks, and you hit the World Bank/IMF complex.
Of the bodies that define the international law system (The UN, WTO, ICJ, one or
two other TLAs), these are the only guys who are located in DC. Also, they are
DC’s third largest employer. The World Bank has no underground tunnels, so
you’ve got lots of people walking around, and their buildings have no unifying
architectural theme, so it just feels like you’re downtown (which you are). Across
the way from the World Bank’s gigantic HQ building are boring old law offices and
such. I’m not sure how many buildings the WB has, but I’ve been to the J building,
and I don’t think they skipped letters.
Directly in front of the WB HQ is a small triangular park, normally occupied
by the usual homeless folk. But during the summer months, there are the regular
protests, which are conveniently held in that park, a stone’s throw from the HQ. A
few security guys watch the crowd to make sure nobody takes that stone’s throw
thing too literally, everybody goes home, and on Monday it’s back to homeless
guys in the park and the Bank managers milling around trying to build consensus
among themselves.
The IMF personality is a bit more like the Supreme Court: head down, looking
at the numbers, caring more about getting the details right than talking to people. It
has only two buildings (one of which was built just last year), which just look more
closed than the World Bank’s. The new building’s internals were built to combat
this, with lots of haphazard stairways and crossing hallways designed to maximize
the odds of bumping into people while walking around. But from the outside you
don’t see this. The World Bank’s HQ, by contrast, is one giant window, and from
what had been the pre-terrorist paranoia guest entrance, you could already see the
waterfall and giant central courtyard. You immediately get the sense of people
walking around trying to build consensus with each other (and thus getting nothing
of substance done).
Oh, and we should maybe take a quick jaunt up Mass Ave, which crosses between Union Station and the Capitol, passes what I will call “Industry in Decline
and Desperately Lobbying Row”, and eventually becomes what is known by those
6.1. A TOUR OF DC FOR POLITICAL SCIENTISTS
153
who work there as “Think Tank Row.” Indeed, most of the think tanks that I can
think of are up there, except for the Heritage Institute, which owns prime land
right by the Senate side of the Capitol complex. Keep going up Mass ave (we’re
past the White House now) and it quickly becomes what everybody calls Embassy
Row. Indeed, almost every house there is an embassy, and almost every embassy
is along Mass Ave, except for a few stragglers like the Mexican embassy, which
is right by the World Bank/IMF. The Vice President’s house is toward the top end
of Embassy Row; general consensus is that Richard “Dick” Cheney’s undisclosed
location is the Naval Observatory, right across the street. It’s a sensible place to
put his house, because nothing happens at any embassy but iconic parties and receptions (and visa paperwork), and I can’t imagine anything else happening at the
Vice-Presidential mansion. The location is super-annoying, by the way, because
the route between the White House and the VP’s house goes right through some
heavily populated areas (Dupont Circle) and every time the VP wants to frigging
commute, he needs an entourage of six limos, ten police motorcycles running their
sirens, and four SUVs, and traffic and any hope of conversation accordingly stops.
Surely it doesn’t have to be that way.
The Military-industrial complex The Pentagon is across the river in Northern
Virginia. It is immediately adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery, and I believe
offices on that side of the building have a panoramic view of the many rows of
graves.
NoVa is thus defense contractor central, and if you make your money blowing
stuff up, or doing paperwork about blowing stuff up, then that’s where your office
will be.
NoVa is seriously unwalkable. It’s just highway after highway, connecting
a long string of parking lots. The stereotypes of military being right-wing and
sort of rural and driving everywhere align just fine here, compared to Metro and
pedestrian-focused DC. If you’re a left-wing DC hipster who takes Metro everywhere, you just would not be able to function down here.
There are a few NoVa exceptions, such as Crystal City and Pentagon City,
which are a series of malls, hotels, defense buildings, and Metro stops all connected
by walkways. That’s where you can go to the TGI Friday’s and be the only person
there who isn’t in an officer’s uniform and a buzz cut.
Oh, the US Patent and Trademark Office is down there too, kind of across from
National Airport, which means that a great many patent lawyers have Northern VA
addresses. The complex itself is getting gigantic, in direct correspondence to the
USPTO’s increasing efforts to make everything patentable.
It didn’t have to be that way. The NIH is in Bethedsa, Montgomery county,
154
CHAPTER 6. POLITICS
MD (among the best-educated counties in the USA), and its campus is eminently
walkable: one side to the other in ten minutes, and a shuttle bus in case that’s a
problem. Both it and the Pentagon have their own Metro stop, and a transit center
directly above the Metro stop, but somehow the NIH managed to not ring itself
with parking lots.
You can tell what bills are before Congress by checking the advertising on the
Metro. The orange/blue lines include Capitol South, so it gets the current bills
before Congress. Metro center was bought out by American Chemistry a while
back, and before that it was Cable. Both VA and MD commuter rail arrive at Union
Station, so you can’t get out without passing a gauntlet of please-don’t-regulate-us
ads. It was Toyota last month; this month it’s Blue Cross/Shield. Most mid-to-high
level bureaucrats live in well-educated Montgomery County, and so the MD-to-DC
red line always has ads for computer equipment and office supplies.
The yellow line goes to VA, so the ads there are always for personnel carriers
and fighter jets. Yup: the same advertising to make you feel good about picking
up some Starbucks on the way in to the office is used to sell products with price
tags in the tens of millions. I mean, how does the decision process go, exactly?
The officers head down to TGI Friday, have a few mudslides, and just buy the first
transatlantic personnel carrier that pops into their heads?
6.2
Mafias and governments
6 January 2007
Mafias are governments. They provide social services and protection from
external threats, and in order to do that and maintain hegemony, they collect taxes
and threaten physical harm upon those who don’t comply with the plan.
That describes the traditional mafias, both in the Godfather style of old and
the more modern Crips & Bloods style. It also describes the kings and feudal
lords from centuries ago, who each had their own little army to protect against the
neighbor’s little army. It describes both Hezbollah—the organization that attacked
Israel and then organized the reconstruction effort after the completely inevitable
bombing—and the recognized government of Lebanon. For that matter, it even
describes the government of the U.S.A., France, China, or any other government
represented at the U.N.
[Sorry, no citations today; this is just a set of interesting ways to think about things. Feel free to
contribute citations. Also, I’ll use government and mafia interchangeably herein.]
6.2. MAFIAS AND GOVERNMENTS
155
The violence thing I’ll talk about how microgovernments provide social services
next time; today I’ll focus on the negative side: microgovernments tend to be orders
of magnitude more violent than the larger governments. The mafias spend a lot of
time flexing muscle, and for easy-to-understand reasons.
You know you’re going to lose any fight against the U.S. government (though
the U.S. Court of Claims rules for the claimant as often as for the Federal Govt),
so you don’t try. Forget what you saw in the movies: there is no way that you are
going to overthrow the U.S. government or otherwise force your way into power,
so you don’t try. That means that although the government has the ability to use
force against you, it never really has to. Forget what you saw in the movies: the
odds are about nil that the Feds are going to show up at your door one day and cart
you off.
The small mafia is a whole ‘nother story. With limited legitimacy and others
who want to claim that they are the ones who should be controlling the taxes/protection money, it is very conceivable that others could take over, so the microgovernment needs to show that it is in control. History has shown that this often
means killing people. Hamas members kill Fatah members, and Fatah members
kill Hamas members.
Maintaining legitimacy: a case study In days of old, the Catholic church (the
reader will recall that the word catholic means universal) was a government. It
had military force, which it used during the Crusades and against subjects who disobeyed. It was Church members who kept Galileo under house arrest and tortured
people during the Spanish Inquisition. In the regions it controlled, it had about
100% membership, just as the U.S. Government collects taxes from all relevant
parties (the only difference being that the Church had a 10% flat income tax, while
the U.S. has a progressive tax rate).
Modern churches are not governments (well, outside of Vatican City.) They
exert social pressure and make an effort to get government to use its coercive force
to advance church goals, but they have shifted to maintaining their power exclusively by trying to be nice. It’d be great if that were enough, but we’ve never seen
a non-militarized church as the sole government in a territory (counterexamples,
anyone?). Thanks to the tourists, Vatican city has among the highest crime rates of
any country2 . Membership rates are pretty far down: there are millions of people
throughout what used to be the Catholic territories that are no longer affiliated with
any church at all.
From which we learn that virtuous behavior and a divine endorsement are not
enough to keep people subscribed to the team. For any modern government, it is
2
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2639777.stm
156
CHAPTER 6. POLITICS
Figure 6.2: The game between those in power and everybody else.
difficult to ask the counterfactual question of whether people would support the
government if there were no threat of force at all. Evidently, most wouldn’t.
The model and the moral For those who need a model, observe the game between the government in power and the other (either subjects or the neighboring
power). First, notice the fixed value r, It indicates the perception of strength, and
will factor in to how effectively people perceive the government’s ability to maintain power. For the U.S.A., r → ∞, because nobody expects it to get dislodged any
time soon; for the streetcorner pusher, r is low because competitors could move in
relatively easily.
Given this, the government chooses its display of military might, p. I assume
that if there is no revolt, the payoff is −10p, meaning that the government prefers
to keep p as low as possible. That is, they use violence only as a tool to maintain
power, and not because they enjoy violence or the display of phallic imagery for
its own sake.
After the government selects p, the other decides whether to revolt/invade or
to maintain peace. If it does revolt, then it expects to succeed with probability
1 − pr, and to fail with probability pr. You can see the payoff to failure is much
larger than the payoff to success, since failure usually means the revolutionaries
6.3. MAFIAS AND BUREAUCRACIES
157
get killed. That said, the opposition has an easy question: is the payoff to revolt
greater than zero? You can easily verify that in equilibrium, the other will revolt
only when p < 1/(11r).
Working up the game tree, we see that the government will thus set p =
1/(11r)
There is an important moral to the game: a government’s use of force is inversely proportional to the perception of strength. The superstable U.S. government does not have people wandering the streets of Washington with machine guns;
Hezbollah was on the verge of disappearing and so had to lob some missiles into
Israel.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the organization being questioned put more effort into
social services instead of violence? Yeah, it’d be wonderful, but somehow that
never really happens.
For Israel and its environs, the policy implications are easy: we’ll only have
peace when both sides stop denying the legitimacy of the government(s) on the
other side of the border. That means that Hamas causes destruction when it calls for
the dissolution of Israel, and Israel causes destruction when it denies the legitimacy
of Hamas. Israel gets about half a point here for taking great pains to work out
how to put together a Palestinian government whose legitimacy it and others will
recognize, but that may or may not put it back in the positive.
So should we never question legitimacy? That would be silly. But we should
recognize the consequences of inciting the organization being questioned into proving itself. Go ahead, oppose the two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine issue,
either by insisting that Israel eliminate the Palestinian Authority or that the Palestinian Authority eliminate Israel. Just recognize that when you oppose the two-state
solution, you are rooting for more misery and killing.
OK, that’s enough for one column; more next time.
6.3
Mafias and bureaucracies
6 January 2007
In the last episode we saw that mafias are just microgovernments: both use
force and social services to maintain power. I discussed how small mafias must use
violence to maintain the perception of legitimacy. Here, I’ll begin with the perkier
side of efficient provision of social services.
Being nice guys Everybody wants to think they’re nice people. This counts for
heads of state too, who want to be able to tell their kids that they’re helping to
158
CHAPTER 6. POLITICS
make the world a safer and more pleasant place to live. Every mafia has its narrative of services provided, including protection from the mafia next door for those
who have paid-up taxes, the list of Hamas’s social services, and the U.S.’s Social
Security system. The cynical can take this as PR to make sure that the subjects
don’t revolt, while the optimistic can take it as a true attempt to help people. Both
are likely right to some extent.
Big government versus small As a broad rule, small organizations are more
adaptable and responsive and have fewer layers of bureaucracy between the idea
and the final implementation of the service. This is broadly true whether we’re
comparing big and small governments, mafias, or corporations.
So say we had a small mafia, like Hamas, providing services comparable to
those provided by the existing Palestinian government, headed by the well-entrenched
Fatah party. Hamas could do more with less, and it is an easily-explained surprise
that they won the election: you’ve got two competing governments, one of which
is an entrenched bureaucracy inefficiently providing social services, and one of
which is a small, relatively nimble organization doing better at providing the same
services.
Families as government The most basic form of government is the family. The
family does provide the sort of services that one would expect from a government
or even a market, like economic insurance and loans of capital. That stereotypical giant Catholic family is a credit collective. [Massey et al., 2002, p 12] And
the decline of the traditional family in the U.S. (as endlessly lamented by social
conservatives) is due to the increasing ability of the open market to provide for the
individual’s needs (as endlessly celebrated by economic conservatives).
The rhetoric of the close-knit family sticking together is all very appealing, but
in many cases throughout the world, the outcome has been violent and decidedly
unwholesome, as big families (aka clans, tribes) and small governments sometimes
are one and the same. African clans often go to war with each other, the Italian
mafia is primarily a coalition of families, and Saddam Hussein’s government was
to a large extent his clan—recall how his brother was high on the U.S.’s hit list.
The goals of government Microgovernments often have a defined goal, which
may or may not look evil to the rest of us. They could be seeking to overthrow
the Nazi invaders, overthrow the U.S. invaders, make sure that a neighborhood that
is ill-protected by the larger government gets its share, control the drug trade, or
dissolve Israel.
Expansion also seems to be a fave goal for just about every government.
6.3. MAFIAS AND BUREAUCRACIES
159
But as a government gets bigger and better established, its goals become much
more diffuse. If the U.S. government has a set of distinct goals, I certainly can’t
guess what they are.
And, of course, we must not forget that the goal for the members of governments of all sizes is to grab stuff for the people in power and their pals.
The two are not equally comparable People spend much time on defining these
microgovernments, especially regarding the Middle East. Are they a mafia, a coalition of happy families, a legitimate government, a terrorist organization? Such a
debate is a waste of time, because once we decide that Hamas is both a social
service organization or a terrorist organization, we still have no idea whether this
sums up to legitimacy or virtuousness. I’m perfectly fine with naming the world’s
service-providing, gun-toting mafias as governments, but that clearly does not imply legitimacy or an ethical justification for their actions.
Every government of all sizes maintains its power via both the threat of violence; and social services, virtuous deeds, and a story about why the founders are
the rightful leaders (Divine right, blood ties, democratic will, or whatever).
So our first question in evaluating legitimacy is to evaluate the balance between
violence and service. Even though the small governments are more efficient on the
service end, they are almost always so far along on the violence side to make the
edge in efficiency look trivial.
The other question is about the goals. Are the stated goals of those governments
with stated goals destructive? Are the goals of expansion for the sake of expansion
and the grabbiness of those in power in check?
Making such a judgment is hard. If you’ve read anything by me in the past,
then you know how I personally score Hamas and Hezbollah, but how am I to
convince you that their violence outweighs their social services? It’s comparing
meters to minutes. You decide for yourself, but do it without labels—to say that
‘they provide services and organize a militia, therefore they are a government,
therefore they are legitimate’ is to put too much weight on the legitimacy of all
governments. Sure, on some level it’s all just a bunch of comparable teams vying
for turf, but some of those teams are much more destructive and some are much
more constructive. Crips, Bloods, and the LA police all have some community
support and some community animosity, but I’m comfortable rooting for the LA
police in that one [and that’s even after the LA police fined me $271 for running a red light on
my bicycle].
Abhorrent vacuums Given that a government maintains its status via the threat
of force, it seems immoral. That’s the libertarian reasoning, which sort of stops
160
CHAPTER 6. POLITICS
there. But there are few situations anywhere where there isn’t some type of government in place.
Where does one not find governments? In the U.S.A., government has explicitly stepped out of managing the drug trade. But, wonder of wonders, small mafias
have taken over in that field and make sure that things are run in an orderly manner.
In Iraq, the government was quickly dismantled, but it is not the case that there
is no government there either. Instead, a large number of small mafias are in a civil
war to control at least their own little space, if not the whole country.
When there isn’t a government in the recognized sense of the term, somebody
will start one up, and the odds are darn good that whoever is running the thing is
doing it out of personal self interest, that the microgovernment maintains status
via regular demonstrations of violence, and if it maintains its power and expands
enough for us to notice then it is likely providing popular services and telling a
locally popular story about its inception.
I made up the word microgovernment for this essay [again, I haven’t scoured the Pol
Sci literature, so I’m not claiming originality; but see Heald [1986] for an anecdotal account of the
because all the other words for such a thing have a tinge
of violence and even evil: the gang, the mafia, the warlord’s faction, the militia,
and maybe we can even throw in the cult.
What happened in Iraq was no surprise to anybody except the Bush administration: when you eliminate a government which is blandly evil, a large, virtuous
government doesn’t magically spring up in place. It’s much easier for small factions to form around the local charismatic figure, via a combination of violence
and good storytelling, with a heavy lean toward the violence side. The blandly
evil government is not the stopper on the bottle that one would ideally wish for,
but if it is there, replacing it with another is risky. Sure, it would be great if we
could eliminate drugs by just refusing to accept them in the law, and we could
replace Hussein’s government with a parliamentary democracy. But when there
is no large, boring government overseeing a territory, then small, almost certainly
violent governments come in to fill the space.
formation of mafias in Africa.]
6.4
How strict constructionism can be judicial activism
16 February 2007
[Today’s episode is a guest blog by Mr. BK of Baltimore, MD]
This is a note on the term ‘judicial activism’, which is misused in subtle ways
among pundits and politicians.
6.4. HOW STRICT CONSTRUCTIONISM CAN BE JUDICIAL ACTIVISM161
The key to how it is misused is the ambiguity of the terms liberal and conservative. I count five (5) distinct uses of these terms.
The first three are familiar to everybody. There’s the liberal/conservative scale
regarding change in general, where the L team is forward-looking and the C team
seeks stability. There’s the social scale, where liberals believe people should be left
to do what they want, and conservatives seek a social order reminiscent of Norman
Rockwell paintings. There’s the economic scale, where liberals believe some social
services are necessary, and conservatives seek smaller government.
These three scales are only tenuously related. It is easy to find futurist social
conservatives, social liberals for smaller government (aka libertarians), and any
other combination of the above. But, with only the words liberal and conservative
used for all three axes, there’s a strong—and clearly false—implication that one
who is liberal on one axis is liberal on the others.
That said, let us move on to judges. Judges are often described as constructionists or activists, as if there is a single axis along which we measure judges.
But as with liberal/conservative, it confounds a couple of concepts and just creates
confusion. So, let’s make some definitions.
Constructionism There are two components to a law: the statute in the Constitution or as passed by Congress, and the interpretation of the statute by courts
who had to contend with the law. One school of thought, strict constructionism,
contends that one should focus as much as possible only on the statute as written,
rather than subsequent interpretation. Congress wrote what it darn well intended
the law to be, so why should later judges and pundits modify that intent?
The constructionist view bears much in common with the neoclassical economist’s
viewpoint, that people are very rational and very capable of forseeing the future.
To the extent that this is correct, the constructionist claim (that Congress wrote
what it intended the future to look like) works.
I work with patents, and patents are an excellent example of how constructionism and the hyperrational assumption can go horribly wrong. Thomas Jefferson
wrote what is now 35 USC §101 (inventions patentable), and it hasn’t even been
looked at since 1952. So: did the 1952 Congress, or Thomas Jefferson, intend that
web page designs should be patentable? Even the Psychic Hotline would have difficulty with such a question, yet a strict constructionist has a simple answer: yes,
they did intend so, because they would have said so otherwise.
The alternative is to look at more recent rulings and try to conform with those.
My impression is that this is the modal type of judge: they try to rule in conformance with the law, but that includes equal measures constitution/statute and recent
rulings. Let us call this the developmentalist approach; some call it the activist ap-
162
CHAPTER 6. POLITICS
proach. The language typically used sets constructionist = conservative and activist
= liberal.
As an aside, the constructionist view toward the U.S. Constitution is often characterized as interpreting the constitution the way the Founding Fathers intended it.
But this is an incorrect phrasing. Jefferson again: “No society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living
generation.” [Letter to James Madison, 6 Sept 1789] The statement ‘I am a strict
constructionist, because I interpret the law the way a set of developmentalists did
in 1776’ is somewhere between incoherent and ridiculous. Rather, the sane strict
constitutional constructionist generally shoots for a direct reading of the words as
written, outside of the context of colonial times.
Stare decisis This is legal Latin for “to stand by things decided”. That is, if judges
past have decided that the law of the land is X, then ya don’t change it to Y unless
there’s a darn good reason.
Different judges interpret the phrase darn good reason differently. Some overturn past rulings at the drop of a legal hat; others steadfastly stand by the past
rulings, and just mumble something about ‘it’s a bad law, but it’s Congress’s job to
change it’ in rulings that they aren’t happy writing.
There are two pairs of terms used to describe a judge’s attitude toward stare
decisis. The first is liberal/conservative and the other is constructionist/activist,
and once again, both pairs of terms don’t correspond to any of the above uses of
these terms.
There are four possible combinations of liberal/conservative in the context of
statute and stare decisis, and it’s worth going over all four, because they reveal an
important asymmetry.
It may happen that the law as currently interpreted differs significantly from the
law as written. This is common for a law written decades ago, due to simple drift
in conditions and legal understanding. The first option in this case is to be a statute
liberal and a stare decisis conservative. That is, a judge could be a conservative in
the sense of maintaining the status quo.
When there is a difference between the status quo and the original statute from
times past, it is impossible to simultaneously be conservative with regards to both.
Of course, this doesn’t keep many judges from trying.
The next possibility is for a judge to be liberal with regards to both statute and
stare decisis. Such a judge really is just making up the law. You won’t find a
judge anywhere who claims such a position, though there’s endless debate as to
whether some judges act like this. Therein lies the asymmetry between liberal and
conservative: conservative on both scales is OK but usually impossible, but liberal
6.4. HOW STRICT CONSTRUCTIONISM CAN BE JUDICIAL ACTIVISM163
on both scales is an abuse of judicial power.
The next option is to be a statute liberal and a stare decisis conservative. There
are people like this in many contexts: folks who insist that the U.S.A. once had a
decidedly Christian government (a claim that is itself up for dispute) and therefore
the present government should be devoutly Christian as well; folks who insist that
the only good music is the kind they heard in high school; folks who insist that all
families must consist of a mother, father, and at least two children because that’s
how it had to be on the farm. Such people are radically liberal, in the sense that
they oppose the status quo in favor of something different, which happens to have
been the status quo at one point in the past.
Judges of this type are often called judicially conservative. Yup, a judge who
rules for changing the status quo when faced with a conflict between statute and
rulings is called judicially conservative, and a judge who prefers to maintain the
status quo is typically called judicially liberal. It’s things like this that make people
learning English as a second language hate it so much.
Patent law is a good example of judicial conservatism/status quo liberalism.
The circuit judge who decided that software and business methods should be patentable
(Judge Giles Rich) was very vehemently constructionist in citing statute and reading it as literally as possible. As such, he was massively activist, because he
overturned a century’s worth of stare decisis, including several rulings from the
Supreme Court.
You know I am not happy with Judge Rich’s ruling, but there are other cases of
activist constructionists, the most salient being those who ruled in Brown v Board
of Education, whom we all love to death. So even after we have acknowledged that
the scales of liberal/conservative with respect to statute and liberal/conservative
with respect to stare decisis are entirely different scales, and after we’ve pegged a
judge on both, we still won’t know whether their rulings are liberal/conservative
with respect to the social and economic scales that people actually care about.
Gay marriage The term activist judge3 has been bandied about by certain individuals, invariably as a derogatory term, but without clarifying to which of the
above two sometimes contradictory definitions the speaker is referring. But the
confusion is typically deliberate, and implies that any activism in the sense of interpreting laws based on judicial understanding must be of the radical form of
arbitrarily revising law.
[ The activism question often comes up in judicial hearings as well, where judges often attempt
to characterize themselves as strict constructionists, implying that this is a good thing. But it seems
preeminently clear that a good judge makes an effort to balance statute and recent rulings in every
3
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061030-4.html
164
CHAPTER 6. POLITICS
Figure 6.3: To revert to the means of judging in times past would be a radical,
jarring change from the present. [Painting credit: Raphael: The Judgement of
Solomon, c. 1518-19]
situation. The Constitution just doesn’t say anything about computer-generated pedopæliac images4 ,
so for a judge to claim that he considers only the constitution in deciding such an issue is to say that
the judge feels at liberty to just make stuff up.]
Not to accuse President Bush of simplistic thinking, but to say that any judge
that does not strictly follow statute is rewriting the law is simplistic. Such a claim
only works when the law as written is entirely and perfectly appropriate to all
situations, even decades later—and remember that a case appears before a higher
court only when there is some sort of open question, ambiguity, or controversy
about the law as written. Thus, any high court judge that isn’t braindead is an
activist in the first sense of re-interpreting statute as written; if we insist that that
means activist in the sense of inventing law, then we can only conclude that all
judges are activist in the derogatory ‘hijacking the law’ sense used by folks such
4
http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/00-795.ZS.html
6.5. MY FAMILY
165
as the guy linked above.
But why be abstract when we have an easy example? The term ‘activist judge’
is the term preferred by people complaining about gay marriage. The big ruling
in the gay marriage issue was Goodridge v Department of Health, which was the
ruling in Massachusetts that allowed same-sex civil unions—and did so via an
allegedly strict constructionist reading of the equal protection clause in the MA
constitution, no less.
With regards to statute, there is clearly ambiguity because nobody ever bothered to strictly define the meaning of marriage, just as Jefferson didn’t specify
whether web pages should be patentable. You could ask what the word marriage
meant in 1776, in which case you’d probably find gay marriage was not intended
by the law—and neither was marriage between whites and nonwhites.
As for overturning stare decisis, I’m no expert on MA marriage precedent, but
giving a casual look ‘round, I am unable to find claims that Goodridge was in contradiction of past court rulings. For so many claims that this is an activist court,
you’d think somebody would find the ruling that they were supposedly contradicting. Rather, marriage law in the U.S.A. has been a slow slide toward disaggregating
marriage into a series of social services (especially given the strict interpretation of
the “no establishment of religion” clause in the Constitution), and Goodridge fell
right into that by interpreting the civil union as such a bundle of social services.
So what we get here is that the court in Goodridge wasn’t actually activist at all
in either the statute or stare decisis sense. It read directly from the MA constitution
using a plain English understanding of the language about equality under the law,
and did not seem to disagree with past court rulings. So we conclude what many
of you have probably been thinking all along: that the term ‘activist judge’ in this
context really is just a polysyllabic way of saying ‘socially liberal’.
Now, there’s a specific reason for conservative rhetoricians to confound all five
axes and claim that liberal on one means liberal on the other four, which returns to
the asymmetry discussed above: if a judge is liberal on both judicial axes at once,
then that judge is just making up law.
This is the crux of the implicit argument in the term ‘activist judge’. If we start
with the false premise that a judge who is liberal on one axis is also liberal on all
four other axes, then we get the false conclusion that all socially liberal judges are
just making up the law, and so the only good judge is a socially conservative judge.
6.5
My family
22 August 2007
166
CHAPTER 6. POLITICS
Figure 6.4: My grandmother was valedictorian of her 2nd grade class.
We begin with a necessary disclaimer. This is a family history, not a political
broadside. I’m sticking to the facts, as best as I can reconstruct them. If you take
this as some sort of commentary on current politics, then I hate you.
I think it is interesting history, however, because it’s not often that a new country just pops up one day. I get the impression that some people think that Israel as
a Jewish state just appeared one day, by UN decree. In one sense it did, but in another, it formed over the course of a century or so as individual people contributed.
Since the members of my family are included among those contributors, my family
history, in my mind, is tied to the history of Israel.
My grandmother was born in Botoşani, Romania, as the daughter of Rosa
Ashkenaz and Aaron Cordova (a German). There are two main streams of Judaism: Ashkenazi and Sehpardic, where the Ashkenazi were primarily found in
Eastern Europe, and the Sephardic in Spain and North Africa. Noting that Cordova
6.5. MY FAMILY
167
Figure 6.5: This is a 10 mil piece. I have no idea what that means.
is a town in Southern Spain, we see that this was a marriage of the two traditions.
It was an orthodox household in an orthodox community. This list of Jewish
Cemetaries5 (which seems to be trying to cite its sources and get things right) has
this to say about the town:
The current population is 5,000-25,000 with no Jews. The Census
from 1839 registered 150 Jewish families. The 1899 Census registered 630 Jewish inhabitants. The 1930 Census registered 1884 Jewish inhabitants. The Jewish Community was founded in 1837 by an
agreement with the owner Teodor Balus. On 1 July 1940, many Jews
were massacred. Between June and July 1944, many Jewish families
were deported in Oltenia.
She left around 1930 (don’t recall the exact date), to the British protectorate that
was called Palestine. The coin pictured here was in my grandmother’s collection,
along with the cute little tokens Israeli payphones used to run on and other such
oddities. You can see that it is in Arabic, English, and Hebrew. The Hebrew in
parens (at about 7 o’clock in the picture) is an acronym for what the Jew folk like
to call this plot of land (Israel), so the conflict of naming is already beginning to
show, though the Brits are showing their clear preference. The choice of Palestine,
5
http://www.jewishgen.org/cemetery/e-europe/rom-d-e.html
168
CHAPTER 6. POLITICS
I am told, derives from the British fetish for all things Roman. Millenia ago, the
Romans had renamed the territory from Judea to a variant on Palestine. The term
also lives on in conversational English in another variant form, philistine. [Once
again, if you think this bit of etymology from the late 1800s has any relevance to modern politics,
you’ve got issues. But ain’t it interesting?]
Romanian sentiment toward Jews is famously bad. Arendt, in Eichmann in
Jerusalem, explained that when the Nazis came to train Romanians about how to
properly persecute a Jew, the Nazi representatives were horrified by how inhumanely Romanian Jews were treated. As my grandmother tells it, the Romanians
kept telling her to go back to Palestine, so she did. There, she was able to continue life as an observant Jew primarily in the Ashkenasi tradition, while others in
her family were able to do the same in the Sephardic tradition. Her brother had
already arrived, and as shown by the stats above, by the end of WWII everybody in
the family had gone separate ways, to New York, Palestine, or, in one case, a gas
chamber.
I asked her what she thought of the British protectorate, and she said “the Brits
were brutes.” She cited one example that she witnessed where the British police
allowed hundreds of immigrants arriving via sea to drown rather than let them onto
shore.
My grandfather was born either in Bulgaria, just before the family went to
Palestine, or in Cypress, en route; my mother is unsure. They met and married before Israel existed, and eventually settled in a little apartment in Haifa. The current
edition of Wikipedia6 lists Haifa’s population in 1922 as 24,600, which is a small
town by any measure; e.g., Washington, D.C. is 22 times larger, at 550,000 people
(without suburbs). So their apartment was in a little, sparsely-populated seaport at
the edge of a great big desert. My grandfather lived in that same apartment until
he died about a decade ago; my grandmother lives there now. When my mother
described the place as she remembered it, she doesn’t paint a very pretty picture,
and I only picture it as worse fifty years later.
So a few more years pass. My aunt was born three years before the official
founding of Israel, my mother three years after.
I’m not entirely clear on their involvement in the many wars that Israel the
country has fought. During the War of Attrition with Egypt, mother was stuck
watching radar screens near the Sinai Desert, since women in the military get
trained in combat but are kept off the front lines.
Meanwhile, my father was born in Prague, Bohemia, Czechloslovakia. I’ve
only met him briefly, but he says that his father, a doctor, was somewhat acquainted
with Bertrand Russel, and a letter from Russel allowed the family to leave the
6
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haifa
6.5. MY FAMILY
169
Figure 6.6: My grandfather, trying to look valiant. Nobody is quite sure what to
call the ground his horse is standing on.
170
CHAPTER 6. POLITICS
country and go to Israel, where he mostly grew up.
One nice thing about the Israeli military: it is a meat market. It’s a little more
busy now, but in the past it’s just been thousands of 17-year old boys and girls
with nothing to do but work out and flirt with each other. So, my parents met, my
brother was born, and I was born a little later (in Australia, because, uh, why not).
Meanwhile, my aunt moved to the United States, after meeting the well-to-do
owner of a condom factory, who whisked her away and married her. Since this was
the 1970s and the USA still liked immigrants—more in the next entry—it was easy
for my infant self to wind up in the USA as well. My aunt had a son, who married
a woman from Ohio, and they had two kids who self-identify as Catholic.
6.6
Neil Diamond, America
30 August 2007
This song should be the USA’s national anthem.
It is the only song about the United States of America that doesn’t just make me
cynical. The current anthem is something about watching a battle over Baltimore’s
Fort McHenry, which is not something many of us can really relate to. Other songs
that are more direct and just keep saying things like “at least I know I’m free” just
remind me of the eternal vigilance that is the price of that freedom, and how many
little flaws that freedom has today.
I once heard an ad executive on the radio, talking about how the USA can sell
itself to the parts of the world that dislike it. [Sorry, I’m not going to be able to find you a
proper reference.] He said that if you gave his agency a million bucks, it wouldn’t be
able to come up with a better tag line than the land of opportunity. It’s a moniker
that says nothing but optimism, hope, and prosperity.
So that’s why I love Neil Diamond’s America. Despite an occasional jump to
third person, it’s from the perspective of the people who still have that optimism
that things will be better in the USA, and feel that it’s worth giving up everything
for that optimism. It has impact because there really are people like that, and we
all recognize that expressing your optimism about a country by leaving behind
friends, family, and everything you know means a lot more than expressing love of
a country with a bumper sticker.
[ When I was a kid, by the way, this was one of only a half-dozen English-language albums
that we had in our collection (being that I’m an immigrant myself; see prior column). So part of my
affection for the song is that I heard it a few hundred times. I always thought the cover of Hot August
Night looked smarmy, though, and perhaps it’s why I still dislike jeans jackets.]
Of course, it’ll never become our national anthem, because it’s about immigra-
6.6. NEIL DIAMOND, AMERICA
171
Figure 6.7: Comments about how my mom was hot when she was in the military
will be summarily deleted.
172
CHAPTER 6. POLITICS
tion, from the first person perspective. It’s about a naı̈ve optimism about the Land
of Opportunity.
Here is a snippet from a New York Times article about a pair of anti-immigration
politicians:
[The anti-immigrant politicians’] main arguments for ridding the town
of illegal immigrants come down to this: their presence has led to both
rising crime and overcrowded schools. As it turns out, however, the
crime rate in Carpentersville has actually been cut in half over the past
10 years; and while the schools were, indeed, overcrowded four to
five years ago..., class sizes have now been reduced—although it did
require the passage of a tax referendum. [From “Our Town”, by Alex
Kotlowitz Published: August 5, 2007]
It is much like a dozen comparable anecdotes from all over the country (e.g., here7 ).
Opponents of immigration present a standard syllogism for why the USA must
bar the door: (1) the USA is fast going downhill, (2) it is going downhill because of
immigrants, and (therefore) we must bar the door to immigrants. Without premise
(1), the conclusion loses its power. Without premise (1), immigration opponents
are left with abstract economic arguments about how things are OK now, but will
all fall apart any minute now—and even that is only plausible when there is some
tangible present evidence that opportunities are only barely forthcoming.
In short, opposing immigration requires manfuacturing a perception of scarcity.
More next time.
7
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/
17/AR2007081702426.html?nav=rss_metro
7
G REEN
7.1
How to be an environmentalist in two steps
5 March 2005
• 1. Become a vegetarian.
• 2. Don’t drive.
Bonus: Do lots of crap like changing your light bulbs and buying stuff in paper
packaging, which won’t have a tenth the impact of #1 and 2, but may make you
feel better.
I know this is a little different from the easy steps list you may see here and
there, because for many people the steps in the two-step program aren’t easy. But
the rest is a farce, a list of things which have an impact that is orders of magnitudes
smaller than the big two.
For example, the statistic bandied about is that it takes 2,500 gallons of water
to produce a pound of beef; by contrast, my water bill tells me that my house (two
residents) uses that much water in 25 days. Anything I can do, like fixing leaky
faucets or showering instead of taking a bath, is an order of magnitude smaller than
the amount of water I could save by reducing demand for beef by a single pound.
[Of course, if you live in Santa Fe, NM, then you care deeply about water, because
the city has such a limited supply, because so much of the Western U.S.’s water
supply is funneled off to beef production.]
As for driving, buying a car and cutting down on trips still induces most of the
damage caused by producing and disposing of a car. If you buy a small car instead
of an SUV, you may cut gas consumption in half, but that’s still hundreds of gallons
a year and half a ton of steel, paint, plastics, and chemicals with no non-technical
name. Driving less is a far cry from not driving.
173
174
CHAPTER 7. GREEN
The question of why the press so often fails to mention the big two when discussing environmentalism are probably obvious to you, but it is worth enumerating
a few:
They involve not consuming The big two are both typically characterized in
terms of not consuming either cars or meat. It’s hard to make money off of people
not consuming, so all of the advertising which comes our way fights against these
principles. Sure, the bike industry and faux meat providers are making good cash
from not consuming cars or meat, but they are clearly an order of magnitude or
three behind.
Meanwhile, the light bulbs and the environmentally friendly solvents and the
other bonus niceties all involve purchasing—and paying a premium for—a product.
Extensive advertisement immediately follows.
They take effort It’s easy to imagine switching from plastic bags to paper bags
(or vice versa. Have I stressed enough how irrelevant the debate is relative to curbing auto and meat consumption?) Switching from driving everywhere to biking
everywhere is a much greater leap of the imagination—and one which only conjures images of sweat, sweat, sweat. Of course, it is the change which is difficult.
As a bicyclist, I can’t imagine driving: I never troll for parking, I am never stuck
in traffic, and I have no monthly insurance payments. But since the default is a
driving world, most need to imagine making the change to not driving, which takes
effort.
Not eating meat is a much simpler task than not driving, since the alternatives
are abundant and served/sold in the same place. Nor are there special dietary issues.
[I am oh so tired of people asking me where I get my protein. I get it from food.
In fact, there’s evidence that excess protein consumption (and that means most
Americans) leads to calcium depletion = osteoporosis. Don’t drink cow’s milk for
strong bones: just don’t eat the cow.]
However, what we eat is almost entirely determined by what we are familiar
with. Again, changing the status quo of what we think of as good food takes great
effort.
Environmentalism is an identity It’s hard to internalize the effect one would
have on the invisible air or the boundless oceans. Much easier is to feel the effects
of a self-identification, and so it is the self-identification which people seek to
cultivate. The hundred little tasks provide a person with a hundred little reminders
that she or he is an environmentalist.
7.2. AN ENVIRONMENTALIST IN WINTER
175
Meanwhile, they are basically costless: you get to live the same lifestyle you
had before, but with more paper and less plastic. Food and transportation are fundamental, and to a great extent, being a vegetarian or being a non-driver is its own
self-identification, which many don’t find to be desirable. Given the package of
vegetarian plus environmentalist, many would like to just drop the vegetarian part.
Minimizing scolding Folks just don’t like to read about their failings, and don’t
like to be lectured. Information about how to be a better environmentalist therefore
has to walk that fine line between telling the reader how to do it better and not
making them feel lousy. Telling readers to not eat meat and to not drive takes a
flying leap off of that fine line. If the reader considers him or herself to be an
environmentalist, eating meat is a fundamental, massive failing.
Impossibility It is very possible to turn down your air conditioner 100% of the
time, but never riding in mechanized transport is darn near impossible in the modern world. I’m sorry to say that the same is true of avoiding animal products:
every day, you will use some products which are the result of animal breeding and
slaughter. I’d like to say that I’m a vegan, but I know enough food chemistry to
know where whey and casein come from, and read enough labels to know that
they’re in everything—even the typical soy cheese includes dairy products. Never
eating meat is indeed easy, but never consuming mono- and diglycerides is a pain
beyond belief.
This is all a reminder that if your criteria for being a good environmentalist
are strict adherence to no.s 1 and 2 above, the nobody in modern society is a good
environmentalist. Isn’t it so much more pleasant to define good environmentalists
by whether they bring their own mug to the coffee shop?
These interdependent causes add up to a massive avoidance of the big issues
by the environmental advocates (and I am in no position to say whether such a
strategy has been a net winner or loser for the environment). Most of the discussion
among environmentalists is not about not driving, but about driving something a
little smaller, and discussion about diet is typically entirely missing. Instead, we are
inundated with little details, which are several orders of magnitude less important,
but orders of magnitude less threatening.
7.2
An environmentalist in winter
12 October 2005
The reader will recall my two easy steps for being an environmentalist:
176
CHAPTER 7. GREEN
• 1. Be a vegetarian
• 2. Don’t drive
That post was intended to be about the enviromedia and why they wholly fail to
mention these two items, preferring to talk about hemp luggage or handbags made
from old rubber. But many readers took it as a personal affront. One reader, who
doesn’t drive but is not vegetarian, agreed with me on not driving but chided me
on being so righteous about vegetarianism. A second reader, who is vegetarian but
has a car—oh, it’s all so predictable.
I’ve been trying to think of other things one can to do continue to live in
Western civilization but maintain a significantly smaller ecofootprint [please, leave
yours in the comments section]. Here’s one or two more:
• 3. Live below 35 degrees of latitude.
• 4. Live in an apartment.
Had been meaning to write about this sooner, but am driven to write about it
now because I am, as I write, on hold with a home heating oil company, waiting
to be told that heating oil is a dollar a gallon more than it was last year. One more
way in which we are paying for the war in Iraq. But this isn’t about being cheap;
that’s just bonus points for not polluting and wasting energy. The environmental
damage prevented by not heating up a 90 square meters of space for four or five
hours is an expletive of a lot more than that saved by turning off the faucet when I
brush my teeth, not using paper cups, covering the lid when I boil water, and fifty
other enviroconsumer tricks combined.
My house gets zero miles per gallon, and over the course of last year used
on the order of a thousand gallons of heating oil. Multiply this by the millions
of houses here in sunny Baltimore, and you’ve got fuel consumption on the same
order of magnitude as the fleet of cars driving around the city, at least for this half
of the year.
Some people think the choice of location is a trade-off between higher air conditioning costs and higher heating costs, but this is a too-modern view of things,
fostered by bad architecture. Our air conditioning bill last year was zero. The
house was built 105 years ago, meaning that it was designed to be cool, and it
works: open the transoms, open the doors and windows at either end of the house,
and the breeze doesn’t stop. Without an air conditioner anywhere in the house, the
first floor was always about three degrees C cooler than the outside. Architecture
to keep people cool is well-established; architecture to keep people warm doesn’t
exist, except to the extent that there are means of keeping the heat from the fire or
the burner or the boiler from escaping.
7.3. THE REFRIGERATOR
177
I’m doing what I can to fix up the place to retain heat. Have fixed that draft
under the kitchen door; will be covering the windows in plastic; will wear socks
more often. It’s too late to take action on this now, but this time next year, I will
have a green roof.
Number four in the list can generalize to being around people. I’m in a townhouse, so I share most of my wallspace with two other houses, meaning that we
share heat. During those days when I experimented with just turning off the boiler
entirely, the house never fell below ten degrees C (fifty F), because the neighbors
were running their heat full blast. The logical extreme is the apartment, which
shares virtually all of its surface with other houses. You’re all in it together, and
share the effort of warming up the larger box of which your little box is a slice.
Alternatively, there’s the coffee shop. When you go to the coffee shop and see
thirty people there, that’s maybe around twenty houses which aren’t being heated
right now. Spending a cold night at a crowded locale can save maybe ten or twenty
gallons of fuel (or natural gas equivalent); then at closing time you can trundle
home to your bed and start up the space heater in every bedroom. [I imagine that this
is how many folks of old lived, and why stories of the middle ages always begin at the tavern.]
None of this means that you have to be uncomfortable and miserable. The idea
is not to sit around in a space where the thermostat is set so low you can see your
breath, though if you’re into that, run with it. The idea is to just not be in a place
where you have to expend energy to keep large spaces warm. [Of course, you could
also just get a smaller house.] This means either being in San Diego or in a shared
space where everybody shares in the energy expense of warming up the area.
7.3
The refrigerator
20 September 2006
Your refrigerator works just like an air conditioner, except it is running all the
time, year ‘round. So it’s worth getting one that isn’t too very consumptive. And
you know what that means—math!
In October ‘04, when I first moved in but wasn’t all here, my house was consuming 3.2 kWh per day. That gives me an upper limit on how much my fridge is
consuming every day. If you don’t have a reference point like that, the EPA makes
it e-z for you to measure the cost of your fridge by model number.
The usual shopping site lists a decent fridge (freezer in a sensible location,
water dispenser to minimize extraneous door opening, stainless steel cover, which,
as you will recall from a previous episode, adds $5,000 to the value of a house)
at $1275 minimum. Down at the bottom of the page, the fridge self-reports that it
178
CHAPTER 7. GREEN
consumes 494 kWh per year, which is 1.35 kWh per day. [[A kWh is a kiloWatt hour.
A Watt is a measure of how much power your appliance is consuming in an instant, and a kiloWatt
is a thousand of those. If you let a 1kW appliance run for an hour, it has used 1kWh. For example, a
100 Watt bulb, run for ten hours, would use 1kWh.]]
Through the magic of subtraction, that means that buying a new refrigerator
will save me at most 3.2-1.35 = 1.85 kWh per day, or 675 kWh per year.
Adding up all the haphazard service fees, I’m paying 14.4 cents per kWh,
which is up from 6.94 two months ago, due to the debacle that is Maryland’s electricity supply.
Multiplying out, that’s a savings of at most $97/year, which means that buying
the new refrigerator doesn’t make sense cash-wise.
But what about environment-wise? BGE’s energy sourcing page tells me this
about how much waste my usage spews into the world:
Emission Type
Lbs. per MWh
Nitrogen Oxides (NOx) 2.59 100.0 %
Sulfur Dioxide (SO2)
8.49 100.0 %
Carbon Dioxide (CO2) 1292.03 100.0 %
That max. savings of 675 kWh = 0.675MWh means that keeping an older
fridge means 872 pounds (395kg) of extra CO2 in the world.
Now that I’ve calculated that number, I’m not sure what to make of it. Should
my environmental conscience be shocked? Wikipedia, citing a now-defunct link
to the USDA, tells me that the average person exhales 0.9kg of CO2 per day, or
328.5kg per year. Thus, my upper limit for the savings on a new fridge is that it
would be equivalent to one fewer adult floating around, breathing. But, again, is
this an actionable savings?
Bonus appliance Thermodynamics is easy: energy in=heat spewed out. After
all, when we talk about an appliance being inefficient, we say something like ‘all
the energy is getting lost in heat,’ so if the appliance’s purpose is to heat up, it
doesn’t have many ways left to be inefficient. But if the intent of the appliance is
to heat up your water, and the heat is drifting out into the room at large, it isn’t
quite doing its job. In the winter, you won’t mind, but in the typical age-of-globalwarming summer, the extra energy is more than a loss.
So I recently picked up a nice, electric teakettle and have nothing but praise for
it.
I suppose the USA just doesn’t have the culture of tea that the rest of the world
has. The typical convenience store in Taiwan (and I’m told the rest of Asia) includes a huge array of add-hot-water options, like tea, coffee, ramen, soup, et
cetera, plus cups and a big hot water dispenser. There’s iced tea in the refrigerated section if it’s too warm for the hot stuff. 7-Eleven is getting there, with a
7.4. TWO STOVES
179
decent ramen rack and coffee, but still has a ways to go in the sheer variety of
things one can do with hot water. But there is just oh-so-much that hot water does
for us.
To put it simply, the electric kettle brings me joy and efficient warmth. The
kitchen doesn’t warm up from lost heat in the least, the way it would if I were
running the stove. It warms up faster as a result. There’s a water gauge on the
side, and I know my favorite mug takes two cups and pasta needs five, so I don’t
boil excess and then pour heat down the sink. Since it turns itself off when the
water boils, there’s no energy loss as it hits me that the water’s boiling and I walk
back from the other side of the house to the stove, and therefore my time spent at
the other side of the house is not nearly as stressful. If I put on water for pasta,
and then forget for half an hour, that’s OK, since the insulation is decent and it all
comes right back to boiling in about ten seconds. Of course, the seven minutes of
pasta-boiling is as normal. Maybe I’ll switch to capellini, which cooks in three.
7.4
Two stoves
14 September 2004
I was in love with the camp stove we had in Venezuela. It was a jigsaw puzzle:
you open a bag of parts, put the little stove-holding pegs in the base, and then slide
in the heat reflector, and then screw in the crown, and then fasten it all to the gas
canister. There was something fun about the process every time.
In the end, the stove itself just gave you a surface on which to put a pot and
distributed the gas from the canister, which did all the real work. The canister is
very clean and neat. There’s really no way to get the gas out without a little stove
on top, so once it was detached you could just throw it in the backpack with the
food and clothes and not worry about it. We made tea in our hotel rooms all the
time, and for the week that I was living in a tent, I never felt unsafe cooking inside
it. One drawback is that the canister is basically a specialty part, and you can’t
take it on airplanes, so you’ve got to find one wherever you go. We found ours at a
furnace store in Merida.
Through most of Latin America and all of Spain, houses don’t have gas lines;
instead, you buy big ol’ cans (una bombilla) of compressed gas which somebody
has to haul to your house and then drag up however many flights of stairs it takes
to get to your apartment. Muy Interesante (a pop science mag for the Spanishspeaking set) asked its readers to nominate the top sci-tech innovation of the century, and the readership put the bombilla de gaz right up there with relativity and
quantum mechanics.
So no problem getting the bombilla-ettes for the camp stove in Venezuela;
180
CHAPTER 7. GREEN
they’re clear on the concept down there. But there’s something aesthetically displeasing about having to find this specialized part everywhere you go—and when
you’re done with the canister, there’s nothing to do but throw it out.
So when I finally bought a stove for myself (that one was a loaner), I decided
to go with the liquid-powered kind, which is an entirely different animal.
The functioning is sort of amazing. As noted, there’s now a pump, since the
liquid isn’t prepressurized. The pressure from the hand pump pushes the gas along
a narrow tube, which loops over where the flame is about to be and down to the
bottom of the stove. It spritzes through a little nipple, and then you set fire to it.
When you first start it you’re burning liquid, which is inefficient and messy. I’m
using kerosene, ‘cause the hardware store didn’t have specialty camper-gas, and
when kerosene burns as liquid, it produces evil black smoke and covers the poor
stove in soot. Meanwhile, the flame is warming up the tube through which the
kerosene runs; when the tube gets hot enough, the kerosene vaporizes and comes
out as gas. The flame gets significantly hotter, and everything that was going up
as soot is now being burned. You get a dazzling flame as the vapor shoots up and
ignites. At this point, you can start making tea.
I’m torn as to which sort of stove I like better. The canister-based stoves move
all the hard technology to the canister manufacturers, so you the user don’t have to
worry about the whole bootstrapping process of producing vapor from liquid fuel.
The liquid-based stove is lower-tech in the sense that all of the workings are right
there for you to see and avoid touching, but it doesn’t offer the low-tech advantage
of having fewer moving parts. Also, it doesn’t come into pieces like the jigsaw
stove did. But there’s a much more significant difference between a can of gas and
dealing with liquid.
Visceral consumption
To make coffee on my front porch, I need to bring out a kettle of water, a coffee
press with some coffee, a mug with sugar at the bottom, and the bottle of kerosene
for the stove. Four more-or-less pure commodities, all of which wars have been
fought over.
There are some cases where the raw material is preferred—people pay extra for
the veggies that haven’t been frozen and turned into some sort of pulp—but then
there’s a whole ‘nother class of commodities for which people pay extra so that
they don’t have to think about the pure commodity itself: animals and petroleum
are the standouts.
If gas was sold in supermarkets like milk, we’d all be driving much less. When
you burn gas on your house’s kitchen stove, there’s a meter downstairs that runs
and gives you a little number; when you drive, there’s a little gauge that goes from
7.5. THE POLITICS OF CHEESE
181
F to E. But imagine if you had to fill the tank every time—and not in the sense of
going to a pump with a gauge measuring dollars spent, but in the sense of holding
in your hand a two-liter bottle of liquid, which you pour into the car. At the end
of the trip you can say, ‘Oh, look, those two liters of liquid have burned away into
fumes. Better get more.’ My own impression was that Spaniards were much more
likely to keep their hot water usage down than the typical U.S. home dweller.
Thusly, the new stove makes me more self-conscious about using petroleum.
The compressed-gas canisters are binary—it’s not like they shrivel up as gas is
used; they just don’t work one day, and then you throw them out the way you
throw out a soda can. With a liquid-burning stove, every cup of tea destroys a little
more of the petroleum product which I’d carried home. When I use the big ol’
Maytag in my kitchen, I never think twice about the gas, sweat, and tears that went
into it, even though it burns through much more gas in much less time.
The irony of low-footprint living is that it makes us even more aware of what
little footprint we do leave.
Sailing beyond the sunset, making tea there
The other advantage of the liquid-based stove is of course that I can go anywhere
and find something to run it on—it’ll run on car gas if the need arises. Equipment
which folds up and works anywhere is half about neat gadgetry, and half a romantic
promise. ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off—and anywhere you go,
your nifty gadget will be there for you, sitting well in order. I could go live in
Ethiopia, and would have no problem making myself tea.
Which makes me feel hopelessly domestic and unadventurous. What exactly
does it mean to go to distant and exotic lands with equipment that allows my life
there to be as much like life on my front porch as possible? There’s a point when
a person carries so much baggage (in the form of procedures, outlook, habits) that
they’re not really traveling; sometimes I feel that I’m quickly approaching that
state.
7.5
The politics of cheese
22 August 2004
So back in the day, folks would store milk in cow stomachs. Seemed sensible,
since a stomach makes a nice bag and all. Trouble was that the milk would come
out sort of hard and crusty. Being desperate, they ate it anyway, and cheese was
born.
Here in the modern day, we know that it’s the mucous lining of the cow stomach, aka rennet, which does the magic. Although it no longer involves pouring milk
182
CHAPTER 7. GREEN
into a stomach, your average store-bought cheese is made from rennet, listing it on
the label with the enigmatic term ‘enzymes’, thus hiding the fact that cows were
killed to make this cheese stuff. Most people—even the majority of vegetarians,
I’d say—don’t know this.
It’s not true the world over. In the U.K., the Vegetarian Society (Paul McCartney, benefactor) labels those foods it deemed suitable for vegetarians, the way that
much food would be labeled as kosher. Cheeses made from microbial rennet are
OK and those made from cow rennet aren’t, and at any Tesco’s in the UK you can
thus tell at a glance what’s in your cheese. Trader Joe’s lists the source of the rennet
on all of the cheeses it sells (many are microbial) since the store is designed around
an educated clientele. At the U.S. chain supermarkets there are one or two brands
of cheese which make some mention of animal rennet or lack thereof down in the
fine print.
But most of the world is blissfully ignorant of the mucosal underbelly of their
cheese, and there are people complicit in perpetuating this ignorance that you’d
expect wouldn’t be, like the vegetarian cookbook over in my kitchen filled with
cheese recipes. [A roommate points out that I’d missed a sentence at the end of the
introduction that mentions it, though the recipes themselves disregard the issue.]
Vegetarian Times has a similar attitude: last I checked they had a paragraph over
in the FAQ somewhere, but unless you care to look for it, you’d think by reading
the magazine that all cheeses are cow-free.
Of course, the cheese manufacturers of the world don’t want you to know that
they’re putting mucous in their cheese, and so the ingredients list nothing but milk,
salt, enzymes (coughs and looks away). Labeling laws OK this.
Identity and Stearic acid
The identity of ‘vegetarian’ is clearly a desirable one for many people, as I’ve
learned from a million and one conversations with people where they eagerly try
to convince me that they’re down with my veggie lifestyle. Maybe it’s just the
crowd I hang with. But taking as a premise that for many people the veg label is a
good one, what do they have to do to maintain that label? This is not necessarily a
question of what I or society believes, but what the person him/her/itself feels.
Beyond the whole issue of whether fishetarians count or not is the food additive
issue. It’s obvious that a slab of animal came from an animal, less obvious that a
slab of Jell-o came from an animal, and you have to do your frigging research to
know that lecithin is sometimes cut from an animal—how to draw the line? The
first strategy to maintain a vegetarian identity is to do the research, become a food
chemist, and read the labels on everything.
[For those who want to take that route, the most interesting resource I’ve seen on food chemistry
7.5. THE POLITICS OF CHEESE
183
and restrictions is the Tofutti FAQ. Beside the requisite promotional copy are lengthy discussions
about the difference between kosher and Hallal, what to feed an autistic child, the source of many a
mysteriously named food additive, et cetera. Truly enthralling stuff. Tofutti products themselves use
sugar filtered through animal bones, and is therefore debatably vegetarian.]
The other option is to maintain a healthy ignorance. Clearly, this is the easier
route to take, since learning requires active participation—and only leads to more
work required to maintain the vegetarian or kosher or Hallal or whatever identity.
On the other side are the organizations that promote vegetarianism; I presume
that their overall goal is to reduce the world’s slaughter and consumption of animals
all around. They have the choice of either promoting the low-grade vegetarianism
which fails to oppose the slaughter of animals for a variety of additives and goops
but lets people feel good about themselves and try out the vegetarian tag for size;
or they can promote the full-information vegetarian, who knows to write the manufacturer of their favorite foodstuffs to demand that they find a non-animal source
for their mono- and di-glycerides. As far as I can tell, U.S. advocacy organizations
(and magazines and cook books and such) generally push for low-grade vegetarianism. It makes them less shrill and divisive, but also less informative. [The shrillest
of them all, PETA, doesn’t push much for the avoidance of food additives, since
they’re so busy worrying about the glitzy stuff. They too have a single page of fine
print which mentions rennet down in the Rs. In their defense, they’re pushing for
vegan and therefore advocate avoiding cheese entirely.]
Anyway, I wonder what the U.S.A. would be like with stronger full-information
advocacy. Living in the U.K. was easy. I was much more vegetarian than vegan at
the time, and had no problem going out for pizza, since every place specified on
its menu that it used veggie rennet. As a truly impoverished student, I subsisted on
the all-you-can-eat pizza place, by fasting the day before, eating a huge quantity
there (the trick is to dab off the grease with a napkin), and then shoving many a
slice in a plastic shopping bag under the table for the next day. Three days’ food
for four quid, and it was all thanks to the Vegetarian Society which made it known
that there are people like me who don’t want cow stomachs in our food.
Meanwhile, here in the States, I’ve been avoiding pizza entirely, save for a few
kosher places, which are always hilarious for their delightful array of the pimply
and the orthodox. [E.g., try Tel-Aviv Kosher Pizza, 6349 N California Ave, just south of Devon.
In Chicago, the city with the big pizzas.] Back when airlines served food, it was always
a risk as to whether the vegetarian meal would actually be vegetarian. I’ve been
served a vegetarian meal or two with Jell-o. As a full-information vegetarian, I just
have no advocacy organization to do all this groundwork for me.
On the one hand, full-information advocacy makes it harder for people to selfidentify as vegetarians, since there are more rules to be had, but it also makes
it easier, since the airlines and pizza parlors know the rules and will make some
184
CHAPTER 7. GREEN
effort to comply to them. Menus, ingredient labels, and every other source of food
information reminds the reader that there are vegetarians who care about what they
eat. Either as a cause or a result of more vehement advocacy, the U.K. has about
twice as many vegetarians per capita than the U.S. (5-9% for the U.K. versus 2.5%
for the U.S.A.).
The U.S. advocacy organizations have obviously thought this one through and
have chosen the low-grade advocacy route, but sometimes I wish more would take
the risk and tell people what’s really in their food.
PS.: Ms. ZK of Canberra, Australia left this interesting comment:
There’s an interesting eating meditation where you trace back the history of the
energy in your food all the way back to sunlight as you’re chewing. So if you’re
eating a piece of bread, you’d visualize the wheat growing up in the sun, sucking up
water through its roots, getting harvested and threshed, being ground, being carried
in a truck to the bakery, being kneaded and cooked by the baker, and making it to
your stomach where the energy from the sun can be released again to nourish you.
The implication is that this meditation should be a joyful process and that if any
step in the production of your food disturbs you, you shouldn’t be eating it. Of
course with 90% of the stuff you’d buy in the grocery store, this exercise would
be impossible - you just have no idea what crap goes in there. People in Europe
do indeed seem much more bothered by this. Whenever I walked around the store
with my French great-aunt, she used to scowl at all the packages and mutter darkly,
“The only way you can trust your food is to grow it yourself.”
7.6
Why your drugs are not vegetarian
14 October 1007
First, you’ll have to do some research, because it’s hard to find out what’s in
those little pills to begin with, because the label on your prescription of Drugacil
won’t tell you what’s in it. You’ll probably have to ask your favorite search engine
for Drugacil prescribing information. On the first or second page, you’ll find the
list of inactive ingredients.
There are two that are very common: gelatin (the coating of gel-caps), and
magnesium stearate (the base for Smarties-type pills). Both can be made from
either animal or vegetable.
Next step: call the manufacturer, and ask them the source of these items. [If you
actually try this with a specific drug, please leave your results in the comments, as a favor to future
search engine users.]
In my own haphazard research, responses about ingredient queries have in-
7.6. WHY YOUR DRUGS ARE NOT VEGETARIAN
185
Figure 7.1: An extensive form game: DrugCo versus the consumer.
cluded pig fat, tallow from cow fat, and our euphemism for the day: “bovine material”.
Pig fat is an especially good choice, because it offends a maximal number of
people. Vegetarians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews—close to every religion that is not
Christianity—forbids eating pigs.
Now, if you take a quick walk down the non-drug aisles of your supermarket,
you’ll find little Ks and CrCs and circle-Us on the great majority of products, indicating that the manufacturer has made a sincere effort to ensure that the product
is kosher. The reasoning is econ 101: ethics are a valuable facet of a consumer
good, and people will pay more for a good they consider to be ethical, clean, or
any of a number of other interrelated concepts. At the extreme, there are a host of
people (many of whom are not Jews) who simply will not purchase an item that is
not kosher—for those of you in micro class, they have lexicographic preferences
with ethics as the leading term.
Why are drugs different?
We’ll start the figure, which is the (extensive form) game played by the drug
company and the consumer. The drug company moves first, and determines whether
to mix in a bit of pig’s blood with every batch of drugs or to use a veg source. Then,
the consumer chooses to buy or not buy the drug. Regardless of the drug company
choice, the consumer needs the drug to lead a healthy life, so in both the left and
right cases, the consumer will choose to consume the drug, although in the case
where it contains pig’s blood, the consumer will be miserable about it.
The drug company know this, and can therefore ignore the Don’t consume
choices in both branches of the tree. If I were doing this in front of an undergrad
class, I’d cross out the Don’t consume nodes with a marker—feel free to do the
same on your monitor—leaving a simple pruned-down tree: if the drug company
186
CHAPTER 7. GREEN
uses pig’s blood, it saves .001 cents; if it doesn’t, it loses that. So, the outcome will
be that DrugCo puts pig’s blood in its drugs despite the consumer’s preferences,
and the consumer buys.
There are several reasons why we get this outcome with drugs but not food.
First, the cost of compromising one’s ethics is fixed—let us call it -100 utils, but
the value of consuming a drug is much higher than for food. Maybe a cupcake is
worth 5 utils, but being free from physical suffering is worth 1,000. Micro students,
you can just say that drug demand is inelastic.
Two counterpoints to this. First, most drugs are not a matter of life or death.
What is it worth to take a drug that allows you to ignore a certain pain, to be less
depressed, or to go to dialysis fewer times a year? Such things may or may not be
worth more than 100 utils.
Second, in the case of an inelastic life-or-death choice, forcing a person into
the tradeoff is insidious. DrugCo is telling the consumer you must choose between
your ethics or religion, or your life. We don’t even need to drag out Goodwin’s law
on this one. Every religion I know of has stories of past persecutions that fall along
exactly this line: in the land of Wherever, the Powers that Be hated our people,
and persecuted them; our people had to choose between continuing to practice our
faith, or be killed. Some chose to die, others suffered the humiliation and survived.
But regardless, the people who forced us into making the choice were evil.
DrugCo is different only in that its actions are ostensibly not out of spite, just
disinterest. But the lack of interest in some ways makes it even more insidious.
When persecutors force a person to choose between his or her beliefs and life, at
least the persecutors were doing it out of equal passion and conviction. The drug
companies are doing it to save fractions of a cent per pill. If our ethical beliefs
are based on the goal of avoiding things that cause significant pain upon others for
minimal gain, DrugCo’s forcing a person into the your-beliefs-or-your-life choice
is worse than that of persecutors of old, because the perceived gain is so much
smaller.
The second reason we see drugs that tread over ethical beliefs, while food does
not, is that medicine is given a semi-sacred status: ethics is expected to take a
backseat. Jewish law dictates that it is against the law to comply with the law if it
risks one’s health. Other traditions have similar medical exemptions.
But the medical exemption is malleable. It’s downright touching to see people
with ambulatory disabilities at a religious service that requires frequent standing
and sitting: many will try their darndest to stand. If you’re not one for religious
services, you see the same sort of dedication at sporting events at the singing of the
national anthem. If a drug leads to increased comfort but is not life-saving, does
the medical exemption to a religion apply? Some stand at the service and some
don’t; some fast on some days and some don’t; some feel that they should take
7.6. WHY YOUR DRUGS ARE NOT VEGETARIAN
187
their synthetic heroin despite its bovine materials and others do without.
Here in the modern USA, the medical exemption to ethical restrictions applies
to an even greater extent, because of how hopelessly lacking the USA is in ethical
restrictions. Regardless of whether the basic thesis is true, many have claimed that
medicine has replaced religion in modern societies, and there’s certainly a good
deal of evidence indicating as much.
The odds are very good that DrugCo’s rank and file were raised in a Christian
tradition. Funny thing about Christianity: it is the only religion I can think of
that doesn’t have dietary restrictions Your Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and
Voodooists all recognize the power of consumption, and thus place ethics-based
restrictions upon what a person may consume. [Sorry, I don’t count the rule of eating fish
on Friday. I don’t think even the Christians who observe this see it as much more than custom.]
All food restrictions that I know of are centered around consuming of animals,
but beyond that, there’s no real pattern. For example, as far as I understand it,
food can not be both kosher and halal at the same time: to be halal, the slaughterer
must speak the Name of God when killing the animal; to be kosher, the slaughterer
must be an appropriately-trained Jew, and Jewish law forbids speaking the Name of
God. Meanwhile, Sihks feel that both kosher and halal slaughering techniques are
inhumane, and therefore don’t touch kosher or halal meats. Some folks (including
some percentage of Christians) consider alcohol consumption to be unethical, but
others (including some percentage of Christians) have laws that alcohol must be
consumed on some occasions.
But back my overgeneralizations: I think that the average US citizen has difficulty comprehending the idea of the dietary restrictions common to most of the
world’s population, and tend to discount them; this is partly an offshoot of how
the Christian tradition is the only one with no dietary restrictions. It’s hard to explain any ethical restriction to somebody who doesn’t buy the basic premise that
some sort of action should be grounded in ethics. People who don’t comprehend
religious observance regarding food will advocate still more strongly that medical
need—or even convenience—trumps religious dicta.
The doctor who originally prescribed to me a drug made from bovine materials, the esteemed Dr. LZ of Baltimore, MD, has a South Asian background, and
is herself vegetarian. [Hi, Dr. Z! Thanks for reading!] However, she had put limited
thought into the source of gelatin and magnesium stearate, being that she’d been
distracted by things like memorizing the Latin name for every part of the human
body. I asked her whether she would inform other vegetarian patients of the fact
that their drugs are not vegetarian, and she said she wouldn’t: their health is more
important.
Whether Dr. Z is doing the Right Thing is an unanswerable question, rooted
in another unanswerable question: is an action unethical if it is committed with
188
CHAPTER 7. GREEN
complete ignorance of its lack of ethics? There’s a cliché about how ignorance of
the law is no excuse under the law, but some religions forgive sins made out of
ignorance—but some don’t. I’m not even going to pretend to have an answer here.
But Dr. Z is clearly demonstrating a belief in the medical exemption to ethics.
It makes sense that she’d place focus and priority on the medical, because she chose
medicine for her life’s work, and spent several years memorizing the Latin names
for every part of the body. The same will hold for most of the decisionmakers at
DrugCo. Getting back to the question of why food manufacturers care about kosher
certification and drug makers don’t, the consumer choosing a food is basically
doing it alone; the consumer choosing a drug has a legion of medical authorities
inserting their opinions. This is how it should be, because drug choice involve
specialized knowledge and has potential consequences that are not relevant to the
choice of cake batter. But it is hard to unbundle the amoral factual information
with opinion on the medical exemption question. Hey, at the extreme, Christian
Scientists are often required by law to accept a medical exemption to their religious
beliefs.
Having an agent makes feedback difficult. The cake batter company can directly ask consumers—the people holding wallets—what their preferences are regarding ingredients. But DrugCo does not care about what consumers want: they
care about what doctors choose for their patients. The game regarding cake batter is
an infinite back-and-forth, where the company chooses its ingredients, consumers
choose to buy or not buy, the company responds to that choice, et cetera. For
drugs, the loop is one way: DrugCo chooses its ingredients, and gets only limited
and filtered feedback regarding whether the consumer at the other end is happy or
not.
In this respect, those annoying consumer-targeted ads about how people should
ask their doctor for Pillizene are good, because it indicates that DrugCo wants
patients as well as doctors to like the drug.
But it is of limited good news, because of the information problem. The US
Food and Drug Administration requires that consumers be informed of what’s in
their food in a clear, standardized label, but has no such requirements at all for
what’s in their drugs or booze. I have no idea how the FDA reconciles the several
standards, but that’s the law, and it’s a simple fact that it is much more difficult to
ascertain whether a drug follows a person’s dietary restrictions than a food.
And, of course, DrugCo wants it that way, because knowledge in the hands of
consumers can only reduce demand. [So does everybody else: those labels are a constant
battle between information revelation and information hiding. E.g., the European Union has the
amusing compromise that food manufacturers must list all ingredients, but may do so in an encoded
form.]
Summary paragraph. I think it is unethical that drug companies are putting
7.7. THE FUTURE OF ENERGY
189
boiled pig bones in their drugs: it gains them little benefit at the cost of distress for
those with certain ethical beliefs, like adherents to almost every known religion.
Some of our most powerful stories, both fiction and real human history, are about
people who force others to choose between their religion and their life—and the
person forcing the choice is never cast as very nice.
On a less subjective note, there are systematic reasons for why this is the case
with drugs, but not with food. People are expected to compromise their beliefs
for the sake of improved health. Information about how drugs are made is kept
close to DrugCo’s chest, while federal law requires that other manufacturers of
comestibles reveal such information. Oh, and there’s room on the market for both
kosher and non-kosher cake batter, but the patent literature indicates that it is good
and beneficial that drug manufacturers are typically monopolists, who can present
a single take-it-or-leave-it option for drugs people may be dependent on to live. All
of the above leads to a lack of the sort of feedback other healthy markets rely upon
when they choose how to make products that make consumers happy. As long as a
drug company knows that it can force consumers to eat boiled pig bones (and that
doctors will back them up on it), it will continue to source ingredients from boiled
pig bones.
7.7
The future of energy
6 December 2006
In all these columns of alleged pontification, I have given you almost no grandiose
predictions about the future. There was the loom, the printing press, the internal
combustion engine, electricity, the digital computer. What is next to completely
revolutionize how human civilization looks?
Solar power.
Or, more specifically, the gathering of ambient energy into useful form. This is
not a new idea. Millennia ago, people worked out that their bodies produce heat, so
if they put on a blanket, then they can retain that heat and put it to useful purpose.
The water wheel went along similar lines: hey, there’s energy in that water flow,
and it could be put to good use. A hundred years later, that water wheel turned into
the Three Gorges D*m.
Or if you’d like to be a little more technical about it, there is the Seebeck effect:
if there is a temperature differential between two sides of a system, then current can
be produced from that differential.
So what’s the revolution? Why am I talking about solar power instead of more
water wheels or wind farms? Because light is everywhere power-sucking devices
190
CHAPTER 7. GREEN
Figure 7.2: A square meter of solar panel could produce about 150–250 watts of
energy, depending on where it is. Black dots indicate the surface area one would
need to meet all expected energy needs in 2010.
can be found. Your solar calculator from high school didn’t need batteries, wires,
or petroleum. It just sucked in energy from the world, and converted it into a useful
form. You carried it around, and it ran itself. When all our appliances, houses, and
transportation are capable of that self-powering trick, that will be a revolution.
Your laptop is not too far from that right now: you can already buy solar panels
that will power your laptop that are about twice as big as your laptop. With a notinsane amount of work, we could get those solar panels down to the size of the
back of your laptop screen. And forget laptops: the real victory will be when your
car and house take in as much energy as they put out.
A square meter of the earth is beaten with about 1000–1500 watts of solar
energy all day long—and thanks to greenhouse gasses, there’s only more watts to
be had1 . For comparison, my fridge is sucking down a maximum of 3 kWh per
day = a constant rate of 125 watts. You can check your laptop’s power supply, but
I’m guessing it’s somewhere around 50 watts—but it won’t need to be plugged in
anyway. A space heater runs at around 1500W. So you can see that the typical
house’s energy needs are likely smaller on average than the solar energy hitting the
roof.
1
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/What_Watt.htm
7.7. THE FUTURE OF ENERGY
191
The Honda EV Plus2 (PDF) uses about 500 watt-hours per mile—and that’s
1999 figures from the DoE’s Idaho National Laboratories; we can only presume
that they’re doing even better now. So mean demand is about 500 watts, and the 2
m2 of car-top is warming up with 3000W of energy.
And hey, where is a great deal of the energy in driving the car’s motor going?
That’s right: heat. Add some tricks to use the heat differential between the top
of the hood and the bottom of the hood to reclaim electricity (that Seebeck effect
again), and you’ve got an even more robust self-sufficient system.
Reality There are two dovetailing problems keeping us from a wireless future.
The first is cost. Those nifty solar panels for the laptop will cost you $250,
so they’re not going to make sense to anybody but total hippies and those who are
frequently off-grid. Putting a solar array on your house’s roof will still be in the
ballpark of $40,000, which will pay for itself in electricity saved and/or sold to the
grid in, oh, a decade.
But burning dinosaurs is not going to work forever. As China and India start
buying SUVs, oil in the USA and Europe is going to become more expensive,
and that means people who were once on the fence will be buying more solar.
Expect gradual reductions in prices as a result. [The offset, though, is that silicon is getting
expensive, due to increasing demand for electronic toys.]
The other problem is in efficiency. The 3000 watts of power in the sunlight
hitting the roof of your car still needs to be converted into useful electric power,
and that conversion is still inefficient. One firm recently announced that it got its
solar panels up to 22% efficiency. For solar panels, this is amazing, but to the rest
of the energy world, this is ho-hum. Other forms of energy extraction typically get
up to around 80% efficiency.
But I read that not to mean that solar power is hopeless, but that there’s a lot of
room for improvement. When a solar panel is twice as efficient and costs half as
much per square whatever, then you’re down to $50 for the solar collector on the
back of your laptop screen—that’s the price of a new battery.
[8 December addendum: Silly me—the future arrived the day before I wrote this: the DoE
announced on 5 December that one of its contractors had achieved 40.7% efficiency by stacking
several types of photovoltaic cell on top of one another. It’s still more than twice as expensive than
the half-as-efficient versions, but we’ll see where it goes.]
So, back to pontification: what will the world look like in thirty years? It won’t
have wires, because we’ll have moderately-sized electricity-generating gadgets to
complement our ever-expanding array of electricity-consuming gadgets. The top
of your car and house will have solar panels that just sit there and store up charge
2
http://avt.inel.gov/pdf/fsev/sce_sum/honda.pdf
192
CHAPTER 7. GREEN
for your air conditioner. The whole greenhouse thing won’t be an issue at all,
except in terms of dealing with our predecessors. We won’t be importing energy
from remote locales, but just pulling it in from around us.
7.8
Green versus greed
11 February 2006
Ms ZK of Canberra, Australia wrote me asking about the motives behind GE’s
recent declaration that it will be greening itself, voluntarily cutting carbon dioxide
emissions over the next several years and even calling for government regulation of
greenhouse emissions. [The Economist; The Washington Post] The key question:
why? Let us consider some possibilities.
Jeffery Immelt’s immense heart
There are indeed CEOs out there who really want to help the environment. For
example, when John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, isn’t busy union busting, he’s
contributing about five percent of the company’s profits to philanthropic causes, including environmental. He dukes it out with Uncle Milton ”assume externalities do
not exist” Friedman in this Reason interview/debate, pointing out that corporations
have a responsibility to public as well as shareholders.
[He himself is veganish. Many people are vegetarian for environmental reasons, citing abundant
reasons for why meat is environmentally destructive, but in another interview, Mr. Mackey makes
no effort to reconcile the fact that you can go to Whole Foods and order veal and rabbit with Whole
Foods’ green PR. ]
But there are two key differences between Mr. Mackey and Mr. Immelt (GE’s
CEO): the first is that Mr. Mackey actually makes a real effort to live his convictions. I invite the reader to dig something up, but I’ve not found anywhere that Mr.
Immelt stated that he himself is trying to reduce his own automotive trips, buy a
smaller house, or otherwise indicate that he is self-aware of his own ecofootprint
the way that our veganish CEO tries to practice what his company preaches (and
then advertises this). Now, I don’t want to be too cynical: nobody wants to be
a polluter, and every sane employee of every company I mention here would be
happy to take steps to reduce emissions—provided the cost is low enough. Mr.
Mackey has expressed interest in reducing certain (but by no means all) types of
pollution even when it costs Whole Foods money; Mr. Immelt has made no such
statement.
The second related difference (as noted in the Reason article above) is that Mr.
Mackey explicitly indicated in the Whole Foods public offering that Whole Foods
will be contributing 5% to charities, while GE has no such do-gooder mission. That
7.8. GREEN VERSUS GREED
193
means that when shareholders purchased GE shares, they did so with the usual
intent of profit-maximization, and for Mr. Immelt to switch the goal to saving the
planet is grounds for shareholder lawsuits.
We all loved Google’s IPO for having a section entitled ”Don’t be evil”, but
as well as being nifty, it allows the CEOs a huge amount of leeway. When shareholders threaten to sue over the owners’ failing to maximize profits, the managers
can point to the do-no-evil clause and walk away. GE’s CEO has no such escape
clause. [[Sorry, but I’m not going to address Google’s agreement to censor China’s search results
today. You know as much as I do.]]
Maximize shareholder value
So as well as whatever Mr. Immelt is saying to the public, he must have a serious,
correct-math argument for why the greening campaign will pay for itself.
He’s got tons of rhetoric from environmentalists backing him up; we hippies
have been pointing out that environmentalism is a form of efficiency, and efficiency
pays off, for decades. The fact that Ford’s gas-guzzling ways have cost it massive
losses is certainly a nice precedent for GE’s greens to point to.
The best way to really evaluate a claim of environmental friendliness is to read
the Annual Report (RTFAR, or RTF10K). There are strict laws regulating the quantity of BS that can be presented to shareholders, so after the splashy editorial pages,
the stats are as honest as you’ll get. Here’s a paragraph from page 27 of GE’s 2004
annual report:
[GE’s Energy division] participated in the period of unprecedented
U.S. power industry demand that peaked in 2002, a period often referred to as the ”U.S. power bubble”. The return to normal demand
levels is reflected in the lower shipments of large heavy-duty gas turbines. In 2004, we sold 122 such units, compared with 175 in 2003
and 323 in 2002. We accurately foresaw the end of the bubble and
took action to reduce the effect, right-sizing the business and growing
and investing in other lines of the power generation business such as
product services and wind energy. We believe the Energy segment is
well positioned for its markets in 2005 and beyond.
Page 51 also makes reference to “increased demand for wind turbines, locomotives, and product services, partially offset by softening demand for large gas
turbines.”
So the Annual Report does indeed present the purely profit-maximizing motives: GE’s executives know that demand for its fossil-fueled energy products is
194
CHAPTER 7. GREEN
under half what it was a few years ago, and are placing themselves in position to
accommodate future markets.
Advertising
An order of magnitude larger than GE’s PR attempt to push greenness is British
Petroleum’s PR renovation from a few years ago: they changed their logo to a
sun/flower/happy green blob and started expanding BP to mean ’beyond petroleum’.
So what does its 2004 Annual report [(PDF, 3MB)] say? Its renewable energy line is
clumped in with petroleum and coal throughout, so I don’t know how much they
spent on solar and wind, or how it had changed from the prior year. This is one of
those omissions that I take as a bad sign. BP’s environmental wins appear on page
31 of the report, and the gist is: we have significantly reduced the carbon emissions
required to ship more and more coal and petroleum to more and more consumers.
Reducing internal fuel consumption is a good thing, but not quite what the ads with
big solar panel arrays is touting. The annual report has a single paragraph on their
research on solar and hydrogen fuels, which I can only describe as fluff.
We need to bear in mind below that both BP and GE simultaneously deal with
energy on two fronts: they vend energy-generation products (BP sells fuels, GE
sells fuel-consuming generators), and they themselves consume energy in the normal course of business. Their internal energy consumption is a drop in the bucket
compared to the energy that their customers are going to be using. However, by
talking about reductions in internal pollution, they commit a little sleight-of-mind
and imply that their line of business is also greener. Of course, BP and GE are
also trying to green their line of business, though BP’s annual report seems to indicate that solar is still a side-affair, while GE’s is directly stating that the company
strategy is to focus more on wind and cleaner transportation.
Self-regulation
There’s much tradition in the business world of self-imposed regulation to stave
off inevitable government regulation. I’ll give one example: the Comics Code Authority, where comic book publishers self-censored themselves to prevent being
basically shut down. Other examples—and there are many—are left as an exercise to the reader. The Economist likes this theory, pointing out that consensus
is that thirty years from now we will certainly have some sort of regulation. Selfregulation was my initial guess at GE’s motives too, but what company plans ahead
for something that’s sure to come in 30 years? Dubya will certainly block any and
all attempts at environmental regulation, so GE is safe until at least 2009. So why
take action now? The timing is much easier to explain in terms of the the energy
7.9. AN OPEN LETTER TO GE’S PR DEPARTMENT
195
bubble bursting two or three years ago than regulations that might begin to be debated three or more years from now.
Vending product
The Economist article’s author found one pundit who thinks that GE simply expects
that CO2 regulations may just benefit GE over the other guys:
[Mr. Immelt] is asking for government intervention on carbon emissions not just to help the planet, but also because he believes it will
create opportunities that his company may be better placed to exploit
than rivals stuck with older, dirtier technologies. Indeed, GE’s effort, argues Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute [CEI],
an industry-friendly think-tank in Washington, DC, is a form of rentseeking that should raise eyebrows.
Now come back to the sleight-of-mind above: GE is promising to reduce its
internal consumption of energy. Also, as in the Annual Report and the CEI pundit
comment, GE has been trying to position itself as a vendor of equipment for ecofriendly energy production. If every company in the U.S.A. follows GE’s example
of reducing internal CO2 emissions, then GE’s external sales go up, evidently more
than the sales of its competitors.
In the context of its external sales, GE’s internal greening makes sense: if GE
can get other companies to follow its lead, either by inspiring example or by force
of law, GE’s investment in internal green technologies will pay for itself many
times over in external sales. Oh, and the world would be a cleaner place.
7.9
An open letter to GE’s PR department
18 June 2006
Hi, GE.
I am your target audience. I wasn’t on the distribution list for your GE ecomagination Resource Manual, but some of my colleagues here at [name of think
tank] were. Perhaps you didn’t like my last post discussing your ecomagination
initiative. But I’ll overlook that little slight and send you a helpful little critique.
The executive summary: efficiency and environmentalism are not identical.
First, when sending a thick, heavy binder about how you’re saving the planet,
use recycled paper. At the least, we econazis like to print things on both sides of
the page; knowing that the whole thing could have been half as thick just sorta
screams of waste. Shiny paper doesn’t even hold ink very well, so I can’t even use
196
CHAPTER 7. GREEN
the back for scrap paper. And if you’d used plain binding instead of the three-ring
binder, maybe you wouldn’t have needed the heavy cardboard mailing box.
Better still would have been to just put the darn thing on a CD. Then I could
share the text with readers, instead of just telling them about it like I’d just seen a
movie and am acting out the good parts. Only the ones who are really interested
in the rhetoric a corporation uses when attempting to influence policy will read
on, whereas if I had a link you could have gotten your glossy message out to the
hundreds of people who read this page and randomly click every link.
At least you provide a link for the PDF of your 2006 Citizenship report, whose
eco-section provides pretty much the same info.
But enough about form. As for the content, you started out with a endorsement
from Jonathan Lash, President of the World Resources Institute. The WRI is a think
tank dedicated to helping the environment while still ensuring economic growth.
That is, they’re the sort of moderates that would get along perfectly with GE. Well
done finding (and funding?) such people.
I know you have to sell yourself, but describing modern times as “what [GE]
CEO Jeff Immelt calls ‘a carbon constrained world’ ” is a bit pretentious. We,
your intended audience, have known about this carbon-constraint thing for a few
decades now. This is one step shy of President Bush pointing out that the USA is
addicted to oil as if he was the first person to ever realize this. Really, the correct
citation is Gaye (1971).
As Mr. Lash points out, setting measurable goals is a good thing, and you get
a gold star for setting them. For our readers at home, the goals are: double investment in R&D; double revenue from green products; reduce internal greenhouse
emissions; and publicly report progress. Your increased R&D is cool—presuming
you mean R&D in green technologies—but there are many ways to achieve the
other goals while still making the world a dirtier place. It’d be nice if some of your
goals were about reducing your ground and water pollution or reducing carbon
emissions from the products you sell.
The diagrams are all very nice as illustrations, but they’re not very informative.
The guy to whom you sent this document was a chemical engineer for a few years
before digressing to computational methods for the social sciences—he knows how
a turbine works. You could have scored some serious points by showing off your
engineering and how you have green technologies that nobody else has. Show us
your patents. Below, you’ll use lots of numbers about the savings in kWh and kg
CO2 when switching from an unspecified baseline to specific GE product number,
but that’s just show if it’s not followed by micro-level technical specs. As for the
illustration, just leave the boxes out and let this be a graceful, bird-free illustration.
[[Wind turbines are famous for killing birds by the bushel, including many endangered species.
Most other diagrams in the book have a bird floating in the background somewhere.
7.9. AN OPEN LETTER TO GE’S PR DEPARTMENT
197
Figure 7.3: The technical details regarding GE’s eco-friendly technology.
I recently spoke to a lawyer doing the paperwork for a wind farm, and she told me that the
stories about bird-killing are all told by wealthy neighbors who don’t want the wind farm spoiling
their view. Anybody better informed want to weigh in on the argument?] ]
You report that “if just 7 percent of the land area of Arizona were covered
with GE’s PV-165 photovoltaic modules, the amount of electricity that could be
generated on a sunny day would equal the average daily electricity demand of
the entire United States.” The report repeatedly makes statements of the form ‘If
everybody using standard [type of product] switched to GE’s version, then the
energy equivalent of [a fleet of vehicles or a large number of homes] would be
saved.’ First, use of the passive voice is discouraged. You don’t indicate who is
switching and how you are creating incentives to get people to make that switch.
Are you seriously proposing to cover seven percent of Arizona with solar cells?
Second, if we replace ‘Arizona’ in the sentence above with ‘your mom’, you could
put some much-needed humor in a rather dull manual.
Third, there’s the point of comparison (from): the typical airplane, locomotive,
washing machine, &c was built decades ago, and it would be sad indeed if no
progress were made in reducing emissions and improving efficiency over that time.
If everybody driving a 1970 Pinto bought a new SUV, emissions would be reduced.
198
CHAPTER 7. GREEN
And let me repeat, once more, that nobody is surprised that GE is working to
create more efficient products. The real question is: when environmentalism differs
from efficiency, which way does GE go? How does this campaign differ from an
efficiencymagination campaign?
Fourth, there’s the point of comparison (to): how are efficiency levels for your
competitors? Upgrading from a Pinto to an SUV would reduce emissions, but
aren’t there ways to reduce emissions more? And forget the industry norm; is GE
really on the forefront of any of this, or are there green companies that are doing
better but don’t have the resources to send glossy reports to think tanks? Are there
other PV cell manufacturers who could power the U.S.A. by covering only five
percent of Arizona? Maybe I missed it, but I couldn’t find anything in your report
that indicates that you are producing the most environmentally friendly anything.
I was interested to see your desalinization technology, not that the diagram
helped me understand it. But it felt like a sleight-of-hand, because GE is known
for its pollution of certain waterways, so I was expecting something in the water
section about keeping waterways clear of high-tech plastics rather than desalinization. You even acknowledge this on the next-to-last page:
At times in the past—when much less was known about how to protect
our environment—we have been at odds over how to address historical
contamination of waterways and other issues. Some of those disagreements continue today. But we have always acted responsibly, within
the guidelines of the law, and done what we believed was in the best
interest of our shareowners, communities, and other stakeholders.
... Let’s be clear about this: GE’s obligation is, first and foremost, to
our shareholders.
This is the sort of thing where ecomagination really matters: if you can produce efficient plastics, but their production is environmentally destructive, do you keep on
producing, or find ways to mitigate environmental damage first? You report (on p
58 of citizenship report linked above) that you had 101 “wastewater exceedences”
in 2005, but you don’t tell us how you’ll bring plants demonstrating excesses beyond environmental laws back into line.
In your citizenship report, you claim as one of your points of environmental
progress in 2005 that you “Reached an agreement with the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency on dredging the PCB-containing sediments in the Upper Hudson River”. As the country song goes, you’re trying to have your Kate and Edith
too. You can either fight the EPA for years in the hopes that you’ll get off without
having to clean up your mess, or you can brag about how cooperative you are with
environmental efforts, but doing both is plain old self-contradiction.
Your statement about government’s role—
7.9. AN OPEN LETTER TO GE’S PR DEPARTMENT
199
...We believe that the government can provide leadership by: clarifying policy, committing to “market mechanisms,” promoting diverse
energy sources and encouraging an American energy gameplan.
—also indicates a difference between environmentalism and profit-oriented efficiency, because “market mechanisms” [(why the scare-quotes? It’s a common English term,
no?)] frequently favor efficiency over environmentalism. One real difference would
be to call for bans on certain processes and chemicals that are harmful, the way
that CFCs were banned in the 70s. You don’t call for this, and the silence indicates
to me a lack of imagination about eco-problems.
As a digression, I certainly agree about your statement about how government
needs to clarify policy. We had a White House adviser over last week:
Me: Mr. Adviser, if I may speak broadly, scientists hate Bush. What is President Bush doing about this?
Adviser: I don’t know why that’s so, because he doubled funding in hydrogen
cell research.
Me: But they still distrust him. And doesn’t that seem like too little too late?
Adviser: He doubled it.
[[Just to clarify, this actually happened, and most of the room was frustrated by the adviser’s
refusal to honestly discuss Dubya’s alienation of the sciences, mostly preferring to defend the President’s preference of the religious right over the fetus-killing scientists. But the dialogue above is a
dramatization.]]
We’re all pretty tired of the lack of a serious energy policy from the US government, so amen to you, GE PR.
However, I would like to see more from you. Nobody anywhere really prefers
inefficiently achieving goals over efficiently achieving them, but the question of
what those goals should be remains, and is unanswered by your Resource Manual.
Are there conditions where you would recommend steps that would reduce demand
for your products? Power companies do this all day long: my electric bill always
includes a little flier reminding me to turn off lights and check my furnace filter.
But it seems your goal of doubling profits from green products makes it impossible
for you to advocate reduction of energy-using goods.
You advertise how much more efficient your trains are than automobiles, but
then you also brag about your plane engines, which are orders of magnitude less
efficient; would you press governors for more spending on passenger rail? You
mention the cleanliness of nuclear power, but why aren’t you pressing for this in
your PR (instead of burying it on the last few pages); are you lobbying government
for this? If you’re really interested in environmental efficiency of all types, and not
just vending energy-efficient products, why is there any continuing disagreement
over contamination of waterways at all?
200
CHAPTER 7. GREEN
So there you have it. Is GE more ecofriendly than its competitors? Is GE
aiming to reduce energy use or just talking people into spending money replacing
their old Pintos with new SUVs? Is GE willing to accept or recommend restrictions
that would force its hand into not using certain toxins? I had these questions before
reading your report, and I encourage both of my readers to ask these questions
of any corporate eco-PR they should come upon. You’ve omitted answers in the
information you sent to the think tank, and the fact that your reports are silent on
issues of non-energy pollution, the potential for government imposition of CFClike bans on especially onerous environmental problems, and how we will actually
go about covering seven percent of Arizona with solar cells indicates that you have
not yet jumped the gap between efficiencymagination and ecomagination.
7.10
Here comes the ocean, and the global climate change
6 June 2007
Today’s brief guest blog, in interview form, is with an oceanographer who
works with a certain climate-tracking agency for a certain large government. In
the spirit of not getting fired, she asked that I refer to her as missmeridian. This
will make it hard for you to track down her credentials, so you’ll have to take my
word for it that when people say ‘we should only listen to scientists who study
climate change regarding climate change issues,’ they mean we need more people
like missmeridian.
The context is in how we understand carbon exchange. For example, there are
the carbon offset credits that hipsters are buying, and other situations where people
characterize Global Warming as a simple stock and flow model: carbon comes out
of our tailpipes, floats around in the air, and eventually dissipates or is eaten by
trees. Temperature is just an increasing function of carbon stock.
This makes basic sense, is easy to comprehend, and is basically wrong. Missmeridian points out that the oceans are a major destination for our tailpipes’ carbon,
but even that isn’t so simple.
MM: The rate at which oceans suck up carbon varies over time and space. The
southern ocean is net suck in the summer, the equatorial Pacific is balanced unless
under el niño, the north Atlantic is net suck in the spring. Search for “ocean carbon
flux” for details.
B: Is it ever the case that oceans dump more carbon into the atmosphere than
they absorb?
MM: Yes. Late fall is famous for that. Sunlight is decreasing at an increasing
rate, and faster than temperature is cooling (due to magical properties of water).
7.10. HERE COMES THE OCEAN, AND THE GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE201
So you have heterotrophs (= not plants) eating a decreasing stock and exhaling lots
of carbon. Also, several large portions of the ocean go hypoxic [oxygen deficient]
in the subsurface at various times during the year (i.e. Arabian Sea during the
monsoon)—this is very complicated, but basically you get a huge bloom that is
eaten so fast it pulls all the oxygen out of the water column, and all that plant
biomass is turned into carbon dioxide very quickly.
Also keep in mind that carbon sucked into the ocean isn’t removed from play
until it is exported to depth (ie under a layer that does not ventilate to the surface on
the scale of centuries). Export in the dissolved phase is controversial. Particulate
export is much better understood, and is pretty small: only, say, 1% of a surface
bloom reaches the bottom intact in that season.
So 99% is converted to either dissolved organic carbon or gaseous carbon dioxide. The gas part may or may not enter the atmosphere depending on the temperature, solubility, partial pressure, etc.; and the dissolved part may eventually be
turned into gas, or may just stick around as stale, inedible carbon for centuries.
B: So if we dump a megaton of carbon into the air, is is possible that next year
that would turn into 1.2 megatons, or are we guaranteed that some percentage will
get sucked into the oceans, leaving .8 megatons?
The carbon flux is ultimately controlled by the quantity and ratio of nitrogen
and phosphorus in the deep ocean, which is constant over century scales (this is
because biomass [sugars, proteins, DNA] grows in a mostly fixed ratio of C:N:P
[carbon:nitrogen:phosphorous], which is usually 106:16:1 [the Redfield ratio]).
Greater than millennial variation is possible, but not well understood. So, on a
year to year basis, the ocean is in steady state with respect to C:N:P. The most
likely candidate for throwing that out of whack is temperature, which controls the
solubility of gases in water. See the “southern ocean iron experiment” (sofex), iron
experiments 1 and 2 (ironexI, ironexII) and the “southern ocean iron enrichment
experiment” (soiree) for studies that measurably altered the carbon flux. Note that
these increased photosynthesis in the ocean—the atmosphere was not manipulated.
I don’t think anyone’s done that, mostly because the ocean-atmosphere carbon flux
is so delightfully governed by gas chemistry—it’s difficult to squeeze a gas into a
liquid.
B: You’ve mentioned (in prior correspondence) that the term Global Warming
is misleading, because some parts of the world will get colder. Do you have any
readings on why Europe would get colder with climate change?
Readings: look up “western antarctic ice sheet (wais)” and “global ocean conveyor belt” or “global ocean deep circulation.” Basically, warming (global or local)
causes the ice sheet to fall into the ocean, turns off deep circulation, which is what
drives the gulf stream, which is what transfers Caribbean heat to northern Eurasia.
Europe freezes.
202
7.11
CHAPTER 7. GREEN
We’re not blocking traffic, we are traffic
8 June 2005
The image problem
I love how many things are called ‘bicycle’. I commute with a folding bike with
tiny wheels and aero bars and a bouncy ride and twenty kilos of steel, the hipper
messengers tool around on an eight kilos of glossed titanium, and yet they’re both
called bikes.
This is not just an aesthetically fun point, though the massive range of bike
amuses me every time I change from riding the clown bike to riding a more typical
bike. No, it’s politically important, because for every type of bike, there are a dozen
types of riders. As an about-town type and commuter, I want equal access, nice
pavement, and police who care about bike thefts. Mountain bikers want the right
to trail access. Weekend cyclists want long paved corridors like unused railways.
Messengers just want to be left alone to bike. Yet the whole diverse bunch of them
are grouped together as cyclists.
Meanwhile, all of these groups are swamped by another bicyclist subgroup:
ten-year olds. For every economist who commutes to his consulting job on a bike,
there are fifty kids out there tooling around who will be driving the day they turn
the right age.
The Law vs the bikers
The law treats cyclists as an outsider group. Every Senator drives or rides in a
car daily; few of them sit on a bike over the course of any given year. Getting a
lawmaker to think seriously about bikes—which, after all, are mostly ridden by
ten-year olds—is thus a virtually impossible task.
The typical bike law says something like ‘bicyclists shall behave like automobiles’, with a few exceptions about what bikes can’t do, like go on freeways. This
law is the legislative equivalent of plugging one’s ears and yelling ‘I don’t know
and I don’t wanna think about it.’ I mean, it’s a nice baseline to start off from, but
if you spend about ten seconds thinking about it, you realize that there are a whole
lot of things that bikes can do that cars can’t, and traffic flows more quickly and
safely if bikers make use of them.
I’m hard-pressed to believe that anyone on a bike has ever followed the behavelike-a-car law as written—it’d be suicide. When you get to the line at a stoplight,
for example, it makes an awful lot of sense to move forward to the light, instead
7.11. WE’RE NOT BLOCKING TRAFFIC, WE ARE TRAFFIC
203
of hanging out at the curb in the middle of the pack. [This requires lane-splitting,
which is illegal for motorcycles in many places, and therefore illegal for bicyclists
under a behave-like-a-car regime]. In some parts of the world, there’s a space set
aside in front of the car-stopping line at major intersections for bikes to gather. I
was once turning left in the proper behaving-like-an-automobile manner, via the
left-turn lane, when a policeman stopped me and told me that bikes must turn
left by crossing through the intersection, hanging out on the curb until the light
changes, and then going straight in the new direction of travel. I don’t know if
this is actually Illinois law, and our kind policeman’s motivation was clearly that I
should get out of the way so the cars can pass faster, but he was thinking—he knew
that bikes can do things cars can’t, and that maybe behaving like a car isn’t always
the best rule for all involved.
I think that police and bicyclists on the street realize the details of bike mobility
and are generally reasonable about it. But the law as written is an example of
how little legislators want to spend time thinking about cyclists. I once heard the
LA Metro Transit Authority’s internal bike advocate solicit project ideas from a
group of bikers. She clarified that we shouldn’t ask about striping projects (wherein
a street is repainted to have a bike lane) because they’re too cheap to merit the
overhead expense—but the Dobbins bikeway, expected to cost $20 million, costs
way too much, so forget that too. [The first item I could find for scale is a note that
CalTrans’s 1999-2000 budget included $8 billion total and $4 billion for capital
outlay projects.] We left wondering exactly what sort of projects the bicycling
advocate was willing to stand behind.
The people who drive for practical need far outnumber the people who drive
for play, and so lawmakers take driving seriously; there are multitudes of people
who play on their bikes, and therefore lawmakers and law enforcers are inclined to
think of all people on bikes as merely playing in the street. Of course, there is a
clear feedback mechanism here: if laws and funding are designed around bicycles
as toys, then they make it difficult to use bikes for utilitarian transport. Even bike
advocacy groups have this problem, since their most important goals are usually
bike arteries in the dirty city, but their funding base is the mass of weekend riders.
No solution here; perhaps we need new words for transportation bicycles to
distinguish them from play bicycles. Or perhaps we bicyclists could all agree to
stop enjoying our commutes and start looking bored, businesslike and/or pissed off
like most driving commuters do. But until we convince the world that bicycling is
boring, we won’t get the funding and other support that we need.
8
B RETTON W OODS
The World Bank is the organization everybody loves to hate, which is unfortunate,
because it is one of the best chances for the world’s poor to actually get help. I
really want the World Bank to work.
I wrote the sections in this chapter over the course of about seven years. The
early parts are conceptual, written well before I began my life as a full-time pundit,
and give an outsider’s view of how the Bank and its sisters should function. The
second part (and you’ll know when the second part starts by the sudden rise in
bitterness) was written during and after my contracts at the World Bank itself. I
had a series of short-term contracts, and was then offered a longer-term one year
contract. But working there was such a disaster that I refused the contract and fled.
Again, I really want the World Bank to work, so the discussion here focuses as
much as possible at what exactly is going wrong and how it can get better.
Be informed! The problems around the World Bank (WB), the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Trade Organization (WTO) are rather esoteric
and difficult questions about development economics. They can’t be discussed in
a sound byte, so this paper goes into some detail about what you need to know
about these organizations and the important questions they raise. Development,
by definition, involves the destruction of the status quo; how can this be done in a
manner that maintains stability in developing countries?
8.1
Introduction
The intent of this paper is to give a factual description and some context regarding
the Bretton Woods institutions: the World Bank, World Trade Organization, and
the International Monetary Fund. These organizations, by their mere existence,
204
8.2. THEORY
205
raise some serious questions about how the developing world should go about developing, and how the wealthier part of the world should go about helping the
poorer parts live better. Unfortunately, these questions are rarely asked.
Many people seem to believe that the World Bank is a big-business conspiracy
which exists in plain daylight and will not rest until the entire world is one big
office complex. But, unexcitingly enough, there is no conspiracy.
Just as people who chant ‘down with the government’ are excluding themselves
from discussion about how we can make our government better, people who believe
the conspiracy theories about the Bretton Woods institutions exclude themselves
from debate about the problems and open questions regarding development and
trade between rich and poor.
The two main problems with the institutions as I see them are a too-faithful
devotion to Neoclassical economics, and the mundane problems of bureaucratic
organization which plague every organization bigger than a dozen people.
The open questions are about the concept of development. Humans destroy the
environment. People like electricity, but there is currently no way to generate it
without damaging the environment in some way. People love cars, but they spew
endless pollution and require roads that divide ecosystems in half.
Bringing in a technology expert from the USA means that the host country will
be a little more technologically advanced than it was before—and will look a little
more like the United States. A country needs to trade with other countries to grow,
but in so doing the distinctions and diversities that make that country unique erode.
People in the developing world want electric lights and fans and, if they can
afford it, cars. Their taste for exotic American goods is as strong or stronger than
Americans’ tastes for Turkish coffee or pad Thai. What should the wealthier nations’ responsibilities be in helping the world’s poor achieve their desires?
I will begin with a few brief and hopefully painless economics lessons. Currency stability and trade negotiations may seem like distant topics, but they have a
real, important impact on whether people eat and how long they live, which I hope
will be clearer by the end of this paper.
The impatient and economically savvy may want to skip to section
Section
8.2
Theory
Before getting to the institutions themselves, some background is in order.
206
8.2.1
CHAPTER 8. BRETTON WOODS
Neoclassical economics in one easy lesson
Neoclassical economics, often known as ‘Chicago school’ economics, is based in
a belief that people approximate perfectly rational beings, who are very good at
working out what’s in their best interest. It was forcefully advocated by Milton
Friedman, who was then at the University of Chicago and who is still referred
to as ‘Uncle Milt’ by U of C Economics professors. The title of his popular book,
Free to Choose, does a good job of summarizing the whole theory: if you let people
choose among a set of options, then they’ll pick the choice they like best, so our
best policy option is to leave people alone to make their own choices.
If you were to restrict the decisionmaker’s choices, she’ll do one of two things:
either her old choice is in the restricted set of choices so she’ll stick with the choice
she had made before, meaning the restriction was irrelevant; or she’ll switch to
something she didn’t like so much when she wasn’t restricted, in which case the
restrictions made her worse off. [This is an informal description of the KuhnTucker conditions.]
In short, restrictions are bad.
Here in the real world, restrictions take the form of laws. If I want to buy a
cheap car that doesn’t have all those new-fangled safety features like seat belts,
then I should be able to make that choice. Restrictions on markets, like taxes or
trade barriers, are also bad, because unrestricted markets can also be shown to be
[Pareto] optimal, as in what is hubristically referred to as the First Theorem of
Welfare Economics.
The logic is very simple, and hard to argue with. But here in the real world,
laws can be a good thing. If I’m too cheap to buy brakes that meet a minimum
standard, you may suffer when I slide into your car one rainy day. And it’s farfetched to claim that the road we were on could have been built without a public
works department and a tax system to support it.
8.2.2
Macroeconomics in one easy lesson
Macro is concerned with a really hard philosophical question: where does value
come from? Since these are economists and not philosophers, the Macro question
becomes: where does money’s value come from?
The easy answer is to say that we can exchange a dollar bill for a loaf of bread,
and so the dollar’s value is equal to the value of a loaf of bread. But if I cross town,
I may be able to get a nicer loaf with the same dollar. This is a pretty minor detail
within one town, but if I take that dollar to Brazil, I may be able to buy a half-dozen
loaves with that dollar and still have change left over.
There are two ways that this is reconciled. The first is via the open market: I
8.2. THEORY
207
can sell somebody who’s holding Brazilian royals1 some of my US dollars. Just as
the bread market eventually reaches a price for bread, the royals market will also
eventually reach a price which we can take to represent the value of a royal in US
dollars.
The other method is by government fiat. This is the true case with royals:
the government of Brazil declared that you can buy exactly two royals for one
US dollar. But it’s a free world, and what keeps me from finding somebody who
really wants dollars and taking three royals for my dollar? The answer is that the
government takes an active role in foreign exchange (aka forex). If the value of the
royal declines on the forex desks of the world, then the Brazilian government will
start buying royals, which will drive the price back up. This is known as ‘defending
the currency’.
How currency conversions affect people’s lives
The currency exchange rate matters because people import and export goods. Many
countries, for example, do not grow enough food to feed the entire population, and
must import food to keep their citizens alive. The price at which they import the
food will depend on the value of the currency: if it takes a lot of royals to buy a
dollar (that is, the royal is weak), then it will take a lot of royals to buy Illinois corn
which is priced in dollars.
However, this is good news for Brazilian exporters: people in Illinois may buy
a bag of Brazil nuts for a dollar, and then the Brazilian exporter can take that dollar
and buy many royals.
If the royal is strong, the story reverses. A Brazilian won’t need many royals to
import corn, but the dollar the exporter got for his nut-picking efforts isn’t worth
so many royals.
It’s a hard call as to whether a strong or weak currency is preferable. The
word ‘strong’ sounds better than ‘weak’, but a country which is basically selfsufficient and has a lot that’s worth exporting to the rest of the world wants to have
a weak currency. The strategic decision of where along the scale a currency should
be depends on the social, economic, and astrological conditions of the country in
question.
Stability is a good thing. One thing that is always true is that (almost) everybody
wants the exchange rate to be stable. When a volatile currency swings toward the
weak, all the people who rely on imports go out of business; when it swings toward
the strong, all the people who rely on exports go out of business; and in the end
1
Although the name of the currency is typically not translated, I felt that leaving it as ‘real’ was
just too darn confusing.
208
CHAPTER 8. BRETTON WOODS
the economy is a mess. Farmers need to decide a year in advance whether to plant
crops they will sell domestically or internationally. If the currency is stable, they
can make that decision without worrying about being ruined half the time.
8.3
Bretton Woods institutions and what they do
Bretton Woods is an area in New Hampshire, known for its skiing and a meeting
of 45 governments held in July 1944, aimed at tackling two problems: Europe was
a smoldering hole in the ground that needed to be rebuilt, and exchange rates had
become systematically unstable.
The rebuilding problem was handled by the establishment of the International
Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), whose goal was to coordinate and assist in getting the money together for the rebuilding. Later, the IBRD
merged with a few other like-minded organizations with like-sounding acronyms.
The larger organization’s expanded mission was to finance development projects
the world over, and was named the World Bank (WB).
The international finance problems were solved by the establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and by an imposition of a gold standard. The
way the gold standard was implemented was to proclaim that any central bank
anywhere in the world could sell gold to the US Treasury for $35 per ounce. Individual countries fixed the value of their own currency in terms of gold, and a
reliable international gold standard was born.
The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was also established to
assist in the negotiation of trade barriers such as tariffs. The GATT has expanded
into the World Trade Organization (WTO).
The goals of these organizations are aimed at unification and equality. The
WTO aims for a world without trade barriers; the IMF seeks a world where all
currencies are equal and stable; the WB hopes to narrow the gap between the mostdeveloped and least-developed. Depending on your spin, the aim is an equitable
world or a homogenized, Americanized world.
To say more, we need more detail about the individual organizations as they
are today.
8.3.1
The WTO
The WTO is basically a meeting place for the discussion of export and import taxes.
It is legally powerless. Really.
“The WTO is a fractious club of 144 member countries [...] The job of heading the organisation is more like managing a bickering professional association
8.3. BRETTON WOODS INSTITUTIONS AND WHAT THEY DO
209
than running a global government.” [“Globalization’s New Cheerleader”, The
Economist, 5 Sept 2002]
However, informally, the general goal of the organization is Neoclassical in
flavor: it hopes to remove tariffs and barriers, and produce as free a market as
possible.
“[...] the WTO’s boss is the single most visible advocate for freer trade. His is
the best pulpit from which to goad rich and poor countries alike into tearing down
trade barriers. [...] Though he cannot force any compromise, a politically astute
WTO director-general is in a strong position to squeeze deals out of recalcitrant
negotiators.” [ibid]
Discussion
A few lines of math will suffice to prove that a freer market will expand the total efficiency of the world economy. But especially among smaller economies, breaking
down trade barriers can create problems.
Say that in a small country without much in the way of technology, a large part
of the population works in growing soybeans. Meanwhile, a farm in Iowa may
be able to grow orders of magnitude more soy using a fraction of the effort and
cost, thanks to machinery and chemicals that the peasant farmer can only dream
of [not to mention farm subsidies by the US government]. If Iowans are allowed
to freely export soybeans to the poor country, then everybody in the country will
be paying less for soybeans, and the peasant soybean growers will instantly go out
of business. In a perfect world, they will switch to earning their living in another
industry, but in practical terms, this is often impossible.
The avowed goal of removing trade barriers could be harmful if an economy
does not match the Neoclassically ideal market—that is, in poor and underdeveloped countries where switching a large portion of the population from one industry
to another is a difficult task. Also, in situations where there are other market distortions at work, open trade may also be harmful; here I have in mind situations where
the wealthier countries subsidize their producers, so they can put their goods on the
market at a lower cost. The U.S.A. gives billions of dollars to cotton farmers, and
the U.S.A. and EU both give billions of dollars to sugar farmers. Such a situation
turns arguments about comparative advantage on their head—Brazilian farmers can
produce sugar more cheaply, but U.S. farmers have the lower price, thanks to subsidies. Entirely open markets would indeed bring cheaper cotton and thus cheaper
clothing to Brazilians, but it’s entirely unclear whether there is net benefit to Brazil
or the world overall under such a subsidies-plus-open-trade regime.
In this case, the question of what is involved in “goad[ing] rich and poor countries alike” and “squeez[ing] deals out of recalcitrant negotiators” becomes an im-
210
CHAPTER 8. BRETTON WOODS
portant one. The negotiation of trade barriers is a good thing, so long as it is done
without threats or bullying; whether bullying does indeed happen is difficult to
determine.
8.3.2
The IMF
Since Bretton Woods, a lot has happened in the world of currency. First, the gold
standard died, meaning that countries are more free to position their currency as
the stars dictate. Second, general distrust of the central role the USA played in the
system led to the creation of SDRs (special drawing rights), an imaginary currency
which the IMF loans to central banks instead of US dollars.
SDRs are paid in annually in proportion to a country’s wealth. The number of
votes a country has in the operation of the IMF is proportional to the amount of
SDRs it pays in. The USA has about 17% of the vote and SDR burden, though
many claim that its decision power is disproportionately larger. [Percentage from
the IMF member directory, 5 November 2002].
But getting back to the goal of things, currency stability is good. Governments
and businesses all want stability. However, currency speculators make their money
on volatility. The conflict is clear, and is played out every day in the forex exchanges.
I was once told an anecdote of a trader who was mad at Australia, and so, with
a trillion Australian dollars (AUD) or so in circulation, he sold a trillion AUD—the
whole currency. The trader was fired and order quickly restored, but more serious
speculators (like George Soros, benefactor of MoveOn.org) could readily destroy
a currency, and, if properly planned, make millions of dollars in the process. If I
got to choose what people picket and riot over, it’d be currency speculators.
A currency’s value is also tied to a dozen other factors I haven’t yet mentioned,
most notably the government’s debt. If the government prints more money, the
value of the money currently in circulation clearly goes down. Similarly, if the
government writes too many IOUs, the value of the currency in circulation also
goes down. As discussed above, a weaker currency is not necessarily a bad thing
in terms of international trade. But it is a destabilizing factor which makes it harder
to defend the currency if necessary.
In the fight between speculators and governments, the IMF is on the side of the
governments and the people they represent. It is the lender of last resort, meaning
that when the government doesn’t have the money to defend its currency, it can
look to the IMF for help, which is where the SDRs come in. The government under
attack may draw out Special Drawing Rights from the International Monetary Fund
and use those rights to buy back its currency. Depending on the situation, it repays
the SDRs in more stable times.
8.3. BRETTON WOODS INSTITUTIONS AND WHAT THEY DO
211
Structural Adjustment Programs
Funding from the IMF is not 100% unconditional: if a country is screwing up its
own currency, by erratic government and massive budget deficits, then the IMF
may insist on policy changes, so as to ensure that it isn’t just throwing SDRs down
the drain.
Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) generally consist of Chicago school
economics: cut budget deficits, thereby shrinking the size of government, and drop
trade barriers. As discussed above, dropping trade barriers can be a good thing, but
may not be under some real-world conditions. Shrinking government can also be a
good thing, but in poorer countries, government’s roles tend to be rather important
and useful, such as providing health and education, building infrastructure, and
keeping especially corrupt and useless individuals off the streets by giving them
paying jobs in bureaucratic offices. I am unclear on the extent to which an SAP
consists of demands to shrink government in general and the the extent to which
it consists of demands to cut social services, but the cut in social services often
happens just the same.
I will discuss this further in the context of some history, below.
8.3.3
The World Bank
The World Bank funds development projects. For example, it is the largest single
source of education funding for poor countries, having spent an average of $1.9
billion per year from 1991-1999 [source: whirledbank.org, a site critical of the
WB, which somehow argued that this was a bad thing.]
Almost all of this is in loans. I am sure that if somebody were to offer to hand
over $1.9 billion per annum, the World Bank would happily disperse it without
lien, but such donations are not forthcoming. Instead, the Bank puts out bonds and
takes relatively small contributions from the wealthier governments of the world.
Its role in the financial process is to remove risk. Loaning to a government
which could be overthrown next week is a risk. Loaning money for development
projects like the modernization of an electric power plant in the middle of nowhere
is also rife with risks. Money for a development project like education or health initiatives will eventually show a return in terms of increased productivity, but nothing
a bank can collect on. In other words, Guatemala will never be able to walk into a
Citibank branch and expect to get much of a loan.
The World Bank acts as the intermediary. It studies proposed projects and
chooses those most likely to succeed, is willing to absorb the loss if the loan is
defaulted on, and talks Citibank into making concessions on the interest rate.
212
CHAPTER 8. BRETTON WOODS
Discussion
First, let us consider its role as an intermediary. Unlike commercial banks, it has
no profit motive. However, it deals directly with the capitalists of the world who
are looking for a return on their investment and have little or no interest in charity.
The WB has to somehow pay back those bonds, or else the entire system fails:
nobody will put money in to the system so future development projects won’t happen, Citibank goes bankrupt because it doesn’t get the payments it was relying
on, and so thousands of Citibank ex-employees and millions of people whose pensions derive from Citibank stock can’t buy food. Citibank’s executives will also be
bankrupted, but they’ll still be able to buy food.
Developing countries have their own credit rating, in a sense. For example,
Russia defaulted on its loans a few years ago, and has had problems ever since.
Similarly, if we just threw away all the existing developing world debt and dismantled the WB, the credit rating of the developing world would collectively fall
in the gutter, and no further development loans would be forthcoming for a long,
long time. The question is not ‘should development loans be forgiven?’ but ‘how
can development loans be forgiven while maintaining stability and the possibility
of future aid loans?’
On the other side of the WB’s intermediation are the governments of the poor
countries. These are frequently incompetent and corrupt. After project funding
is procured, it is often difficult for the Bank to ensure that the money goes to the
project instead of the leaders.
Each country has a World Bank bureau, whose goal is to get loans of the largest
magnitude possible. This creates a systematic bias toward megaprojects, like dams.
In the choice of project role, many claim that the World Bank doesn’t do very
well. Some projects just don’t work, some are environmentally destructive, and
some are sociologically destructive. And as discussed in the introduction, it is hard
to imagine a project which does not in some way affect the environment and the
society.
For example, one of the easiest ways to create jobs is to exploit natural resources, such as mining or logging. For Americans to claim that mining and logging should not happen is hypocritical, since we depend on wood and bauxite for
our day-to-day existence. Blocking such projects means miners and lumberjacks
won’t be able to eat. But allowing such projects to run at full tilt until the forests
are empty and the earth a lifeless hole is also indefensible.
In summary, development is not cheap—in terms of dollars, environmental
costs, and social upheaval. But to say that as a result it shouldn’t happen is to
avoid the truly difficult question of where the balance should be. If we believe that
development is a good thing, then the question is where the money will come from.
8.3. BRETTON WOODS INSTITUTIONS AND WHAT THEY DO
213
Ideally, it would come from contributions from donors, but the businessmen don’t
care and the Congress is clearly more interested in buying sleeker bombers than
building roads. Instead, we have a decidedly imperfect system of loans, with the
WB at the center.
8.3.4
The WB and the IMF as bickering siblings
The best guarantee of economic stability and repayment of a World Bank loan is,
of course, support from the IMF. This brings us back to the structural adjustment
programs: if a country seems economically unstable (and they all do. . . ), the World
Bank may not be willing to entrust them with a loan until the country can get IMF
backing, which it can’t do unless it accepts the IMF’s SAPs.
The culture of the World Bank is much more liberal than that of the IMF, since
the day-to-day questions are about education, health, and roads instead of currencies and bonds. The liberal types attracted by development issues typically do not
support Chicago School economic ideas. To claim that the World Bank wholeheartedly supports structural adjustment programs, as many, many people do, is
to simultaneously misunderstand what the WB does, and to assume that its actions somehow represent the feelings of its employees—or even its head. Joseph
Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner in economics, was chief economist of the World Bank
from 1996-2000, and had this to say about the economics embodied in the SAPs:
When the IMF decides to assist a country, it dispatches a “mission” of
economists. These economists frequently lack extensive experience in
the country; they are more likely to have firsthand knowledge of its
five-star hotels than of the villages that dot its countryside.
[...]
The mathematical models the IMF uses are frequently flawed or outof-date. Critics accuse the institution of taking a cookie-cutter approach to economics, and they’re right. Country teams have been
known to compose draft reports before visiting. I heard stories of
one unfortunate incident when team members copied large parts of
the text for one country’s report and transferred them wholesale to another. They might have gotten away with it, except the ”search and
replace” function on the word processor didn’t work properly, leaving
the original country’s name in a few places. Oops.
–“What I learned at the world economic crisis”, The New Republic,
17 April 2000
214
8.4
CHAPTER 8. BRETTON WOODS
A few histories
The intent of this section is to give the sort of context in which the IMF and the
World Bank deal.
8.4.1
Latin America
Latin American societies have historically been very unequal. This is due to a
Spanish/indigenous hierarchy, uneven distribution of resources, and any of a number of other factors. Meanwhile, thanks to pressure from the people and from
the United States, almost all of Latin America has been a democracy for the last
few decades. The leaders who do best in an economically lopsided democracy are
those who know how to keep the poor masses happy, and the democratic leaders
of Latin America have typically been very populist, even socialist. Take this in
contrast with the dictator Pinochet, who imposed the free markets suggested by the
Chicago Boys.
Populist tactics tend to erode the economy in the long run, since they are
typically consumption subsidies, which somehow need to be paid for. Since the
wealthy—who may not have much of a vote but still wield power—won’t allow
their taxes to be raised, this means budget deficits, and as discussed above, budget
deficits destabilize the currency. This is not academic: Latin American history in
the last few decades is rife with currency failures, which led to riots and depressions.
The frustration of the IMF should be apparent now: its Neoclassisicist managers had an obligation to support these currencies, and at the same time felt that
further failure was inevitable due to the structure of the populist governments. This
was the genesis of the SAP conditions.
Are the imposition of SAPs overriding the decisions of the governments they
are imposed upon? The first point to note in answering this question is that ‘imposition’ is not a literal term. A choice was presented to the elected leaders: either the
IMF will leave you alone and the people will throw you out for ineptly managing
your economy, or you’ll have to implement the SAP in which case the people will
be miffed but might let you hold office for another term. In some cases where the
economy was especially trashed, and hyperinflation made day-to-day transactions
impossible, there was even popular support for the SAPs, even though they cut
programs that the people depended on.
Were the Neoclassical SAP recommendations the right ones to make? Who
knows. In the context of Latin American populism, they were a sensible counterpart to the sort of excesses that the governments were committing. But nonChicago School people would no doubt come up with other conditions, perhaps
8.5. CONCLUSION
215
insisting that the budget be balanced by raising taxes on the upper echelons and
barring cuts in services.
8.4.2
East Asia
Asia suffered a speculative crisis (mostly in real estate) in 1997. By then, the IMF
had established its pattern of SAPs, and presented them to the ailing governments
of Asia. But somehow, East Asia doesn’t have the populist history that Latin America has. Government isn’t all that big, and inflation isn’t a problem. Typically, the
economy is weak due to governmental decisions and then speculators take advantage of this and cause the currency collapse. But in this case, it was all about the
speculators.
Yet the IMF imposed the same “cookie-cutter” SAPs that it had in Latin America. Many claim that this was a misapplication which exacerbated instability and
made what could have been a manageable situation much worse. But the IMF
economists didn’t see this, because their faith in the market and distaste for government was so strong.
8.5
Conclusion
By now, my agenda should be clear: I am a fanatic moderate, and do not believe
that extreme answers are ever the correct ones. On the critical side, “The IMF
should just be dissolved” or “No large development projects are good” are too extreme to be reasonable. On the establishment side, the WTO’s official answer to
every question is that trade barriers should be removed, and the IMF’s recommendation for every problem is that interference by government needs to be eliminated.
This is equally myopic.
The World Bank’s job is to push for development—meaning destruction of
the status quo. Critics often paint a picture of the status quo consisting of noble
savages who eschew technology that would make them more comfortable, live
longer, and work more efficiently, who only accept such things due to brainwashing
by McDonald’s or the use of force by the World Bank’s nonexistent army.
The WTO exists to press for trade which is as free as possible. Tariffs can often
be used destructively (thus terms like ‘retaliatory tariffs’), and are almost by definition supporting an industry which works more efficiently elsewhere. Therefore,
the WTO is a necessary organization for checking domestic political pressure to
help certain industries make more money than they would in a free-trade world.
However, in trade between the developed and undeveloped world, the developed
country has more resources at its disposal to subsidize its industries and engage
216
CHAPTER 8. BRETTON WOODS
in antisocial behavior such as dumping. How can trade barriers be dropped in a
manner that ensures that the magic of comparative advantage works?
The IMF exists to maintain monetary stability. Most folks here in the USA
don’t realize the incredible importance of this because the US dollar is so stable
that we don’t think about such things. But the planning of new businesses and the
survival of old businesses depends on the stability of the currency, which the IMF
defends. But what should the IMF do when stability is threatened? How often is
the Neoclassical approach the correct recommendation to make? What other fixes
could they recommend to an economy which is desperate enough to resort to the
lender of last resort?
The World Bank supports development projects by acting as an intermediary
between wealthy capitalists and third-world rulers. Both of these groups are famous for not being very nice people; how can the WB best bring them together to
facilitate the development programs that people need and want, while at the same
time keeping each side’s desire to shaft the other at bay? How can the WB implement development projects in countries where the government can be expected to
steal half the funds? If we feel that old debts should be forgiven, how much can be
forgiven without destabilizing the US and European economies and destroying the
debtor countries’ credit?
Almost by definition, development destroys the current order, socially and environmentally. What sort of projects accommodate the fact that people in poor
countries want electric lights, easy transportation, the tools they need to work efficiently, and the ability to trade goods with the rest of the world; while preserving
the diversity and other desirable features of the status quo? Any bureaucracy’s goal
is to maximize its budget, so how can we ensure that all of the projects proposed
and approved, especially the megaprojects, are warranted?
Even though most of them have no answer, those are the questions I think we
should be asking.
8.6
Who is a liberal?
2 September 2005
I think I’ve worked out that detail which causes liberal folk to hate the World
Bank. The WB is the largest and best hope for global poverty alleviation we have,
so one would think that it’d be the darling of liberals everywhere, but it has one
fundamental difference from the typical liberal: it’s not pro-labor.
It’s hard to pinpoint the lack of a position, but I posit as a matter of opinion
based on reading loads of World Bank reports that it has no position on labor stan-
8.6. WHO IS A LIBERAL?
217
dards. We can try Google, for what it’s worth: the search "labor standards"
site:worldbank.org turns up 530 hits, "working conditions" site:worldbank.org turns up 844, and "investment climate" site:worldbank.org
turns up 16,500.
I haven’t been able to find a straight answer, but as far as I can tell, somewhere
between a great number and the majority of the WB’s employees are short-term
consultants—that is, they have no benefits, no insurance, and no job security. The
Bank has a rule that nobody can work as a short-term consultant for more than 120
days/year, which often means that people wind up working for free for much of the
year.
We can go to the coffee shop in the atrium, which serves SBUX coffee (SBUX
being famous for treating its employees nicely, but I think the WB is just serving
their coffee). There are about six varieties of coffee on tap, and only two of them
are Fair Trade certified. Could you imagine a choice of Fair Trade or not-Fair Trade
coffee in the SEIU lobby? Heads would roll. At the Bank, nobody detects anything
awry at all.
Trying to detect the lack of a position is further complicated by the fact that the
Bank is a decentralized mess, because policy written for Africa is not necessarily
any good for Latin America. With policy written on a region-by-region or even
country-by-country basis, there are thousands of human beings whose statements
get blobbed together after a header like ‘the World Bank states that...’. Some of
them are clearly pro-labor.
Caveats and paltriness of evidence aside, I’m still going to make this negative
assertion, and you can evaluate it next time you have a WB report in your hands:
the World Bank is not pro-labor.
Which brings up an interesting question:
Can one be liberal but not pro-labor?
Some people define politics as a labor vs capital fight, and then the liberal/conservative split is just a renaming of the two teams. For these guys, it’s a no-brainer:
you’re either with us or you’re against us. Then there are the non-economic, social
definitions of liberal, which are just not quite apropos for an economic development
organization. Though, gender inequality is a big deal within the WB, and there are
reports up the wazoo about it in every context.
Less hard-line economic definitions say that the liberal is simply concerned
with reducing poverty or increasing equality. The two measures are not identical, because of the ‘all boats rise with the tide’ philosophy espoused by the typical conservative when confronted with the poverty question. In almost all of the
world, people are better off than they were fifty years ago: where they had hand
218
CHAPTER 8. BRETTON WOODS
fans before, they have electric fans, and where they had electric fans they have
air conditioning. The all-boats story was the norm at the University of Chicago
twenty-five years ago, and is therefore the default at the World Bank today. But the
story says nothing about whether equality is expanding or diminishing, and one
is hard-pressed to measure quality of life in absolute terms, since there’s loads of
evidence that most humans use relative terms themselves.
My impression from the likes of Mr. JB (whose book I have reviewed) is that
the WB thinks of those issues that would affect poverty as those which are in its
scope to discuss, but issues of inequality are somehow politically out. This is an
arbitrary division if ever there was one: every last action by the UN or any of its sister organizations (including the WB and IMF) is interventionist, and we’re glad for
those interventions (including Mr. JB). We think extortionary laws which oppress
minorities to be worthy of international censure and even military intervention, but
extortionary laws set by a wealthy few to exploit a poor majority are somehow just
a matter of course. It’s a question of careful spin, and I’m always incredulous when
somebody manages to maintain ethics that say one type of intervention is virtuous
and the other overstepping.
So we’ve got three definitions of liberalism: caring about labor, about the poor,
or about inequality, and they have different implications. Under definition one,
which the black-clad Marxists go by, the WB is a big, fat conservative. By the
concern about the poor definition, the WB is the paragon of liberalism. Their
motto is ‘A world free of poverty’, and I would say that the great majority of its
employees buy into this.
By the final definition, caring about inequality, the WB is borderline. In my
conversations with managers there, I have rarely if ever heard any of them express
interest in inequality issues, but when I say, “We care about equality,” they invariably nod in agreement, perhaps even going so far as to vocalize a “yeah” (or
offering to fund my inequality-measuring models). My impression, which again
has nothing but touchy-feely support, is of a group of people just beginning to get
it. So thanks, black-clad protesters, I think your message is slowly seeping through,
and our best hope for reducing world poverty may eventually become our best hope
for reducing inequality as well.
8.7
Policy recommendations for the World Bank
6 May 2005
[If you know me personally, you know that I had a number of contracts at the Bank. Some went
well, but most were for a rather shifty individual who was somewhat dishonest, both academically
and more generally. The contract stipulated pay for eight days, and I cut bait and left after maybe
four months of mostly full-time work trying to fit models to his hypotheses—and he still withheld
8.7. POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE WORLD BANK
219
payment.
There you have it, right in front, and you can read the rest of this article knowing my bias.
Though, I’d worked out most of the below over a year ago, and you can tell by this header that I’m
self-conscious enough not to base any of the below on one personal data point.]
The World Bank is huge, and that is not necessarily wrong. If we somehow
broke it into ten separate organizations, those organizations would have constant
turf squabbles and fights over funding, constantly need each others’ assistance
and/or replicate each others’ work, and would probably wind up setting up some
sort of interorganization council that doesn’t differ too much from the Bank’s top
management. There are umpteen thousands of people working in development,
and that’s an organizational problem no matter what.
Now, there are two eminently sensible ways to divide expertise: you can go by
geographic region, because Central Asia is a very different place from Sub-Saharan
Africa, or you can go by topic, because poverty reduction is a very different issue
from gender issues. The Bank does both: the management chart is a grid, with
departments like Central Asia-poverty and Africa-gender (except everything is an
acronym, so it’d be ECA PREM). That is, everybody has two bosses, thus giving
everybody something to complain about at the water cooler.
The next problem is that new projects come and go at a pretty rapid pace, and
always involve subject that are a bit far afield from the expertise of the managers.
The solution: hire contractors. Lots and lots of contractors. The Bank doesn’t
have a dam-building division—they contract. Nor do they have a dam-evaluating
division; that’s contracted too. Nor do they have sufficient expertise in virtually
any of the subjects that your typical Bank report is about.
So when you sit at the coffee shop in the Bank’s spacious atrium—and a whole
lot of Washington is like this—you find a small core of individuals who are there
for life and a constant flux of two-year RAs and contractors. [Also, you’ll see that only
two of the five coffees they serve will be Fair Trade certified.]
Now, if you work in a technical field, you know that finding people who are
both technically apt and good managers is supremely difficult. Further, even if
they were the best of the best twenty years ago, maybe their COBOL skillz aren’t
so impressive now. I would contend that in the pool that the Bank has to draw
from, there are simply not enough people who are experts in country plus subject
plus general management to fill all the posts. They have to compromise.
And the compromise the Bank chooses, time and time again, is to go for the
people who can best manage the stream of contractors. Subject knowledge can be
hired; familiarity with the Bank and its protocols can’t. To add to this, managers are
rotated every few years, so if somebody really buckles down and learns everything
there is to know about labor in Europe, it’s down the drain when they’re moved to
managing technology dissemination in China.
220
CHAPTER 8. BRETTON WOODS
Now, management skill generally goes with political skill, and much of the
work of a Bank manager consists of not pissing off politicians. So this is one more
reason to bias toward managerial knowledge over subject knowledge. It is also
why most Bank reports don’t actually say anything of substance.
I suppose the arrangement of hiring subject knowledge could work, but the
Bank culture kills it. The Bank’s employees are trained to think like business managers. Impoverished countries are referred to as ”clients”, and I have heard at least
one manager give a speech explaining in no uncertain detail about how the Bank
must be run like a business. There are clear management goals; growing GDP by
7% per year in an given country is always a popular one—and even if it is achieved
via inequality-expanding means, all boats will eventually rise with the tide.
However, the Bank’s questions are only partly business on the ground. A huge
percentage of the Bank’s product is reports, about the business climate, about how
[trend of the month] can reduce poverty, about the environmental effects of dams.
So the contractors the Bank will hire are a mix of the usual survey-takers and other
such laborers, and academic types.
As demonstrated by me and my shifty boss (really, I had some nice ones too!),
academics and hard-nosed managers don’t mix. Academics want to write something that is correct to the last detail; managers want something that gets the point
across. Academics want to hold off judgment until the data is in; managers want to
write the introduction to the report before hiring the academics. Academics need
time; managers need output by Friday. Further, experienced academics are not
cheap. They have day jobs, and if you need original research, that distracts from
the navel-gazing they’d rather be doing.
I asked one well-known academic, “what do you think of the World Bank?”
and he snapped back, “Did they pay you?” Then there’s the graduate student who
confided to me that she didn’t tell her adviser that she’s working at the Bank; due to
so many bad past experiences, her department has a policy of not allowing students
to work there. After I gave up on the project at the head of this column, shifty
manager attempted to contract two experienced individuals working in my field,
and both refused. I’ll stop with the anecdotes there.
The end result from all of this: the Bank generally runs on the young and
inexperienced. If you just got your Master’s, they’ve got work for you to do. If
you can’t necessarily do original research, but you know how to run Microsoft
Excel, then you have what it takes to write the flagship publication, the World
Development Report. If you skim through the thing, you’ll notice that (1) it is
primarily a very long lit review, and (2) none of the original data work goes further
than a bivariate graph. Most of those bivariate graphs (e.g., pp 2.14 and 2.20) are
Excel charts based on a manually-enterable number of data points. That is, it’s the
sort of report that you expect from a team of Master’s students.
8.7. POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE WORLD BANK
221
Of course, that report has its value, and if you want a survey of global poverty in
2005, you should definitely click the link above. But does the following statement
inspire confidence in you?: ”Resources to eradicate world poverty are allocated
based upon the best research by the most eager graduates of the last few years.”
In short, the Bank’s structure consists of a core of managers, many of whom
learned their economics in the ’70s, and a constant stream of generally inexperienced subject-knowledge labor. The result is well-managed and well put-together
graduate-level work, upon which life-changing policies are decided.
Policy recommendations
You know I’m an academic, so it’s no surprise that my basis for critique and reform
is the Bank’s reporting output. Ask someone who works more on the operations
side, and you’ll get a whole ‘nother list of reasons. But that said, here are my
policy recommendations. Executive summary: the Bank should focus more on
hiring talent in the subjects in which it works, and retaining those people.
The Bank is clearly over-managed, in the sense that there are just too darn
many layers of management and the corresponding politics and unproductive inoffensiveness is stifling. It is also overmanaged in the sense that it is run like a
business with a series of financial goals for its clients, rather than an organization
whose goal is to understand poverty and eradicate it.
Coauthoring is efficient. The latest Journal of Political Economy has seven articles, five of which were coauthored. To produce a good report about environmental
issues in India, you can hire a full-time India-environment specialist, or you can
hire a full time India specialist and a full time environment specialist. The team
stands a good chance of producing a better paper and finishing in fewer personhours than the lone author. Thus, the grid is redundant: a team of the best and the
brightest for each country and for each topic, plus a nice coffee stand where then
can all interact, may be sufficient, and can run with a fraction of the managerial
overhead.
What do the best minds in academia want? [And let me make very clear that I
am decidedly not referring to myself.] First, they want to feel that their work will
actually go somewhere. Everybody understands that things go slowly and nobody’s
recommendations are magically implemented a week later. But it is disheartening
to know that your careful and interesting work will be reduced to the politically
least offensive denominator. For a report to be interesting to one’s academic peers,
it has to say something.
For Bank contractors, much of the pay is in the form of carrot-dangling about
how maybe one day you’ll have a real job at the Bank and at the least you’ll have a
recognized name on the resume, both of which are premia that only a recent gradu-
222
CHAPTER 8. BRETTON WOODS
ate could love. The incentives to advance for the full-time employees are primarily
about being able to control more money. The World Bank has no advancement path
of any sort for a person who has experience and knowledge regarding poverty and
economics.
Since there is no means of retaining those who are interested and capable regarding the intellectual challenge of fighting poverty, such people are guaranteed
that the Bank will be an unpleasant place for them, and if they want a community
of people thinking about poverty, they are better off elsewhere. The Bank could be
the focal point where the smartest people in the world meet to tackle the world’s
hardest problem, but instead it is a house of bureaucracy, hiring lowest-bidder contractors to provide management solutions to the government officials who are its
clients.
8.8
Democracy vs effectiveness
12 June 2006
Democracy and talent are fundamentally at odds. You want to be able to rotate
people every few years if The People should decide that they want to shift left or
right, but your bureaucracy is most effective when its members have time to gain
years or decades of continuous experience. The bureaumetricians have observed
this problem forever; I’m pretty sure Niskanen wrote about this in the early 70s.
[ [Don’t ever say your field is boring until you’ve spent time in bureaumetrics—the statistical
study of bureaucracy. I know only one guy who works on this full time, whose actual real-life name
is Dr. Dull. Not to kill the joke, but he’s a really fun guy and his work is kind of interesting.]]
The number of people who can be successful managers in a technical discipline
are few, because you’re looking at the intersection of people in the technical field
and people who have the skills to be managers. If you cut that list in half by
only looking at people who are on the right or left, then you have a fifty-fifty
chance of losing the most qualified individual. The person who has been on the
job for a decade is pretty likely to be the most qualified, because they were about
right for the job a decade ago, and now they have ten years’ experience, so if we
switch bureaucrats every time the regime changes we’re paying a heavy cost in
administrative effectiveness for the sake of democratic whim.
Resolving technical issues democratically
Worse is the case of the exceptionally technical fields. The People do not know a
thing about welfare shifts from derivative securities regulation, or battlefield logistics, or the multiplier effect of the interest rate at the open market window.
8.8. DEMOCRACY VS EFFECTIVENESS
223
The optimists tell us that for even the most technical discussion, somebody
will be able to summarize it for readers with a ninth-grade education so that they
can collectively aggregate their opinions to the wisest choice. The majority of
The People will ferret out the truth through the authors’ flowery writing style and
argumentation tricks and select the right option, and then the elected politicians
will listen to the majority opinion and successfully communicate the opinion to the
technical bureaucrats who were having the original debate.
Majority rule is great because it decentralizes power better than most any other
system short of just drawing straws, but there’s nothing about it that makes it an
effective means of detangling technical issues. There’s the Iowa presidential futures market, that does a great job of aggregating a semi-majority opinion of how
the majority will vote. There are the standard stock markets, which do a great job
of aggregating information about how people will value a stock into a stock value.
But the majority of voters are homophobes who would rather get a cut in their
property taxes than fund their kids’ schools, and the majority in the marketplace
just wants more porn and SUVs.
The majority (by vote or dollar) has a lot going for it, but the claim that it
makes wise choices is based more on faith than on fact. Some pro-market types
define away the problem, by assuming that if the market wants something, it must
be wise; this is 100% equivalent to somebody who says that we don’t understand
everything that the Good Lord does, but it must always be good. [It also makes a
certain assumption about Benthamic additive utilities that nobody actually believes.]
Academia is incredibly political, but it’s not a Democracy. Debates transpire
between the handful of few people who have devoted their lives to minutiæ like
supermodularity in production functions, and everybody else gets to hang on the
sidelines and watch (while they have their own debates about other issues). You
won’t find many academics who think we should switch to a system where technical debates are resolved by a majority vote among the vaguely-informed.
Producing accountability
OK, so the technicians should be left to do math and administer bureaucracy as best
they know how, without the uninformed masses telling them that their models need
to take into account the immorality of the homosexual lifestyle. On the other hand,
none of us want public policy handed down from a black box in the sky, because
we know that the people in that black box have their own biases. Sometimes,
the eggheads have ideas that don’t sit so well with the rest of us on an ethical
level that we lay-idiots can readily evaluate. So how do we get the good parts of
accountability without the negative effects of political meddling?
224
CHAPTER 8. BRETTON WOODS
Examples
There’s no easy formula for balancing the need for accountability with the need
for apolitical and clear-headed analysis, but some organizations are clearly doing a
better job of it than others.
The Fed The Federal Reserve has a whole lot of really smart people who write
models that you will never see, but which affect your life. The Fed desperately
needs to retain those people, and as far as I understand it, it does.
Mr. DF of Bozeman, MT, pointed out to me that the Fed does so well because
it insulates its eggheads from politics. He reports that there is a whole layer of
management whose job is to keep the politicians happy without revealing anything
about what the modelers are doing.
Now, the Fed has a few features that allow it to maintain its secrecy. It is
semiautonomous by design, and when it’s short on cash it just prints bonds. The
system is thus built so that a politically incorrect model won’t cause budget cuts.
Further, there’s the simple justification that if the models were public, people could
plan accordingly, thus frustrating some of the Fed’s attempts at control.
Joel the Guru opines that the sole role of management in a tech firm is to insulate the talent from the mess of politics and money issues and customer complaints,
while still keeping those customers happy. The strategy of the Fed’s management
is very similar: mollify the politicians while keeping their influence on the models
minimal.
The Department of Defense Like the Fed, the DoD does a lot of things about
which The Enemy must not be informed, and which is too technical for the average
person to really understand. It is basically the only department of the federal government that actually does anything besides printing forms and allocating funds,
and it sure ain’t run like a Democracy.
In this case, the big questions are presented to The People: e.g., should we invade Iraq, and given that we ignored the majority rule and invaded anyway, should
we stay or go. The detailed questions about tactics and logistics and strategy are
basically nondemocratic and in most cases classified.
I’m reserving judgment about whether this is an effective or correct means of
doing things, but there’s the DoD strategy: let the broad policy strokes be public
and insulate all details of implementation.
The DHS Now let’s have a look at last week’s DHS funding reallocation. Under
secretary Foresman assures us that ”Political considerations play no part in the
allocation process – none whatsoever. And I’m unequivocal on that.” It sounds
8.8. DEMOCRACY VS EFFECTIVENESS
225
like there was a reasonably academic process involved, even including 2 X 2 grids,
but I don’t know what political haggling went in to the design of the nice, scientific
allocation process. There were set criteria written down before the meeting, but did
those criteria favor some places over others? E.g., perhaps less focus was placed on
the iconic targets that are all over NYC and DC but not so common in Nebraska.
There are a few frustrated economists shaking their heads at all of it (I’ve met
them), bothered that their perfectly good research doesn’t affect anything because
others who were better at politicking got there first.
In short, the DHS has no insulation, and politically unpopular modeling will get
you defunded. The DHS management that I’ve met is not entirely happy with this,
and would rather be working on increasing security than increasing the perception
of security, but the design of the system, rooted directly under the President, means
that it will be an uphill battle to create that insulation. The fact that certain agencies
keep doing unethical things in secret doesn’t help.
The World Bank My last entry went into detail about the World Bank, where
a bunch of managers oversee research assistants who gather semirelevant research
done elsewhere. The Bank’s operations gain little respect from academics, and The
People don’t much like them either, so they’re a worst-case situation.
In the context here, the modelers are in no way insulated from the politicians.
Every Bank report gets handed to a politician somewhere, and the politician then
decides whether his or her country will continue funding the Bank. An analyst
can get fired for writing a politically incorrect model. The Bank’s managers seem
very OK with this setup, and in my opinion many even embrace it. But indeed,
the embrace of politically-driven analysis leads to the sort of worst-case issues I’ve
discussed, where neither The People nor the academics trust the output. But it is
well-funded.
The UN, by the way, would probably fall into this class too, and nobody likes
them either.
To the extent that I have any conclusion, it is this: the Bank and DHS and UN
don’t have to be this way. If the Bank’s operations departments were able to retain
good economists trained in modern methods (and right now they can’t), the the
role of management in this would not be to oversee RAs and generate half-baked
research, but to insulate the real producers from the politics and ensure that they
keep getting funded. In such a world, there would be less management than before,
and the balance of power would shift in favor of the analysts and away from the
politicians (because it can’t shift any more toward the politicians).
9
S TATS
9.1
Why macroeconomics sucks
6 October 2008
[Or more specifically, why time series analyses are not to be trusted.]
I’ve often mentioned here that time series analyses need to be eyed with great
suspicion. Here, I give a detailed explanation why.
How it’s supposed to work:
• Write down a model of how variables influence each other.
• Then, gather data to test the model, using a limited number of facts we know
about the world (primarily central limit theorems).
• To test, estimate parameters in the model; the facts about the real world give
us some idea of the likelihood that the parameter we care about is not zero.
The worst macro models and time series screw up every single step in the above
chain—sometimes many times over.
Write down a model There are more data points than any of us could possibly
count. However, there are only so many causal stories that we humans have been
able to write down. Given a time series to explain, like GDP, and a hundred completely random variables, like sales of Barbies, beats-per-minute of Billboard’s #1
song, Pantone numbers for the colors on Ikea’s catalog, you are guaranteed with
near-certainty that at least one of those variables has a strongly significant correlation with the variable to be explained. Here, apophenia kicks in, and after you’ve
seen that BPM and GDP are correlated, you’ll have no problem inventing a model
for it.
In short, the model has to come first, and has to be a serious attempt at explaining the world. But you knew that.
226
9.1. WHY MACROECONOMICS SUCKS
227
[There’s also the problem that it is very difficult to write down a model for which there isn’t
another model with the causation the other way ‘round. Timing won’t necessarily save us: Christmas
card sales cause Christmas, as the saying goes. But that’s another deeper problem.]
No, really, write down a model Now, one problem with real data is that everything moves at once. Thus, as soon as you say ‘A causes B’, somebody will
brusquely interject that no, C causes B, and A is just a bystander in it all. Therefore, macroeconomic papers often control for ‘the usual variables’.
Reapplying the principle from the last section, don’t write down a regression
without a model to back it up—and having a model to back up half of it is as bad
as having no model at all.
You no doubt felt that the section about how having a model is important is
self-evident, and most serious macro papers will start off with a good model. But
the statistics with which the model is estimated will almost always include spare
variables which aren’t in the model. With micro papers, it’s a mixed bag; with
macro papers, this is the norm.
Without a model to say anything about the extra variables, you’ve got a lot of
leeway to screw around. If C, D, and E don’t reshape B the way you want, try C
squared, log of D, and D times E (‘D interacted with E’, as the lingo goes. Used in
this manner, this term is meaningless. Does D times E appear in your model?). We
throw out the parameters estimated for these extra control variables, and some take
that to mean that we don’t have to bother with a model for them. That alibi is the
downfall of serious time series analysis, and covers a great deal of the empirical
macro literature.
Using facts about the world I used to think that stats is just an arbitrary list of
customs that we made up so we have common means of arbitrating our disputes.
But no, there are solid foundations to it.
Flip a coin a hundred times, write down the number of heads. Repeat the
hundred-flip procedure a few hundred times. You now have a list of numbers between zero and a hundred, and you can plot their frequency. Most of the numbers
you wrote down will be near fifty, and things will taper off as you get to the ends—a
bell curve.
By which I do not just mean a curve which
p is fat in the middle and wide at the
2
ends. I mean: p(x) = exp((x/50 − 1) )/ (π). This is the sort of precision we
need to be able to say that one thing differs from another with 95.28% certainty. In
fact, it’s the sort of thing we need to say anything at all, because we only have a
few coin flips, but we’re trying to say something about what would happen with an
indefinite number of future coin flips. Having a mathematical theorem about the
228
CHAPTER 9. STATS
probabilities in the limit means we don’t have to take guesses.
For many other processes, there are other very specific things we can say about
the resulting probability distribution. Statistics relies desperately on these few
tricks we have at our disposal, generally known as the Central Limit Theorems
(CLT). What do you do if the process you’ve modeled doesn’t fit the assumptions
of a CLT? Then you can’t say how confident you are that the value for A that you
drew differs from zero, because you don’t know the distribution of A down to a
square root of pi. If you draw another set of values for A, maybe it’ll be distributed
like the few that you’ve already drawn, but maybe it’ll be totally different.
For example, for many types of game, if you have two players repeating the
game a thousand times, the distribution of actions that player one took will have
nothing at all to do with the distribution of actions that player two took, because
the distributions are not independent—what player two does is directly related to
what player one does. Experimental game theorists know this, and set the unit of
one observation to be a whole run of the game. If you want enough data, don’t
have a hundred people play the game together and call it a hundred data points, but
run the entire experiment with all new people a hundred times.
Back to time series. The model claims that the variable of interest is related to
the various other things we wrote down, plus or minus an error term each period.
As with the game playing above, the CLT will only apply when those error terms
are independent and identically distributed. Independent: the error last period had
nothing to do with the error this period; identically distributed: the distribution
we’re drawing the errors from doesn’t change with time.
For a time series, these assumptions are untenable. It is very difficult to invent
a story for what those error terms mean that reasonably fits the independence and
identical distribution assumption. [Yes, I know you allowed for different variances via the
var-covar matrix, but why am I supposed to believe you that the mean is constant or follows a linear
trend that you can soak up with the coefficient on date?]
What that means is that we can’t apply the central limit theorems unless we
make hefty assumptions about the world outside the model: everything in the world
can be reduced to one variable, whose mean is constant, or at best, whose mean
moves at a constant, linear step every period. That error is probably the mean of
a hundred variables, many of which are moving up with time and many of which
are moving down with time—no CLT on earth is going to tell you anything about
what that series of errors will look like (even though there are CLTs to say something about the mean of unordered and independent draws from a hundred outside
variables).
[OK, one last attempt at explaining it: for any variable you gather over a hundred periods,
I can find you a hundred other unrelated variables, somewhere, that sum up in some reasonable
linear combination to exactly the data series you gathered. In many lab or micro settings, this isn’t
9.2. MICRONUMEROSITY
229
the case, but it holds for the consistently-arranged variables of all macro time series studies. So
if you include the hundred variables which replicate your pet variable, your pet variable will lose
significance (especially since collinearity means your data matrix is now singular and (X 0 X)−1 .
blows up). So you exclude the hundred variables—but now your error term is based on a process
which is heavily influenced by your variable, and IID goes up in flames again. Darned if ya do, darned
if ya don’t, and there’s no mathematical formula to tell you how to select variables for inclusion or
exclusion, so it’s a crap shoot, which means the parameter estimates you get are a crap shoot. The
sane thing to do would be to use the model, but the model doesn’t mention but a few variables, and
the other typical time-seriesesque variables just get included by fiat or custom.]
Sure, it happens often enough that the error term really is well behaved, and
everything that isn’t in the model has a neutral effect. It is often true here in the
real world that A does cause B. But most statistical analyses in macroeconomic and
time series studies do little or nothing to help ferret that out, because they need to
make a dozen arbitrary outside-the-model assumptions for the statistical test of the
model to work out. Without backing up the assumptions in mathematical results,
they are as up for question as the model itself. Yeah, sometimes it’s OK to fudge
the assumptions (which are never 100% true to begin with), but it’s nice to at least
pretend to take them seriously.
Policy implications Be Bayesian. When the paper says ‘Therefore, the coefficient on A is significant with 99.99986% certainty’, read that to mean ‘there’s one
more piece of evidence that there might be something special about A.’ With a
hundred of ‘em, we can maybe start believing that A really is special. But any one
time series, no matter the R2 or the number of stars by the coefficients, can only
provide a limited amount of evidence, because unless it is done right, it flaunts too
many of the fundamental assumptions underlying statistics.
9.2
Micronumerosity
14 June 2007
Today’s subject is two studies of money and its relation to medical efficacy.
Both found no relation, but this non-finding may be suspect.
The first, found via this blog1 , explains that doctors aren’t nearly as effective as
one would hope. His key citation is this early ‘80s study by RAND Corp2 (PDF).
1
http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2007/06/10/
the-twilight-of-expertise-part-2/
2
http://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R3055/
230
CHAPTER 9. STATS
[I actually posted much of the below as a comment on the blog, but the guy has on one of those ‘I
will post only comments that agree with me’ filters on the blog.]
The second, found via the New York Times3 , is this study of PA cardiac surgeons4 (PDF).
The RAND study followed several thousand people over almost a decade. It
paid for the health care of some of them, and those people naturally visited the
doctor (statistically) significantly more than the control group who had to pay for
their own health care.
However, the study did not find a statistically significant difference in many
standard measures of health, such as death rate, between those who received paid
health care and those who purchased their own. We conclude, therefore, that public
subsidies for healthcare is stupid and people should fend for themselves.
The NY Times interpretation of the PA study went along the same lines: it
looked at what insurance companies were paying for health care at each of two
dozen hospitals, and the success rate of those hospitals. Again, it found little difference in the death rates from one hospital to the next.
Catastrophic events Having spent a reasonable amount of time with both studies, I encourage the reader interested in the running gag that is US health care
finance to look at both reports. That said, there’s a problem with the statistics: The
studies aren’t very powerful.
Most major medical events, death included, are catastrophic events, in the formal sense that they happen very infrequently but are a big deal when they happen. Colloquial catastrophes, like earthquakes, are also catastropic in the statistical
sense. Doing stats on catastrophic events is difficult, due to the difficulty of gathering enough observations. Our guest blogger from a few episodes ago5 has often
pointed out to me that the ocean is very clumpy, and is therefore impossible to
sample. Either you’ll get the 99.9% dead spots where nothing is going on, or the
0.1% where a huge menagerie of critters are collectively following the currents and
feeding off of each other.
[When I first arrived in DC, I was lounging in a coffee shop attempting to keep myself occupied,
when a TV crew came in, looking for man-on-the-street interviews. The interviewer showed me
a paper with a news release about terrorism futures, for about, oh, three seconds tops, which was
long enough to read the single highligted line about TERRORISM FUTURES. The videotape rolled,
the mic was shoved in my face, and I was supposed to say, ‘I am apalled!!!’. But they got an
3
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/health/14insure.html?ex=
1339473600&en=3b83aad4ce8bdb79&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
4
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/business/20070614_
INSURE.pdf
5
http://fluff.info/blog/arch/00000214.htm
9.2. MICRONUMEROSITY
231
unlucky draw; instead I said something like, ‘I just got my PhD from a major research institution—
the department that had a hand in the development of markets like these, even—and these markets do
a wondeful job of aggregating information. However, terrorist events themselves—not to be confused
with ancillary events around terrorism—are catastrophic events, and so it’s very difficult to aggregate
information about them.’ What else could I say? I didn’t bother to see if I showed up on TV that
night.]
Table four in the RAND study states that the range in deaths over the various
treatments was from 0.9% to 1.1%, for a total of forty deaths in the entire study.
So bear with me here (or if you’re wimpy, skip to the boldface difference below): assume a binomial distribution, and a true rate of death for those paying for
health care of 1%. In order for us to reject the null hypothesis at a p=0.01 level,
the 2000-member test group would need to see under ten deaths, or a death rate of
under 0.5%. A halving of the death rate is what most of us would call ‘miraculous’.
Now let’s say we had 2 million people in the test group instead of two thousand.
Then we could reject the null hypothesis at the 1% level if, instead of observing
the 20,000 deaths expected, we observe only about 19,680—a death rate of 0.98%.
A 0.02% drop in death rate is beginning to look like something that could actually
happen, and it would be both socially and statistically significant at this scale.
The difference is what statisticians call power. How much true difference does
there need to be between one group and another before the test is able to actually
detect that difference? To give a physical metaphor, some people have crappy
vision and can’t distinguish letters from a distance; others have powerful vision
and can easily tell the difference. With catastrophic events, we’re trying to read
very faint lines, and so we need to gather lots of data to reasonably detect them and
say that the control’s line is definitely different from the case’s line.
The RAND test is low-power because one rate has to be fully half the other
before it can state a difference with confidence. The PA data is also low-power for
the same reason. I leave the stats as an exercise to the reader, but the number of
surgeries is around 20,000, and the rate of various measures of success for various
procedures range from 1.9% for death rate to 19% for readmission (reading from
page one of the study). This means that the power will be better than RAND’s, but
still not incredibly good. The PA study includes no regressions or hypothesis tests,
which one could argue that they were right to do.
Interpreting a low-power study So what are we to make of a study that gathered
data, but did not gather enough data to state anything with statistical significance?
Well, we’re back to eyeballing it and using our intuition. For more money you get
a longer hospital stay; people who get free health care see the doctor more; people
like to overcharge insurance companies. These things make sense, so when we see
232
CHAPTER 9. STATS
that there is no evidence against these intuitive statements, then I suppose we can
bolster our belief a bit. But then there are things that are counter to intuition, like
how health care is irrelevant to human health, or additional services are completely
useless, which seem a bit counterintuitive. [Got cancer? Walk it off.]
There seems to be a popular belief that studies are standalone events that conclusively prove or disprove; newspapers are happy to push this perception because ’a recent study proved a sexy fact’ sounds a lot better than ’a recent study
marginally raised our subjective belief regarding a certain sexy fact’. But that’s
what a single study does: it marginally raises or lowers our confidence in the truth
of a statement. I’ve already discussed this extensively in the context of creationism6 . A study that has low power certainly contributes less to the debate than a
powerful study would, but it is still data that we can scrutinize, in conjunction with
all the other data that we have about the issue.
9.3
Still just parametrized models
2 July 2008
You will recognize Wired as a heavy-paper glossy magazine, owned by the
same company (Condé Nast) that owns Ars Technica, Glamour, Modern Bride,
Teen Vogue, and Bon Apétit.
A few months ago, it ran an issue whose cover story claimed that everything
you knew about environmentalism is wrong, and you should do contrarian things
like buying a rugged SUV instead of a hybrid, live somewhere where you’ll run
your air conditioning 24/7, and so on. A7 great8 many9 people10 commented on
how ill-founded the recommendations were.
However, there were at least a few points that were kinda true: it is generally
ecologically cheaper to run the air conditioning than the heater, but there are many
places and many houses where you don’t have to run either. My brother lives in San
Diego and just runs a fan from time to time. San Diego sprawls, but he shouldn’t
buy a hybrid to get around—he should buy a bike.
This month’s issue vends paper via the same revolutionary formula as the
6
http://fluff.info/blog/arch/00000159.htm
http://putative.typepad.com/putative/2008/06/everything-you.
html
8
http://thinkprogress.org/wonkroom/2008/06/07/
wired-ignorant-libertarianism/
9
http://www.fluffybunnybutts.com/2008/05/wired-sells-out-to-monsanto.
html
10
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/5/20/15537/7410
7
9.3. STILL JUST PARAMETRIZED MODELS
233
antienvironmentalist issue, but gets none of it right at all. In fact, its own examples
sometimes support the opposite conclusion. I’m writing a response, despite the
don’t feed the trolls rule, because the authors are actually making very common
mistakes, which have been made repeatedly over the last several decades, so this is
a springboard to discuss a few other scientific revolutions that didn’t happen.
This month’s declaration: The End of Science11 (!!). The guy who wrote about
the End of History was maybe right for a year or two—The Lull in History(!!). But
Wired’s scientific revolution doesn’t have half as much going for it. Frankly, the
other Condé Nast publications better maintain credibility by just offering 15 NEW
HAIR AND SEX TIPS every month.
The basic claim is that having petabytes of data is fundamentally different from
having smaller amounts, to the point that the traditional method of developing and
testing a model is somehow no longer relevant. In the words of the lead essay12 ,
“Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent
models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.”
Rather than reading Wired directly, I recommend that you instead read KK’s
response to Wired13 , which is much more coherent, although still a bit hyperbolic.
It uses the word pioneer.
Some examples Back to Wired, it presents a long series of examples where people develop and test models using large data sets. I could write a paragraph about
how every last one misses the mark, but I’ll just give you three that should give you
a sense of how inquiry, data, and models interact and how that differs from the End
of Science story.
What they’re trying to say above is that we can program our computers to
just suck in data and spit out correlations, and that has meaning, and is outside of
models. More or less: we give it data, and the computer thinks for us and draws
conclusions that are true but beyond our comprehension.
We’ll start with an example to show you what we’re not talking about:
The best practical example of this is the shotgun gene sequencing by
J. Craig Venter. Enabled by high-speed sequencers and supercomputers that statistically analyze the data they produce, Venter went from
sequencing individual organisms to sequencing entire ecosystems. In
11
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_
intro
12
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_
theory
13
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/06/the_google_way.
php
234
CHAPTER 9. STATS
2003, he started sequencing much of the ocean, retracing the voyage
of Captain Cook. And in 2005 he started sequencing the air. In the
process, he discovered thousands of previously unknown species of
bacteria and other life-forms.
You can ask Wikipedia about shotgun sequencing, and it’ll tell you that it is
based on the same genetic model everybody else is using, but uses a novel random
component to gather a lot more data a lot faster than prior methods could. That is,
this is the type of science we call gathering data. Where and how to look has always
been advised by some human-sensical story, and observers have always striven to
let the machinery work and not judge the data while gathering it.
No naturalist feels the need to prove the causal mechanism underlying a new
frog before declaring the new frog’s existence, so this says nothing about the rise
or fall of causal mechanisms. But it is certainly true that methods like these are
giving us an order of magnitude more data. We want less restrictive models that
will let these reams of data speak for themselves as much as possible.
So let’s move on to what happens after the data is gathered: taking action or
deriving meaning from data. Any action by Google is taken by tech enthusiasts as
divine, so it is naturally a key example (or three):
Google’s founding philosophy is that we don’t know why this page is
better than that one: If [sic] the statistics of incoming links say it is,
that’s good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required. [...]
This makes two statements: Google doesn’t primarily rank quality via content
analysis (i.e., computer-reading the page and evaluating the relevance or quality of
the words on the page), but it does uses a simple, human-comprehensible model
relating page relevance to incoming links. That is, it doesn’t use a literal content
model, but it does use another link-based model. We’ll see this pattern of passing
on one model for a ‘looser’ model a few times more below. Google’s page ranking
model even has an underlying causal story, that high quality content causes people
to link to the page.
One last example, from this page14 , about political micro-targeting. I conclude
with this one because it’s the only one Wired gets right.
As databases grow, fed by more than 450 commercially and privately
available data layers as well as firsthand info collected by the campaigns, candidates are able to target voters from ever-smaller niches.
Not just blue-collar white males, but married, home-owning white
14
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_vote
9.3. STILL JUST PARAMETRIZED MODELS
235
males with a high school diploma and a gun in the household. Not just
Indian Americans, but Indian Americans earning more than $80,000
who recently registered to vote.
This is known as “data mining,” and has its formal origins probably thirty years
ago, or so. Being from the pre-Wired dark ages, it is very model-dependent: claiming that elements of the data set are correlated to each other is a model, and searching for the best correlation is a series of model tests, often done using the traditional
hypothesis tests they forced you to learn in undergrad stats. Your typical data mining textbook includes lots of other models, including overlapping categories, trees,
separating hyperplanes, and other very structured forms.
To clarify, think of what a model-free search would really consist of. Think
of all the ways that our politicos could handle this data: they could look for the
political preferences of people with blood type AB positive, or the product of age
cubed times the cube root of sushi consumption for women or the 3.2nd root of
sushi consumption for men, or the preferences of people whose house number starts
with a 4. Rest assured, they ain’t wasting any processor time testing the 3.2nd root
of anything, even though it would be as valid to the computer as any other list of
numbers. Instead, they set a framework such as a hierarchy of characteristics, and
set the computer to find the best such hierarchy.
[Wired gives an example of data mining airline prices. There was a period where airlines sent
signals for the purposes of colluding on prices using the cents part of a price, so there really was a
pattern among tickets whose price has a four in the dimes place (or whatever). I have no idea how
that pattern was spotted. U.S. ticket prices are now in whole dollar amounts by law.]
The pattern in the data People marketing products such as toothpaste or politicians love data mining. After all, it’s a results-oriented system that only asks how
many people purchase the product, not why. Thus, it’s perfect for non-causally oriented analysis, and has been for decades before Wired declared it to be a paradigm
shift. But every data mining textbook is heavy on causal models. This is not a
contradiction: the model is just not where you expect it to be.
Or, consider the field of ‘nonparametric statistics’. By that, we mean writing
down models that aren’t the one- or two-parameter models you get in the back
of stats textbooks (Normal, Poisson, Binomial, . . . ). Instead, a typical procedure
defines a bar chart with maybe a hundred segments, and then estimates the heights
of all 100 bars. Great, so this ‘nonparametric’ method has a hundred parameters to
fit instead of two.
All of the examples here have a similar flavor: we don’t specify a tight model
with only a few parameters, but instead a loose model which may need a million
236
CHAPTER 9. STATS
little parts to be specified: instead of a broad regression on a few variables, calculate a different value from scratch for every web page, or every combination of
age/race/gender. But that doesn’t mean there’s no model, or that you’ve somehow
escaped the paradigm of describing a human-sensible model and then asking the
computer to fill in parameters from the data. [Also, it doesn’t save you from the problem
that you can fit a loose enough model to any garbage—more on this next time.]
Or consider the case of agent-based modeling, which is a hair’s breadth from
simple simulation. This was trendy in the 1980s because of the new study of chaos
and all the resultant poster and calendar sales. All the rules of the agents in the
simulation or the steps in your chaos model are all very simple and easy to understand, but there’s no way to know what it will do in the end but to follow the
iterations of the model to their computer-calculated conclusion. We can now repeat
everything stated above: the outcome is beyond small-scale parametrization, and
causal mechanisms are hard to come by (otherwise we wouldn’t need to follow the
simulation along, but could predict the outcome). But on another level, it’s still
just a model: simple rules and typically a set of parameters that can be tweaked as
desired.
For all of agent-based modeling, chaos theory, nonparametric stats, and whatever the fuck Wired is talking about, some proponents trumpet how their new
method is outside of the parametrized small-scale model that we had been contending with since the advent of modern science. But upon further inspection, we
find a framework of assumptions that is really just a model pushed behind the curtain, and we find that the final goals of the data search are a set of numbers or
relations, which is another way of saying parameters.
One retort is that the framework underlying the computer’s search for parameters for a regression model is a model, but the framework underlying the computer’s
search for parameters in these complicated systems is a meta-model, or just a set
of rules, or a constraint set, or some other means of avoiding the word model. But
this is semantics. When we sit down to the computer to fit the old-school models
to data or fit the broad meta-heuristic-constraints to data, we do exactly the same
thing, albeit with more or less typing.
I was heavily involved in the writing of a book on computational methods for
models like these15 , aimed at treating a range of models as broad as that described
here. It opens by declaring that its goal is to estimate the parameters of a model
with data. Save perhaps for the pure data-gathering exercise, that phrase describes
every example here. In every case, we’re assigning a human structure with a finite
number of levers, and relegating the computer to finding how to best position the
levers. You can ask (and may benefit from asking) the same questions of any study:
15
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8706.html
9.4. THE TWO SIDES OF THE STATISTICAL WAR
237
what is the underlying framework, and its underlying causal story? What parameters are being tweaked and/or output? How do you know when the parameters are
good so you can stop searching?
From a philosophy of science perspective, nothing seriously new is happening,
save for an increasing trust when the machine gives us a million parameters instead
of two. From a practical perspective, the engineering advances are clearly incremental: a question of distributing computation among PCs, managing databases,
and finding ways for us humans to comprehend and take action on all that computer
output.
9.4
The two sides of the statistical war
6 August 2008
There is a little war in the statistical world. Like other little wars, like Mac vs
PC or Ford versus Chevy or Protestant versus Catholic, everybody who isn’t on one
of the teams has no idea how to differentiate between the two sides. Also, there is
no resolution to the central question.
Tukey [1977, pp 1–2] gives a metaphor of the detective and the judge. The
detective gathers all the evidence he can, regardless of whether the evidence will
be admissible in court or whether it proves guilt or innocence. He just compiles
a thick a notebook as possible and worries about sorting it out later. The judge
does the sorting. She is bound by law to ignore some evidence, and is comfortable
ignoring most of the detective’s notebook as irrelevant to the final, narrow question
before the court.
Data-oriented inquiry has a very similar division, of descriptive modeling and
hypothesis testing. The descriptive modeling step simply gathers information and
puts it into a human-comprehensible format. The hypothesis test uses the strict
laws that you forgot from statistics class to make a more objective statistical claim.
In the last episode (p
There are two steps to take from there, one of which (developing a causal link)
I won’t talk about until next time. The main step is the hypothesis test, wherein
you come up with some means of verifying the claim that the relationship you just
found is what you claimed it was.
We need those extra steps because correlations could be sheer coincidence,
meaning that they may reflect a true statement about the data at hand, but we
shouldn’t rely on them next week, or claim that there is some causal story that
made that correlation happen. Stupid coincidences happen all the time and are
easy to manufacture.
238
CHAPTER 9. STATS
The problem with all our wonderful technology, however, is that as the power
of your relation-searching machinery goes up, the power of your hypothesis testing
diminishes. Here are two questions:
• Randomly draw a person from the U.S. population. What are the odds that
that person makes more than $1m?
• Randomly draw 350 million people from the U.S. population. What are the
odds that that wealthiest person in your list makes more than $1m?
The odds in the second case will be much higher, because we took pains in that
one to pick the wealthiest person we could. [That is, the first is a hypothesis about just data,
the second is a hypothesis about an order statistic of data.]
Now say that you have a list of variables before you.
• Claim based on intuition that A is correlated to B1 . What are the odds that
your claim is OK with more than 95% odds?
• Write down the best correlation between A and B1 , B2 , . . . , B1,000,000 . What
are the odds that your best correlation is OK with more than 95% odds?
With a big enough list of variables, you are guaranteed to find a correlation (or
any other model) that passes any hypothesis test you want.
You’ve read stories like this before: researcher inspects the data very carefully,
eventually stumbles upon a relationship that works, thinks about how it makes
sense that those two variables are related, and then publishes. With luck, it’s something quirky enough to get into the NYT, Economist, or any other pop science
outlet that happily reports one-off, unreplicated studies about how a crazy and unexpected variable has an important effect on the things we care about.
And that’s the core of the conflict. The descriptive camp points out that it
can develop badass means of testing a thousand hypotheses, and the hypothesis
testing camp points out that once they do that and pick the best correlation out of a
thousand, all the hypothesis tests are basically invalid until modifications are made
that the descriptive kids won’t bother to make.
There are a few ways by which we can have too many hypotheses. The simplest
is to just have a systematic list of a few million possibilities in need of testing. If
we can get a million genetic markers from a drop of blood, which we can do, then
we need to correct for that as we run a million hypothesis tests. People usually do
the corrections in this case.
Before moving on to the real disasters, let me note that some people reject the
discussion to this point. If variables A and B2891 are truly and honestly correlated,
then that fact is true no matter whether we ran exactly one test or ran a million.
There is no Heisenberg weirdness here: observing the correlations does not change
them.
However, our tests and how we interpret them are changing. A hypothesis test
makes sense only in a given environment, and that environment has to include the
9.4. THE TWO SIDES OF THE STATISTICAL WAR
239
data, how the data was gathered, cleaned, and pre-inspected, and what other tests
are being run at the same time. In the cookbook-format manual, none of this gets
mentioned: the recipe calls for a list of numbers, mashed into a certain statistic,
compared to a certain table, and you’re done. But once a human observer comes
along, you’re already out of the textbook.
But the people who don’t quite get the concept of the multiple testing problem
don’t get much cred. It’s subtle and easy to get wrong, but people eventually work
it out. If you write a loop to run every regression of a list of twenty variables
against some outcome (usually GDP or some overall productivity number), then
you are guaranteed to find an excellent fit to your data, and you will have no proof
that what you found is any good, and nobody will respect you.
No, that’s not where the debate lies.
Eyeballing multiple testing Here’s another way to get too many hypotheses:
given a list of twenty variables, you can produce what is called a TrellisTM or
lattice plot, which gives a 2-D dot plot of every variable against every other. It’s
not hard to put plots for twenty variables on a screen, and then scan to find the pair
whose line is sharpest and shows the best correlation. Congratulations, you’ve just
run 20 × 19 = 380 hypothesis tests. When tested more formally, the correlation
you just spotted is almost guaranteed to hold, even if your data is pure noise. Or
you can try any of a multitude of other visualizations that will similarly allow you
to see hundreds of relations at once.
The DataViz field is trendy right now. There are a few icons of the field who
are working hard on self-promotion, such as Edward Tufte, whose books show
how graphs can be cleaned up, chartjunk eliminated, and grainy black and white
fliers from the 1970s cleaned up through the use of finely detailed illustrations in
full color. John Tukey’s Exploratory Data Analysis (cited above) is aggressively
quirky, and encourages disdain for the hypothesis testing school.
These guys, and their followers, are right that we could do a whole lot better
with our data visualizations, and that the stuff based on facilitating fitting the line
with a straightedge should have been purged at least twenty years ago.
The underlying philosophy, however, is humanist to a fault. The claim is that
the human brain is the best data-processor out there, and our computers still can’t
see a relationship among a blob of dots as quickly as our eye/brain combo can.
This is true, and a fine justification for better graphical data presentation. And hey,
we humans would all rather look at plots than at tables of numbers.
But the argument forgets that humans are so good at seeing relationships among
blobs of dots that we often see patterns in static (there’s a word for this tendency:
apophenia). We look at clouds and see bunnies, or read the horoscope and think
240
CHAPTER 9. STATS
Figure 9.1: If you don’t see faces, you’re crazy. Oh, and there’s a penis and vagina
in every inkblot too.
9.4. THE TWO SIDES OF THE STATISTICAL WAR
241
that it’s talking directly to us, or listen to a Beatles song about playground equipment and think it’s telling us to kill people. Given ten scatterplots, you will find
a pattern—in fact, if a psychologist were to show you a series of ten seemingly
random inkblots16 and you didn’t see a reasonable number of patterns in them, the
psychologist might consider you to be mentally unhealthy in any of a number of
ways.
Better data visualization doesn’t address the problem of apophenia. In fact,
following Tukey’s lead, the people who focus on clean testing are characterized as
not seeing the value of all these full-color diagrams. They’re wearing blinders for
the sake of being good Boy Scouts and not seeing the trees and grass and chirping
birds around them. Conversely, the testing people generally see little value in all
these full-color plots and want to go back to inferring things.
So this is the current battleground in the descriptive-versus-testing war. No side
can win—there are no tests for overtesting, so this is all just intuition and opinion.
We can write down in a cookbook that if your data-analysis model includes a series
of ten tests, you need to make such-and-such an order-statistic correction. But how
do you write into a textbook model framework that you surfed charts of the data
for forty-five minutes, including eight 3D plots and two TrellisTM diagrams?
Further, both sides are necessary, and both sides have valid points. So this is a
perfect recipe for sniping back and forth forever.
But overcharting (and defining what that means) is not where the true problem
lies.
The looming problem After all there is a middle ground, where a person comes
in with some idea of what the data will say, rather than waiting for the scatterplot
of Delphi to reveal it. Then the researcher refines the original idea in dialog with
the data. The closer something fits prior human beliefs, the more we are inclined
to accept it, so the researcher is not on a pure fishing expedition, but is not wearing
blinders to what the data has to say.
So one researcher could be reasonable—but what happens when there are thousands of reasonable researchers? When a relevant and expensive data set has been
released, a large number of people will look at it. I’ve been to an annual conference attended by about a hundred people built entirely around a single data set, and
who knows how many weren’t able to fly out. With so many humans looking at
the same set of numbers, every reasonable hypothesis will be tested. Even if every
person maintains the discipline of balancing data exploration against testing, we as
a collective do not.
Every person was careful to not test every option, so the order statistic problem
16
http://ar.geocities.com/test_de_rorschach/index.htm
242
CHAPTER 9. STATS
seemed to be dodged, but the environment is not just one researcher at a computer,
but thousands across the country, and collectively, a thousand hypothesis tests were
run, and journals are heavily inclined to publish only those that scored highly on
the tests. So it’s the multiple testing problem all over again, but in the context of the
hundreds or thousands of researchers around the planets studying the same topic.
Try putting that into a cookbook description of a test’s environment.
There’s no short-term solution to this one.
In the next episode, I’ll take this a little further.
9.5
Statistics as unbearable longing
26 August 2008
[ Introductory logistics: This is part two; see the beginning here (p
Statistics—by which I mean all of mathematical inquiry aimed at explaining
the real world, and sometimes even plain measurement—has fundamental failings
for its intended purpose of allowing us humans to better understand the world.
Picking up from last time, statistics can never prove. The real world is uncertain
and messy, but mathematics is pure and certain and unwavering. Mix the two
together, and what do you get? An uncertain mess.
Our language is inclined toward our desire to accept things as true. Statistical language makes at least a half-assed effort—maybe even a three-quarter–assed
effort—to retain skepticism at all times. A good and pedantic hypothesis test comes
up with two outcomes: reject or fail to reject. This seems appropriately skeptical,
and it means that if somebody is snooping around in the data beforehand, and inappropriately failed to reject, then it’s no big deal: we just learned nothing from
that experiment (in formal stats language, the test had insufficient power).
But this fine point breaks down at every opportunity, because we long for certainty, and statistics just won’t give it to us.
The first breakdown [and non-math–geeks are welcome to skip to the next paragraph] is
that the system is asymmetric regarding what should be symmetric hypotheses.
Given two variables, we typically wind up with H0 : the variables are equal, and
H1 : the variables are not equal. The above reject/fail-to-reject language typically
refers to H0 . Failing to reject H0 is appropriately indefinite, but rejecting H0 is
definite, not-squishy language stating that we know the variables are not equal,
because we reject the claim of equality. Since the reasearcher is probably trying
to show that the variables are different, the language is slightly skewed in favor of
the reasearcher. In an ideal world, perhaps we’d say that the test fails to reject and
fails to accept. Then when we fail to reject one hypothesis, we’re failing to accept
9.5. STATISTICS AS UNBEARABLE LONGING
243
the alternate, which has the same level of confidence on both sides.
The second problem is that even that little bit of legalese, fail to reject, is hard to
keep in place for long—it turns into accept even in many stats textbooks, especially
the ones with a ‘tude that tries to make statistics fun. And don’t expect the phrase
to ever appear in the newspaper: my brief search of the NYT turns up one oped making exactly the point I’m making here, one correct use of the phrase, and
assorted cruft. The longing for certainty is just too strong to let weak language
stand.
But there are benefits to accepting the weakness of statistics. If we bear in mind
that statistics can not prove, then my lament last time about how all our published
positive results are doomed to be too confident is not so bad. An article with a solid
result from a statistical test should simply slightly raise our confidence in whatever
they found. If the research was especially carefully conducted, then it will raise
our confidence a lot. Perhaps another article will come by next year that bolsters
our belief or cuts it down a bit.
So after incredibly tedious and careful mathematical contortions, the best result
we can get is that the human reader believes the claim a little bit more.
Some people are disappointed by the inability of mathematics to touch the core
of what we as humans want, and just reject the entire project. Forget all those
studies: they either tell us what we already know or are a pile of sophistry that will
be contradicted next week. That’s extreme. Our measurements are never perfect,
but we make them. We’re surrounded by black boxes that we’ll never be able to
crack open, and situations where we know any measurement will be imprecise.
Despite knowing that we’ll never be able to fully and truly understand anything,
we still try.
Correlation is not causation, but neither is anything else But to really make
our model good, we need to tell a story, almost invariably of the form A causes B.
Unfortunately, statistics has no concept of causality.
This is one of those philosophy of science things that you could expound on
forever, though I won’t go into it too deeply here. But the concept of causation
happens only inside the human brain. It’s not something we can measure, perhaps
with a causality ruler (or a more portable causality tape), and then write down that
A causes B with 3.2 causal units, but C causes B with 8.714 causal units. There
are intuitive ways to measure a causal claim, like saying that if A always comes
before B, then A causes B; in direct correspondence, there are easy ways to break
such a simple measure, like how Christmas card sales cause Christmas.
But people like stories. As kids, we’re taught how the world works via causal
stories, that were not just a list of incidents but were a chain of events. Because
244
CHAPTER 9. STATS
granny was ill, Ms Hood took her basket of food and went walking over the river
and through the woods; because the wolf was evil, he conspired to eat Ms Hood;
because Ms Hood was virtuous, she was saved. A story where a bunch of unconnected, seemingly random things happen is just not satisfying, and correlation
without causation is dissatisfying in exactly the same way.
You could take the basic intuition about how causality works and build machinery to draw causal flowcharts, which give a wealth of means to reject the flowchart;
look up structural equation modeling or read Perl [2000]. But apply the above rule
that statistics can never prove a model of the world: statistics can never prove a
causal model of the world—and this case is only worse because we’re not even entirely certain about how to measure or even identify causality. As with any model,
stats can bolster or cut down our confidence in the causal claim, but that’s where it
ends.
Of course, people fake it all the time. You will rarely if ever find a newspaper
article declaring a correlation without strongly implying (if not directly stating)
that the statistical model showed a causal link. Get your favorite researcher drunk
and he or she will stop talking about correlations and start talking about causation,
even though everybody in the room knows that it’s just a mathematical mirage.
There’s so much that we want to understand about our world and those around
us that we’ll never come close to. We’re just guessing at reality based on our
sadly limited information, and nothing makes that more evident and visceral than
statistics.
9.6
Causality and ethics
24 September 2008
There’s a platitude that it is ethics that distinguishes humans from the rest of
the natural world. In prior posts, you’ve seen me say that humans are distinguished
by their ability and tendency to perceive causal relationships. These two statements
are closely related: without causality, there can be no ethics.
Some causal chains are obvious, even to young children: if I drop a plate, then
it breaks. If I kick the dog, the dog will bite me. For those that are not so obvious,
you can help your child by laying it all out line by line. Here is Joe. Joe committed
a misdeed. As a result, Joe’s misdeed came back to him and he suffered. Here is
Jane. She committed a virtuous act, and as a result, she was rewarded for it. The
end.
Person does good, is rewarded; person does bad, is punished may sound simplistic, but it is the canonical format used by most of the stories we hear or see or
9.6. CAUSALITY AND ETHICS
245
read. The modern version of Little Red Riding Hood (as alluded to last time (p
These stories help us to move up the ladder of causal subtlety from mechanical
misdeeds like kicking the dog to societal issues like littering. Thus, causal stories
of the form virtue ⇒ reward and ill behavior ⇒ punishment are really central to
building a society.
[ It so happens that religious stories directly fit into the same structure: the omnipotent overseer
makes certain that good ⇒ reward and bad ⇒ punishment. Where no simple causal mechanism
exists, the omnipotent overseer defines one.]
The lit I think it’s so completely obvious that morality is taught through causal
chains that I don’t feel much compulsion to provide a host of references, but let me
give you one or two so you know I’m not entirely making this up.
First, we can point to Jean Piaget, an oft-cited pioneer in the academic study
of child development. Among others, he wrote many books on how children develop cause-and-effect relationships, and one entitled The Moral Development of
the Child (that has almost no discussion of causality). So this could be traced back
to Piaget’s writings circa 1930 if you were so inclined.
The intro pages to Karniol [1980] give a nice summary of the modern interpretation of Piaget’s moral stories, and examples of how kids sometimes take the
causal story to what we consider an absurd extreme (e.g., the boy stole the bike ⇒
the bridge collapsed). She also ran experiments on about 150 elementary school
children. They were read skeletal stories of the form Joe stole money. Later, Joe
fell down the stairs. or Jane lied. Later, Jane fell in a puddle. There were a range
of types of causality, including immanent causality (the result is because of something inside the person), asyndetic17 and/or mediated causality (it was the person’s
action, but mediated via another force), or chance causality (which is delightfully
not jargon). Chance causality explanations were basically the least popular, ranging in use among the five grades from 16 to 34 percent; mediated causality ranged
from 58 to 86 percent usage; immanent causality ranged from 23 to 47%.
That’s the first experiment; the final experiment, using only kids who’d given a
mediated causality response in the first experiments, and a story in which the kid in
the story gets struck by lightning, was able to induce a greater recourse to chance
causality among the listeners (70%). But the first two experiments (and another
story in the third experiment where the boy breaks his leg) still show that if there
is no causal story spelled out, the brain of the listener will probably invent one.
If you want more, Karniol gives a dozen or so other papers that come to similar
conclusions: even the youngest kids will see a link between a person’s actions and
the eventual outcome when there is a relationship to be had, and will invent one
17
Syndetic: Serving to unite or connect; connective, copulative.
246
CHAPTER 9. STATS
when there isn’t.
Variants of the story Now that the canonical story is ingrained in us, hard, there
are all sorts of variants that turn our causal expectations around. Some just make
for a better story, but others begin to show flaws in the system.
[The ending to Moby Dick was so gut-wrenching because it was so outside of the entire framework. I’m a bit amazed that it got published and sold well enough that we’ve heard of it, given how
much it bucks convention.]
Adult fiction is filled with what we call moral ambiguity, by which we mean
that the virtuous aren’t rewarded and the evil aren’t punished. This is not to be
confused with stories that create tension by allowing the bad guy to win halfway
through, getting the princess or the thousand pounds of gold boullion [both props
play the same rôle in the typical story]. In those half-win stories, tension comes from
our knowledge that the inevitable downfall will only be worse after the temporary
victory.
Many bookshelves have been filled with Dark Knight-type stories about characters of ambiguous virtue. But we humans have an easy solution for these stories:
if we are firmly wired to see virtue ⇒ reward, then we eventually start to see reward ⇒ virtue. In logic class, it’d be a blatant error to conclude the second relation
from the first, but we’re not talking about logic, we’re talking about how people
think.
If you’re an Objectivist, you learn that whatever it takes to gain reward is by
definition virtuous. If you follow other sorts of commerce-oriented ethical systems,
then you follow a similar but looser line. And as the cliché goes, might makes right.
In the other direction, I’ve heard more than enough people give me a line like ‘it’s
not illegal, so it’s not unethical’, which in this context means no punishment ⇒ not
evil.18
Or, it’s easy for both kids and adults to miss what the cause that led to the final
outcome. It’s downright cliché that the protagonist is attractive and the antagonist
ugly, from which we are taught that attractive ⇒ reward; ugly ⇒ punishment. [Add
this to the last paragraph, and we find that unattractive = evil, which I find really is how a lot of
people think.]
If the virtuous are always rewarded and the evil always punished, then anybody
who is being punished must be doing something wrong. If we see a person, or a
group of people (grouped by language, size of nose, or genitalia), and find that
they are doing worse than others, our brains work overtime to fill in the blank
18
It’s not as if I know what the True and Correct ethical system is, but an ethical system that
directly equates individual benefit with ethics is really just the state of nature calling itself ethics, and
a rejection of the idea that we humans can develop beyond biology.
9.7. STORY TELLING VERSUS PROGRESS
247
in the relation
⇒ punishment. E.g., if they hadn’t eaten from the Tree of
Knowledge of Good and Evil, they wouldn’t be worse off.
Now, all those stories are really just practice for what happens here in reality,
where we write our own stories. The non-fiction evening news is making a huge
effort to fulfill our expectations: the evil have to be punished, and (from time to
time) the virtuous have to be rewarded. As viewers, our expectations about how
the world should be are very high. If the assailant doesn’t go to jail, then we’re left
with the frustration of a story cut short just before the resolution. If their country
is evil, and our country is virtuous, then there is tension until we find a way to
bring about some sort of punishment for them, preferably in a manner that brings
rewards to our contractors.
And so we see a great deal of our legislative and interpersonal effort put into
making sure that rewards and punishments are eventually paid out, even though the
only real benefit may be the sense of resolution that comes from making the world
fit the stories we were told as kids.
We all have these virtue ⇒ reward and evil ⇒ punishment relations tatooed
to the inside of our foreheads. Our parents made sure of it, by teaching us ethical
causal stories at the same time that we were learning more mechanistic causal
stories. If they didn’t present us such stories, we’d just make up our own. But the
mechanical relationships like I drop the plate ⇒ the plate breaks are much more
robust than the relationship between nice behavior and reward, to the point that we
can easily invent unverifiable relationships, like how a pretty face and big muscles
implies virtue, or spilling one’s seed is evil, or that whatever person we’ve never
met before is getting exactly what he or she deserves. The ability to develop and
understand causal stories, which makes us human, gives us ethical beliefs, and
allows us to construct a society, is exactly the same force that lets us dress up
self-interested behavior as virtue, makes us pine for retribution against perceived
slights, and nudges us to wish ill upon those who look or behave differently from
our ideal.
9.7
Story telling versus progress
16 January 2005
IBM has announced (PDF from a Word document) that it will be granting free use
of 500 of its over 30,000 patents to open source development. The Economist announces that it is a ”bold step”. Groklaw, the place for geeks who are into law, has
effusive commentary about how wonderful this is, including pages of comments
from people writing things like “I praise IBM for taking this bold step!” and “All I
can say is Wow!”.
248
CHAPTER 9. STATS
Parade-raining time: it’s nothing but PR. IBM has been vocally and actively
pro-open source for a few years now; it’s run the Postfix project, contributed lots
of stuff to Linux, and has generally been pushing the paradigm from all directions.
They sell hardware; what do they care if you paid for the software or not.
So in this context, what does this statement mean? It’s a mere formal announcement of a position they’ve already had, which I guess may have some benefit, perhaps in talking other patent holders into switching to a more open regime as well.
But look at what the announcement didn’t say. It didn’t say that IBM would use
these patents to defend open source, meaning that if another patent holder sues an
open source project over a patent, then that plaintiff would lose its right to these
500 patents. IBM won’t do that.
It only specified at most three or four percent of its software patent holdings
[ballpark figure; I have yet to find somebody who will make a firm statement about
how much of IBM’s patent holdings are software. Part of the problem is that the
USPTO denies that there is such a thing as software, just ‘computer-implemented
inventions’ of all sorts, so others need to do their own classifications.] Why not
all of them? Given that it’s a purely PR step, and any open source developer with
his/her/its head up knows that IBM will never sue, I guess only listing a token set
of patents is good enough.
One giant brain So it’s nice that IBM sort of formalized this, and the press is
nice for the communists as well as IBM, but it’s nothing new. So why do people (heart) IBM so much more? Here’s a comment somebody left on the above
Groklaw page: “Just for that, the next three, maybe four servers I buy will definitely be from IBM.” It’s scary how often we all forget that a company has no
personality of any sort.
We all know, in a rational superego kind of way, that International Business
Machines does not have a unified will, and that the actions of one of its arms has
nothing to do with the actions of others. I mean, IBM killed my great grandaunt.
[I’m sorry if that sounds flip.] To hold all of today’s IBM employees accountable
for this would be silly, and it would be equally silly to reward its server division
with sales because its legal division is agreeing to a pro-free software strategy.
One more example, from the world of software patents. From this testimony:
“My name is Douglas Brotz. I’m Principal Scientist at Adobe Systems, Incorporated, and I am representing the views of Adobe Systems as well as my own. [...]
Let me make my position on the patentability of software clear. I believe that software per se should not be allowed patent protection. [... T]he emergence in recent
years of patents on software has hurt Adobe and the industry.”
That was in 1994. A decade later, Adobe Acrobat’s splash screen lists forty
9.7. STORY TELLING VERSUS PROGRESS
249
patents. These are not just defensive: they have sued their competitor, Macromedia, over and over. Adobe had one man put in prison for violating its intellectual
property. So is Adobe our friend or not?
The Standard Story This is all a reminder of something you all probably know
but may not pay much attention to: that trying to form a causal story is often a
waste of time, if not detrimental to our actual goals.
Those books we read and stories we were told when we were kids all had the
same format: person takes action, and then if that action is bad person is punished
and if that action is good then person is rewarded. Often, the punishment isn’t
even causally linked to the initial bad action by a mechanism in the story, but in
our minds it is causally linked anyway, perhaps by an omniscient overseer who
directly observed the action and meted out the punishment/reward.
Now, when we read a news story, the kid in the back of our brains is constantly
trying to push it into the good/bad causal story; it is emotionally satisfied only when
the facts fit the story. If the bad guys see no punishment, the story is incomplete
to the point of being frustrating. Worse is when the bad guy gets a good reward,
because our causal expectations are so shattered—and still worse is the case where
there is no causal story at all (or equivalently, one too convoluted for us to really
piece together). That’s where we stand with IBM: they are far too huge to be a
character in a story. If they were, they would be the good guy and the bad guy at
the same time, and then what sort of final payoff should they see?
Everything in our brain is wired into the standard causal story, and it’s a real
struggle to read news about a corporation or a person without trying to jam it into
that form. But fighting the urge is worth the effort.
E.g., I think my book is better for it. On one page, Microsoft would be evil for
trying to patent its DOC format, and on another, it’s the hero in its struggle against
Eolas, who would screw up the entire Internet if they won. Eolas wears a black hat,
but is backed by the University of California, which we like. The story can’t fit the
Standard Form, and even if it could, Microsoft’s happy or sad ending wouldn’t say
much about the overall questions that the book is dealing with.
E.g., George Soros made his fortune partly by single-handedly destroying a
currency or two. He’s got a lot of shady political dealings all through Eastern
Europe. But he’s also possibly the largest benefactor to the progressive side in US
politics. By ignoring any stories about the person or the money and focusing on
the causes he supported, those causes moved forward.
E.g., Richard “Dick” Cheney is unquestionably evil in a hundred ways, but
he is the highest-ranking Republican who opposes a homophobic constitutional
amendment. We can focus on the emotionally satisfying storytelling in which we
250
CHAPTER 9. STATS
declare that Cheney should get what’s due (and I plead guilty of this), but we do so
at the detriment of the issues we want to push forward.
9.8
The perception of causation
28 November 2003
So here’s the structure of just about every academic paper: author asks a question in the way of ‘hey, I wonder if A causes B?’ and then goes out and gathers
some data, and then checks to see whether the data verifies that A and B are related. The rest of today’s pontifications will pile on caveats to this simple structure.
Statistics only disprove The first is that statistical methods on the observation
side is aimed only at falsifying claims, not verifying them. The correct wording
of a typical conclusion would be: ‘The study failed to reject the possibility that A
and B are related.’ The media will clean this sentence up to say, ‘The study found
a link between A and B.’ More forceful, less passive, less true.
Causation Next, there are two motivations for asking about A and B: observation
and persuasion. Our academics like to imply that they’re just innocently inquiring about the world around them, but people get married to their ideas quickly—
especially in the social sciences, where there’s often a gut political belief that the
academic would like to back up. Further, the goal of all persuasive essays is not to
say that A and B are linked, but that A causes B. We readers don’t entirely mind
our academics writing causal-persuasion-oriented papers instead of observational
papers, because causation is interesting and observation alone isn’t.
If I had to point to one thing that distinguishes humans from stuff, it’s the perception of causality. It is impossible for humans to think without using a causal
framework, and it’s impossible for machines to think causally. You can’t do a
statistical derivation to prove objectively that one thing causes another, since correlation is never causation. Further, if you have two things which we’ve decided
cause another, you can’t do anything to show that thing one was more of a cause
than thing two, even though we humans often care deeply about that very question.
An academic paper really, really is an artistic expression—even more than
painting or self-immolating performance art—because the paper’s intent is to make
the reader perceive the causal functioning of the world (that inherently human
thing) as the author perceives it. The funny thing is that the persuasive support
for the communication of perception lies in statistics, which can provide evidence
9.8. THE PERCEPTION OF CAUSATION
251
for or against causation, but not causation itself. You get papers that are 100%
machinery, but whose intent (if they haven’t forgotten it) is to persuade the reader.
Linear models The primary tool for the testing of an A-is-related-to-B hypothesis is the linear regression, which is based on lots of assumptions that nobody ever
checks. Notably, most of these regressions are about nonlinear systems. I mean,
really guys: it’s a linear regression because all of the methods embodied in the
process are from linear algebra, and yet people will run a frigging regression on
anything, without paying a second of heed to whether the thing they’re modeling is
really even vaguely linear. And throwing in an ‘oh, it’s log-linear, so just take the
log of everything and you’re hunky-dory’ just doesn’t cut it unless you have more
justification for log-linearity than ‘oh, it looks all loggy.’
In sum, our dependence on linear regression makes the world a worse place,
because it is often not applicable for observational purposes, and at the same time
says nothing about causation. Going away from the linear regression form, you’ve
got two statistical options. The first is to make things a lot more complex. E.g.,
do everything as a maximum likelihood estimation of some weird function that
you dreamed up. This allows you to get quantitative values where there were none
before, which is observationally useful, but is even less persuasive than the simpler
regression.
The other option is to get much simpler than the linear regression: just describe
what you see. Gather your variables, calculate their means and variances, and tell
us whether the mean is different from zero. A good description of the situation
with a few connecting paragraphs is often a much more persuasive argument than
a table of forced regressions. I wish there were more papers like that.
Modeling of nonlinear systems That said, let’s get back to the subject of me. I
draw up models, many computer-based, which are intended to describe a situation.
A good model will do well on both of the above fronts: on the observational level,
it comes up with data which is comparable to the data we cull from reality, and on
the causal level, it should embody the causal processes that seem similar to that of
the real world. I.e., a model which always gets the right answers but does so in an
intuitively displeasing fashion will not make it as a subjectively good model.
So the problem is that the folks at [name of center at institution], of which
I am including myself, model situations where the causal process is based on the
interaction of lots and lots of people. Instead of, ‘Oh, variable A rises, which causes
variable B to fall,’ we have, ‘People have a set of heterogeneous characteristics
with distribution A, and if they interact in a specific fashion which seems basically
descriptive of reality, then B results. We can predict how changes in A will affect
252
CHAPTER 9. STATS
B.’ [That includes both my all-computer work on migration and my computerless
paper-and-pencil analysis of conviviality.]
It’s observationally great, but dissatisfying with respect to the perception of
causation. You don’t feel smarter after reading the paper. You have no causal
factoid to put in your back pocket and pull out at cocktail parties. But if you’re
looking for predictions about a nonlinear system, then you’re much better off with
one of these computer models than an invalid but easily comprehensible linearregression based causal story.
The MPU It’s a common complaint that modern academics are wankers because
they often break down their papers into the minimal publishable unit (MPU). Back
in the day, an author would expound for a hundred pages on a topic, and may
produce one paper which summarizes his/her/its findings about the world and its
workings. Nowadays, the lament goes, the cynical academic would break that
down into a thousand short papers, thus multiplying his/her/its citation count by a
thousand. Papers like Milgrom & Robert’s 1980 magnum opus on auction theory
just aren’t getting published anymore.
I think this is true, but the blame here is in the wrong place—yes, papers are
more likely to be exactly one MPU long, but that is because the readers demand it
to be so. Referees don’t have time to read a hundred technical, meandering pages;
they often don’t have all that much interest in the topic that’s been thrown on their
desk. They don’t feel smarter after reading the darn thing.
A paper which does not embody a simplistic causal story will fail. This is a
horrible thing for the study of systems where there are no simplistic but true causal
stories to be had.
Our hubris People like their gods to have faces, and like them to generally be
kind of like people, but more powerful. Stories about deities have a causal framework much like that of stories about people; where they don’t fit the normal human
form, thousands of pages get written on why the omnipotent one is only behaving
in an unhuman way on the surface. Similarly, academics expect the workings of
the world to function in a basically comprehensible manner, and get annoyed when
the world doesn’t.
So my lament is that the models of [name of center at institution] throw such
academics for a loop: my laptop can keep track of more numbers than any human,
and it’s pretty darn easy for me to have it do things which are conceptually simple,
but are beyond easy A-causes-B explanation. They are observationally sound—
and often better than simpler stories, but are not causally persuasive unless people
are willing to accept causal stories which are complex beyond the workings of their
9.8. THE PERCEPTION OF CAUSATION
own brains.
253
10
I NTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
10.1
My preface
2 February 2007
[My stats textbook will be available in print and as a free online PDF.
Now, as somebody who keeps writing books, I can’t tell you how great is the temptation to metawrite. To have a nice, long intro about why I wrote the book and who I have in mind as the reader and
what problems I surmounted in writing it and other things that are of marginal interest to people who
aren’t the author. It’s a nice form of procrastination. At the extreme, you have this guide to Ruby1 ,
which goes for a long time before you get to the subject and even then has frequent meta-sidebars. A
textbook needs to have this, because a textbook intro is actually an extended advertisement explaining
to professors why they should adopt the text for their class, but I managed to keep the intro down to
14 out of 400 pages (equals 3.5%), which I count as OK in the context.
So I wrote the following intro to the online version, and then realized that it’s all meta-writing—
even a bit maudlin—and so scrapped it. [Maudlin, from the OED: Having reached the stage of
drunkenness characterized by tearful sentimentality and effusive displays of affection.]
Now that you have the context—the meta-meta-writing—here’s the intro that the online edition
will not have.]
Nobody ever believes me when I tell them I grew up poor. But it’s true: my
family didn’t clear the poverty line until I was about twenty years old. Needless to
say, my personal library was rather limited, primarily consisting of whatever was
under two bucks at the used book store, and a nickel copy of The Magic House
of Numbers that my brother bought from the Bottenfield Elementary School library clear-out sale. [The fact that it was my brother’s made it all that much more
intriguing, and I read through it many times.] I spent endless hours at the local
library, or sitting at the back of the bookstore at the strip mall next to our apartment
complex. The employees there just wheeled their carts around me as I sat on the
floor, reading books from cover to cover.
Somewhere around 19 I got my first computer, which I bought using my income from a summer as a bike messenger. I already knew the basics of working
1
http://poignantguide.net/ruby/
254
10.1. MY PREFACE
255
the thing, thanks to a Champaign Park District BASIC course, a 10th grade PASCAL class, and many hours at a friend’s house. It wasn’t cheap, but now that I had
that laptop, I had the tools to create whatever world I wanted.
I spent a year of college at the London School of Economics, which my university paid for via my need-based financial aid. At the airport, I passed through
the UK customs agents with a letter stating that I had the finances necessary to pay
for my life in London, but that was a blatant lie. My housing and tuition were paid
for, but food was not. Fortunately, the computer science department paid me under
the table to teach Mathematica tutorials. In the evenings, while everybody else was
out dropping another ten quid at the bar, I was at home with that laptop, writing
papers and models, and doing haphazard and completely unpublishable research.
In many ways, it was a great year.
As you can see from this book, I’ve learned a modest amount of math and
computational stats since then. And all my progress has been possible because
mathematics is free.
Because of my own experience, I want mathematics and tools for mathematics education to remain as free as possible. When, in the tradeoff between lower
property taxes and better public schools, a person tells me they prefer lower taxes,
my skin crawls—especially when they justify it by saying their kids go to a private
school so public school quality doesn’t matter. I have written extensively in opposition to the court rulings that made it possible for mathematical algorithms to
receive U.S. patents because—beyond its legal and economic senselessness—the
thought of paying a licensing fee for a mathematical algorithm seems fundamentally unethical to me. No one should be able to bill you for math you have done
yourself.
This book is based on free software partly because I placed high priority on
writing code that is as portable as possible, and if you need to jump through licensing hoops to transfer your work from one computer to another, then it is not
portable. But the choice of tools is also based in that conviction that mathematics
should be free. A book about how to use a thousand-dollar stats package is of limited use, and gives the vague impression that mathematics is a sport for those with
a budget.2 It points to one more little barrier between a curious kid with a used PC
and the mathematical world.
There’s a joke (except it’s true) that Russia is a powerhouse in mathematics
because Russians didn’t have the money to do any other kind of science. Computational modeling is also a science anybody can do, because fifty bucks will buy a
used computer that could easily host any of the tools in this book. The One Laptop
2
Yes, I know it’s very easy to break the license and get a copy of STATA or Mathematica or
what-have-you, but why bother when there are entirely above-board ways of getting free software?
256
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Per Child project hopes to distribute basic computers to children throughout the
developing world. Based on the specs as of this writing (500 mHz processor, 128
MB RAM, 512 MB storage), the tools here would comfortably run on an OLPC
laptop.
I’ve read a lot of textbooks in the process of writing my own, and I increasingly
think that the intended audience for any textbook (whatever the author may claim)
is the author, some number of years ago. The methods in this book work for me in
the present day, where I need efficient and effective tools for projects with hundred
thousand dollar budgets at the world’s largest organizations. But I have made certain that these methods remain useful to somebody like the earlier me, who just had
a low-end laptop, a sporadic Internet connection, and a desire to learn and explore.
I understand the economics behind the seemingly high price of textbooks, and
I know that this book will be available at most academic libraries (because libraries
often subscribe to a press, meaning they get everything the press publishes, good
and bad). But having the book available anywhere and to anyone is one less barrier to mathematics education for those who do not have the traditional support
systems behind them. And that is why, with the gracious permission of [academic
publisher], this book is available as a free download.
10.2
Philosophizing from the bench
4 April 2007
I have written elsewhere about how there is no economic justification for patents
on software or business methods, and how the legal basis of such patents is based
on a very specific (and in my opinion, false) reading of prior case law.
But there is one final question regarding such patents: are they ethical? To
answer this question, we must answer another entirely unanswerable question: do
people invent mathematical results or discover them? Are the symbols mathematicians write down a reflection of some innate structure of the universe, or just human
symbols manipulated using human rules?
One could find people on all levels of the spectrum between math as pure invention and math as pure discovery, but this has not always been true: before about
two hundred years ago, mathematical results were firmly a part of nature that humans stumbled upon. In such a context, the ideal of granting a patent—an ownership right—in a mathematical algorithm would have been taken as simply absurd,
an unethical and unenforceable handing over of a piece of nature to one person.
The monopolies now granted for mathematical algorithms are thus the product of
a few centuries’ worth of development in mathematics and our attitude toward the
subject.
10.2. PHILOSOPHIZING FROM THE BENCH
257
Unfortunately, software patents do not represent the cutting edge in modern
sensibilites regarding the nature of mathematical algorithms. Instead, they make
sense only via a school of thought that was prevalent from the late 1800s until it
was discredited in 1931. Thus, the courts have tried to keep the law up-to-date
by revising the scope of patent law from where it stood in 1790, but they remain
behind the times nonetheless.
The realists The realist view originated with Pythagoras (about 582-507 BCE).
Pythagoras observed various regularities, like how the sound of a plucked chord
made the most harmonious sound when played in concert with a chord exactly half
its length (what we now call an octave apart), and then with a chord a third its
length (a fifth apart), et cetera.3 He concluded from these pleasing regularities that
all of the world is a reflection of a set of harmonious mathematical relationships—a
music of the spheres.
Plato (born about 75 years after Pythagoras’s death) picked up on the Pythagorean’s
geometrical obsession. If you’ve ever taken a philosophy class, you are familiar with Plato’s view that the forms we see are vague, secondary reflections of
a perfect ideal—nature is a reflection of mathematics. Plato said that people remembered mathematical results, because they are imprinted in our minds and we
need only get the right signal to remind ourselves of the mathematical truth inside
ourselves.
Around this time, it was a popular trick to try to try to write down as many
theorems as possible from the basic axioms of geometry. The most famous such
attempt is Euclid’s Elements. This is an oft-told story, but here are the first five
basic assumptions Euclid needed to derive all of geometry:
1. A straight line segment can be drawn by joining any two points.
2. A straight line segment can be extended indefinitely in a straight line.
3. Given a straight line segment, a circle can be drawn using the segment as
radius and one endpoint as center.
4. All right angles are congruent (i.e., equal).
5. If two lines are drawn which intersect a third in such a way that the sum of
the inner angles on one side is less than two right angles, then the two lines
inevitably must intersect each other on that side if extended far enough.
3
See Donald Duck in Mathemagic Land.
258
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
If you’re like most people, you were nodding your head up until you got to that
last one, which is something of an eyesore in its lack of simplicity; we’ll get back
to it shortly.
2000 years pass. The history books typically characterize these as periods of
religious fervor, but that doesn’t mean that they’re periods of scientific inactivity.
However, the realist viewpoint took a small twist: it’s not that nature haphazardly
reflects mathematical ideals, but that the Divine Creator used math to design everything. But people like Copernicus and Newton still saw themselves as just marvelling at how neatly the Divine Watchmaker designed the mathematical world around
us, and still placed themselves in the role of observer rather than inventor.
The formalists appear Back to that fifth assumption. Some tried to derive it
from Euclid’s other axioms. They would begin by assuming that the fifth assumption is false, and then search for a contradiction to the other axioms. But a funny
thing happened: under some means of constructing a system where the fifth axiom is false, no contradictions turn up. One could construct a whole world that
in many ways looks absolutely nothing like Euclid’s. Gauss, the inventor/discoverer of Gaussian elimination, the Gaussian distribution, Gaussian quadrature, and
et cetera, was one of many in the mid-1700s to question that fifth postulate. What
if you could have lines point toward each other but still never meet? We thus get
non-Euclidian geometry, which caused something of an explosion.
This was the first chance for the formalist viewpoint to take hold. Many of
these non-Euclidian geometries didn’t describe anything we have seen here on
Earth. Some got the last laugh a few centuries later when Einstein showed that
non-Euclidian geometry sometimes did a better job of describing reality than Euclidian, but at the time there was the gnawing question that maybe these axioms and
their derived results were just a set of amusing inventions—human-made symbols
that reflect nature only by sheer luck, if that.
The project of mathematics became the problem of designing systems of symbols and their manipulation that are interesting in and of themselves. Of course,
such a system should not self-contradict, and reflects at least some of our intuitive
beliefs, like how if A = B and A = C, then B = C.
Here in the present day, mathematical geometry courses build the subject in a
series of steps. They start with defining sets, then establishing the characteristics
of open and closed sets, then describing networks of those (aka topologies), and
then adding in neighborhoods (aka manifolds), and only then can the concept of
distances (metric spaces) come in. So what Euclid took to just be space, we take to
rely on definitions of sets, algebras, topologies, manifolds, and metrics.
The larger project is to have a unifying set of symbols, beginning with sets, that
10.2. PHILOSOPHIZING FROM THE BENCH
259
would allow one to trace the most advanced mathematical ideas all the way back
to basic manipulations of sets. Like the Euclidian craze of the Greek era, the late
1800s–early 1900s brought about a flurry of people writing derivations of as much
as possible from basic axioms of sets. The stand-out attempt was Whitehead and
Russel’s Principia Mathematica, which went pretty darn far in starting with very
simple symbols and building up basically everything.
It will be relevant below that Bertrand Russel, the paragon of the set theoretic
formalization of mathematics, was not very happy with his symbolic designs:
I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious
faith. I thought that certainty is more likely to be found in mathematics than elsewhere. [. . . ] But as the work proceeded, I was continually
reminded of the fable about the elephant and the tortoise. Having constructed an elephant upon which the mathematical world could rest, I
found the elephant totterling, and proceeded to construct a tortoise to
keep the elephant from falling. But the tortoise was no more secure
than the elephant, and after some twenty years of very arduous toil,
I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do
in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable. [Russel,
1956, pp 54–55]
Russel thus raises a natural question: how far can all this go? Kurt Gödel
famously showed that it’s not as far as one would hope, using the formalization of
the following simple declaration. This sentence is false. If that sentence actually
is false, then the sentence is proclaiming a true statement—which means that the
sentence is actually false—which means that it’s true. . . .
Gödel’s version was the statement “This statement is not provable using the
logical system L.” Name this statement S. If S were provable using the system L,
then the statement would be false, meaning that L has proven a contradiction. If
S is not provable using L, then L is incomplete, in the sense that S is a provable
statement (it is not provable using L, as promised), but L can not prove it.
This was a horrible blow to the formalists. However powerful their system,
there would still be simple logical chains like the last paragraph that prove things
that the logical system can not handle. The formalist movement basically lost
credibility. The proof that there is something to mathematics that our symbolic
systems can not handle clearly advocates for the realist side of the spectrum.
The derivation of computing At this point, the symbol-manipulators did not
entirely give up, but instead rephrased the question: having accepted that for any
logical system some expressions are not evaluable, what mathematical expressions
260
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
are evaluable? Two people simultaneously provided suggestions of determining
what is evaluable, in 1937–8. The first, Alonzo Church, invented a means of writing expressions, claiming that his writing scheme covered all possible evaluable
operations. Alan Turing took it in a slightly more imaginative turn: he described a
machine with a tape (memory) and a head that moves along the tape and modifies
the data written thereon; if Turing’s machine can evaluate the expression in finite
time, then it is evaluable.
That is, Turing described a computer, and said that if something is evaluable
via computer, then it is evaluable via the systems of set theory as well. In fact,
every modern computer out there is equivalent to Turing’s machine and Church’s
lambda calculus (which are themselves equivalent). Barring highly specialized
languages, virtually every modern programming language is Turing equivalent,
meaning that it is equivalent to a Turing machine, the lambda calculus, and all
of the other Turing equivalent languages. That means that programs written in a
modern programming language are equivalent to mathematical expressions using
traditional mathematical notation.
Thus, modern computing has its roots in the set theoretic attempts to write
a language that describes everything, which in turn has its roots in the formalist
perspective that mathematical symbols need not reflect any inherent logic of the
universe.
In computing, the bias toward formalism is still heavier, because programs look
like human designs. Further, they are often describing systems built by humans.
Geometry is Greek for “measuring the Earth,” because it was first used (by the
Egyptians) for surveying land, but as the mathematical and computational edifice
grows taller, it becomes increasingly difficult to see the ground below.
The final step in formalist philosophy The birth of formalism laid the foundations for the software patent.
There is an understanding that laws of nature may not be patented, which persists to this day. The law of gravity, or a newly discovered element, are not human
inventions, but discoveries regarding nature. Within the law of nature exception lay
a sub-exception: mathematical algorithms may not be patented. In the terminology above, setting mathematics as a subset of nature is clearly and firmly a realist
view. This is appropriate, because Thomas Jefferson wrote the first patent law in
1790, while Gauss had written his development of non-Euclidian geometry around
1820–1830. The realist school was thus the prevalent (and only) understanding of
mathematics when the patent law was written. Legal scholars often ask what the
“congressional intent” was behind a bill, and it is effectively impossible for the
congressional intent to have been that mathematical results are not laws of nature.
10.2. PHILOSOPHIZING FROM THE BENCH
261
Now let us skip forward to 1980, at the founding of the Court of Appeals for
the Federal Circuit (CAFC), to consolidate patent hearings (and some other issues)
into one specialist court. Several of the judges on the CAFC bench are assigned to
hear only patent cases—cases about human inventions. Many of them are former
prominent patent attorneys. Therefore, it is no surprise at all that with regards to
mathematics, they are formalists.
Let us open with a law review article from 1986, five years after the Supreme
Court ruled for the third time that mathematical algorithms may not be patented:
“A mathematical or other algorithm is neither a phenomenon of nature nor an abstract concept. [A mathematical] algorithm is very much a construction of the
human mind. One cannot perceive an algorithm in nature. The algorithm does not
describe natural phenomena (or natural relationships).”[Chisum, 1986] This passage is clearly a product of the towers of elephants and tortoises above. Russel’s
Principia Mathematica was published in 1913, and this law review passage arrived
73 years later. Given the speed at which attitudes toward mathematics move, this
perspective is downright trendy.
In the courts, the origins of the software patent are typically traced to the ruling
written by Judge Giles Rich in In re Alappat (33 F.3d 1526, 31 USPQ2d 1545,
1994), which split the mathematical algorithm exception off from the law of nature
exception—and then denied the existence of the mathematical algorithm exception:
[T]he Supreme Court explained that there are three categories of subject matter for which one may not obtain patent protection, namely
“laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas.” . . . the Supreme
Court also has held that certain mathematical subject matter is not,
standing alone, entitled to patent protection. . . . A close analysis . . . reveals
that the Supreme Court never intended to create an overly broad, fourth
category of subject matter excluded from Section 101.
Clearly, this discussion makes no sense if a mathematical algorithm falls into
the categories of “law of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas.”
Having split off mathematical algorithms as a separate category from things existing in nature, the Federal Circuit killed it off by 1999. AT & T v Excel (172 F.3d
1352, 50 USPQ2d 1447, 1999), cited earlier CAFC rulings to determine that: “the
judicially-defined proscription against patenting of a ‘mathematical algorithm,’ to
the extent such a proscription still exists, is narrowly limited to mathematical algorithms in the abstract.” Such a narrow limitation is no limitation at all, because
it is trivial to state “I claim a machine on which is loaded an algorithm to. . . ” before any purely abstract algorithm. Indeed, patents granted based on such wording
abound.
262
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
But the world is not formalist As you can see, the CAFC has positioned itself at
the formalist extreme of the formalist-realist spectrum. However, since Gödel, few
practitioners of math and computer science placed themselves at such an extreme.
Dedekind was a mathematician instrumental in the development of set theory,
and was thus essential to the formalist camp. In the opening to his notes on differential calculus [Dedekind, 1901, pp 1–2], he cast himself as a formalist, complaining that resorting to intuition “. . . can make no claim to being scientific, no one will
deny. For myself this feeling of dissatisfaction was so overpowering that I made the
fixed resolve to keep meditating on the question till I should find a . . . perfectly rigorous foundation for the principles of infinitesimal analysis [differential calculus].”
But there his formalism toward differential calculus gives way to his realist belief,
that he was working to “. . . discover its true origin in the elements of arithmetic and
thus at the same time to secure a real definition of the essence of continuity.”
I have not yet mentioned the intuitionist movement, which Kline [1980] traces
back to the early 1900s. The position of the intuitionist is closer to the realist:
we all know what zero and one are, an we all have an idea of what addition and
multiplication mean, so we should build from there. Causality is something about
which we all have an intuitive grasp, but which is simply impossible to pin down
using statistical tools. Judea Pearl, the author of the standard reference on causality
[Pearl, 2000], is entirely unfazed by the fact that his chosen subject is completely
ungrounded: “For me, the adequacy of a definition lies not in abstract argumentation but in whether the definition leads to useful ways of solving concrete problems.
The definitions of causal concepts that I have used in my book have led to useful
ways of doing things. . . .”4
So while patent law has followed the single thread of formalism to the exclusion of all other threads, the typical person having ordinary skill in the art of
computing and mathematics believes a mix of the realist, the intuitionist, the formalist, and perhaps even the theological. Therein lies the conflict: Judge Rich was
philosophizing from the bench, and mandated that patent law shall take the formalist viewpoint that mathematics is the human manipulation of human symbols—but
mathematicians themselves have prevalently had the view that strict formalism is
an inaccurate description of mathematics and computing since the 1930s. Practitioners thus see the patentability of software and mathematical results as based on
a false—and even condescending—view of their chosen field.
4
http://www.mii.ucla.edu/causality/?p=33
10.3. PHYSICAL PROPERTY V INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
10.3
263
Physical property v intellectual property
26 October 2005
The question for the day is: is it reasonable to class intellectual property along with
physical property?
Mr. RMS of Nueva York, NY says no: physical property is based on a sort of
natural right, and the legal default is that you get to own stuff; intellectual ’property’ is an entirely artificial construct invented to advance society in certain ways.
Thus, to lump intellectual property in with physical property is to imply that authors and inventors are natural owners of their products.
[Mr. RMS also says that copyright law, patent law, and trademark law are too different to be
lumped into the same class, so the term is misleading in that respect too. No point arguing that one;
there are similarities, there are differences, so you decide if they should be categorized together or
not. If any librarians are reading this, please edify us on any apropos classification theory.]
The thesis which I’ll present here is that yes, physical property and intellectual
property are indeed both property; this does not mean that we should be more blasé
about intellectual property rights and grant them to anyone who claims them, but
that we should remember how much thought and careful design went in to our
physical property rights.
The menu
Text and designs are obviously different from household objects, but we all knew
that. In fact, automobiles are also different from household objects. So is land,
and the houses built on that land, which differ from each other. Your kidney is also
significantly different. Oh, and commodities such as corn, which differ from corn
futures. Correspondingly, the rights associated with all of these things are different.
There are a number of rights typically associated with ownership:
• right of transfer
• right of sale
• right of use
• right of modification or development
• right to exclude others from use [and a number of subclasses within this one]
There is a multitude of things that we call property that lack one or many of these
rights, some of which I listed above. E.g., you have the right to transfer but not
to sell your kidney. The study of property law is the study of which items from
264
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
the rights menu should be applied to which elements of the objects menu. Many a
bookshelf has been filled with discussion of that simple connect-the-dots exercise.
Some books on that bookshelf (e.g., mine) are about stories or designs or other
nontangible concepts. But apart from the fact that the object to which the rights are
associated are abstract, the work of analyzing the correct rights to assign to which
items and how to operationalize the rights in law is about the same for the ethereal
and ephemeral items. On the left, you’ve got exactly the same menu of rights; on
the right you’ve got a list of abstract concepts, and the task of connecting the dots
is the same as above. Of course, we must take into account the fact that text has
different properties from a blender, but a competent study of real property (real as
in land and houses) also takes into account how land is different from a blender.
If there were a single block of rights granted to all forms of physical property,
and then we came along and called a storyline property, then that would be misleading because the storyline would be the odd man out. But because property
is merely an item to which some bundle of rights may be attached, the storyline
doesn’t stand out at all: it just has associated different items from the menu of
rights that could be granted.
[And what is the correct set of property rights for a storyline? Mr. FK of Alexandria, VA argues
that they should be patentable. If software—text on paper or a hard drive—can be patented, then why
not a storyline, he argues. Having studied the list of legal justifications for software patents myself,
I actually agree with Mr FK. He doesn’t mean to, but is making a strong argument against patenting
software.]
Is the term intellectual property used to mislead? Yes, by assuming that there
is a monolithic single set of rights that all property has, and therefore that exact set
of rights should apply to text or designs. In this case, it’s not the term intellectual
property that’s misleading, but the term property, which implies that monolithic set
of rights. One can combat this by comparing abstract objects to less-than-simple
real-world objects where not all rights are taken as given, like land or kidneys. Or
how about an emergency room? The owner of an emergency room does not have
the right to exclude, because society would be the worse for granting that right. By
comparing code to a blender, we mislead, but by comparing code to other objects,
we can edify how ownership of a block of code does not immediately mean every
imaginable right at once. More examples below.
For another example of how the metaphor between intellectual and physical
property can be beneficial for our team, let’s ask whether the DMCA is a property
right. By the above reasoning: yes, because it provides the owner with some items
from the menu of rights associated with property, notably the right to exclude.
This has important political implications. The argument that the DMCA is a newly
invented property right forces us to apply the usual ’should this right apply to this
type of property’ analysis we’ve done a hundred times with other items, but which
10.3. PHYSICAL PROPERTY V INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
265
nobody did with the DMCA because it was never billed as a property right. I’m
not of the impression that it would pass that analysis.
But physical property rights are natural
Some people discuss physical property rights as natural or inherent or a default
right. This is, as the social scientists say, problematic.
First, there’s the problem above: there’s a whole bundle of rights which could
be granted or not, and is every right included by default? One has the right to leave
an automobile sitting on the side of the road—some call it parking—and if others
so much as touch the car, they can be sued. Can I leave my couch on the side of the
road and expect the same property rights? What if I install a couch alarm? Why is
it legal to place a car on the side of any country road but not a tent?
So the definition of default rights ain’t so obvious, which brings us to the question of whose intuition we should go by. A couple of options.
truly natural property rights The only truly natural property law is that the
guy with the biggest stick gets everything he wants and everybody else splits the
rest. It’s no coincidence that the ’real’ in real estate is Spanish and Portuguese for
’royal’: it used to be natural that the king (the head of the army) owned all land and
we all just lived on his land by his generous grace.
individualistic property rights Go type “property rights” into your favorite search
engine, and the first few links are likely to be pretty amusing. Lots of clip art of
flags and eagles. From the first hit as of this writing: ”Welcome to the Property
Rights Research web site. If God and Country and family are your top priorities,
you’ll like this site.” What do God and country and family have to do with property rights? I mean, the Bible says that women can’t even own property, let alone
debate the eminent domain clause.
These guys want property law to be written around an individualistic ‘if I can
grab it and hold it it’s mine’ philosophy. Some are dismantle-the-government, ‘if
you step on my land I’ll shoot you’ types, and some are neoclassical ‘if purchased
then deserved, by definition’ types (and some just haven’t bothered thinking much
about the axioms underlying property law). Notice how quickly individualistic
property rights imply that you don’t have to pay taxes or to make sure your restaurant meets the health code. If all property rights are inviolably bundled with all
property, then libertarianism immediately results.
double-entry property rights My own gut intuition toward objects is that if I’m
in proximity to and am using an item more than anybody else, then it’s mine. [Many
266
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Westerners who visited parts of Africa have told me anecdotes of people who use
this concept of property rights.] Under U.S. property law, this blatantly fails. If
somebody borrows a book I own and uses it every day for years, I can go to her at
any time and take it back, even though her attachment to the book is greater than
mine. That is, there’s a great ledger in the sky listing who owns what item, and
ownership is only transferred via mutually-agreed upon entries in the ledger. [To
be more correct, the ledger lists property rights associated with an item, like the right to use or the
right to sell, and those rights get transferred around, sometimes all at once in a fee simple sale, and
sometimes piecemeal, like a rental contract.]
To summarize this option, we define property
rights in terms of the market.
societally-oriented property rights None of the above approaches to property
rights match actual Western property law very well. The best fit comes from a
simple question: what is the socially optimal allocation of rights?
Bear in mind that we live in a market-oriented society; we can have the ’is the
market the optimal structure’ debate later, but must take it as given that the principle
of the market is ingrained in the society, and to some extent a healthy market is
requisite for a healthy society. That means that the double-entry system gets it
half-right, but is vetoed left and right when not appropriate or socially optimal. If
your car threatens the health of others, or your tree is getting in the way of the
power lines, or you want to make a fast buck but all you have to spare is your
kidney, all your market-based rights are out the window.
[ The neoclassicists will try to trip you up into thinking that society is built around natural,
objective property rights rather than social construction (some do call themselves ’objectivists’, after
all). But it’s a trick of definitions and not-quite logic. First, define the market as natural. If you
purchased something, then you deserve that item and are its natural owner. With that definition
there’s a lot of overlap between their definition of what is deserved and what is legal. But even if
we accept the definitions, (market ⇒ natural/deserved) and (market ⇒ property law) does not imply
(natural/deserved ⇒property law).]
To revisit the original question, the socially optimal allocation of rights is exactly what intellectual property law is intended to do as well. Sure, IP law is
artificial, but physical property law is equally artificial; we’re just so used to it that
we’ve forgotten.
Dumb people
Mark Lemley gives a much more nuanced critique of the phrase ’intellectual property’ in this paper [which is not to disparage the commentary at the head of this
column, but to say that Mr. Lemley is a professor at a law school who’s spent
much of his life studying IP]. He concedes that the social benefit story generally
10.3. PHYSICAL PROPERTY V INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
267
works: “Demsetz believed that the creation or alteration of property rights could
be explained by asking whether the social gains from internalizing an externality exceeded the costs of doing so.” (p 10, giving every indication that he agrees
with Demsetz) However, he points out that most of the externalities from physical
properties are negative externalities to be avoided via stricter property rights, while
most externalities from intellectual properties are purely positive. This means that
in physical property, ‘free riding’ is bad—it crowds out or otherwise hurts the
owner—but in IP, it takes several steps of logic to convince us that that downloading that song hurt or damaged the owner of the original song. You could make
that argument, but you’ll need to go through a physical property metaphor to do
so: something has to get crowded out.
Lemley’s paper doesn’t really disagree with much of what I state above, either
about property being a complex bundle or property or being a social invention to
maximize social gains. But he still suggests throwing out the term ’intellectual
property’, because of the difference between positive and negative externalities,
and therefore the limited applicability of free riding in the IP context. To rephrase,
it is correct to set intellectual property as a subset of property, and to do the same
social-benefit analysis, but people apply the analysis wrong in major ways.
My first reply is that you can see any situation two ways: if the default is that
the public is gaining positive externalities, the private citizen is restricted from taking action to restrict those benefits; if the default is that the public suffers negative
externalities, the private citizen is forced to take action to provide public benefit.
One can spin most stories in a destruction-of-value or creation-of-value direction
depending on the default (and every party will of course claim that the natural state
of things is the one which benefits or does not restrict them). I can’t walk around
the neighborhood naked because not wearing clothes creates negative externalities,
or because covering my pasty hide creates positive externalities?
Second, it is my opinion that crappy method by others does not mean that we
should throw out the term or the entire means of analysis. No, we should just
do the analysis better. I posit that without the term ’intellectual property’, people
would still be drawing metaphors to physical goods. As anybody who’s ever taken
algebraic topology or comparably abstract topics quickly works out, people think
in metaphors to things they can see and hold in their hands, whether the language
facilitates it or not. Everybody will continue to provide physical examples and
analogies; we just need to provide better ones.
So, here are some examples of physical goods which provide positive externalities, for which law therefore does not grant/limits the granting of private property
rights:
• Emergency rooms: a physical place and pile of goods where the positive
268
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
externalities are too great to be restricted.
• The club that leaves its windows open: you can’t bill the guys lingering on
the sidewalk in front, even though they’re enjoying the same music as the
guys who paid the cover.
• Most photography of a public space: even though the architects put a year
or two of effort into the work of art you just snapped, you’re welcome to
photograph the facade, frame the picture, and sell it to offices for use in
decorating their rows of cubicles. Go ahead, take a picture of your neighbor’s
laborious flower arrangement. (people constantly try to restrict this one, with
limited success)
• Notorious possession: If the area in front of your building is a public space
for long enough (like places with a semipark in front or those skyscrapers
with a sidewalk inside the frame), then you can not revert it to a private space,
because that destroys positive public externalities (notorious possession has
loads of caveats which you can look up if so inclined).
• Zoning: residents of many areas need permission to build on their land in a
manner incongruous with the surroundings. Since the status quo is a consistent theme to the area (which people evidently like), this is a restriction on
private property usage to prevent the private destruction of positive externalities.
Notice all the parentheticals: there is abundant debate in physical property—
flowers and buildings and pants—about how to handle externalities, and despite
millennia of physical property precedent we still don’t have set and finalized rules.
But the base is that if you put your goods in a public place, you have a carefully
limited right to exclude—which sounds a lot like intellectual property.
Let’s not abandon the methods of analyzing property rights just because some
people don’t apply them correctly. Instead, we can talk about intellectual property
as physical property and do it correctly, to show that property rights are not to be
granted to anybody who wants them, but should go through the same cost-benefit
analysis applied to rights in physical property.
10.4
How to foster innovation
4 February 2005
10.4. HOW TO FOSTER INNOVATION
269
It takes a harem Most programmers are male, and socially inept. Like most
males, they like sex with cute people. This has a simple policy implication: if we
want to encourage innovation in computing, we need to reward programmers with
harems. Programmers would submit their programs to a review board, perhaps at
the USPTO, which will evaluate the proposal’s merit. Those with low merit will
earn head points; those with exceptional merit will earn a nineteen year old love
slave—or two—as the inventor’s sole property. The love slave him/herself may be
unhappy with the deal, especially given the typical programmer’s hygiene habits,
but it is essential that we foster innovation, so the overall program is certainly worth
it.
Every time somebody proposes stronger patent laws, they defend the statement by explaining that we need to foster innovation. They take this as sort of the
discussion-ending argument—how can you be opposed to innovation? But there’s
a cost-benefit analysis that needs to be done. A patent is a monopoly (OK, a limited
right to exclude) and that means that those who would have been competing, and
those consumers who would have had multiple products to choose from, could be
worse off. This is especially true if the innovation would have happened anyway;
see below.
There are people who advocate against doing a cost-benefit analysis. Here is
the American Intellectual Property Law Association’s response to recommendations about reforming patents by the FTC. For those of you who don’t feel like
reading white papers by lawyers, here’s the gist: the AIPLA advocates all of
the recommendations by the FTC which would expand the need for more patent
lawyers, such as a post-grant review process, and opposes those which would diminish the scope of patents, such as a cost-benefit analysis of whether patents in
a given industry would actually help the economy along. [In particular, see comments on recommendation #6. They claim that the courts can not do a cost-benefit
analysis—true—and that the Congress, which is constitutionally obligated to do
the cost-benefit analysis, has already considered whether software is patentable—
false. The last law written by Congress which covers software patenting was written in 1952. Not thinking about it is not equivalent to reasoned consideration.]
People will tell you that we need to foster innovation, and you can respond: at
what cost? Should we sacrifice some virgins to the mysterious gods of innovation?
Should we believe Microsoft when it tells us that it just can’t afford to do innovative
research unless it has an absolute lock on the market?
The transmogrifier Every science fiction story has a device which will make
anything. You walk up to it and say, ‘I’d like a soylent blue patè and a plate of
wheat crackers, please’, and it would suck in ambient particles and produce a plate
270
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
exactly to your specifications.
Under current patent law, if you can demonstrate that you are the first to make
this request to the transmogrifier, then you can file for a patent: “A method and
apparatus for producing soylent blue patè with accompanying bread product.” The
work wasn’t much: you just had to ask. But since you were the first to do it, you
are the innovator, and can exclude others from using the transmogrifier to produce
soylent blue pate with crackers.
The computer is a data transmogrifier. If I need a program to index soylent
blue recipes, all I have to do is ask in the right language. If I need a program to
calculate maximum likelihood estimates of the parameter in a Zipf distribution, I
can write one. [I actually have such a device in the other window.] It’s not as
simple as asking nicely, but if I give a competent C programmer a flowchart for a
program I want, I know with 100% certainty that he or she will give me something
that basically meets the specs.
There are loads of details which need to be worked out, and no two programs
will look exactly alike, but translating an idea into computer-readable language is a
different sort of inventiveness from what we’re used to in the physical world. Let’s
say that I’d like a solar-powered machine that can mine slate quarries and bake
delicious cakes. If I hire a competent mechanic, he or she would need to spend
time in designing and building physical objects which might work on paper but
probably won’t work the first time they’re built. For the computer, all I had to do
was write a flow chart, and then the implementation is hard but guaranteed to work.
For the physical machine, the flowchart wasn’t enough: just because it looks good
on paper doesn’t mean the cake will actually taste good.
Let me make clear to the programmers among you that I am one of you, and I
know what it takes to implement a flowchart, and that the details aren’t so peachy—
my Waring parameter estimator is giving me buggy output and I can’t work out
why. But none of those hard details go into a patent application. Here is a surprisingly frank patent attorney explaining what is currently required: “Everything that
goes into a claim can almost be correlated back to a simple flow chart, so you can
get protection at a fairly high level. And, of course, that’s our goal, to get as much
as we can.” (from page 137 of this FTC hearing transcript) So it comes back to the
inventors trying to get as much as possible for as little as possible, which means an
incredibly broad patent.
The courts and the USPTO have been delightfully polite in obliging them, because we need to encourage innovation. Here is Dan Burk of the U of MN law
school doing his patent judge impression: “Tell us that it’s a compiler; tell us that
it’s a spreadsheet. We’ll assume that you can write the code. You don’t need to
tell us what the code is. You don’t need to give us a flowchart, don’t need to give
us any indication of how you do it, just tell us its function.” (p 134 of the same
10.5. REWIRING YOUR ETHICS
271
transcript) As a result, an inventor can file a claim with the USPTO which states, ‘I
have asked my computer to index recipes for soylent blue,’ and now anyone who
wants to ask their computer to index soylent blue recipes must first get permission
from the patent holder.
If we had not given the inventor any protection at all, would he have asked
his computer to do that which he needed it to do? Yes, he would have—he or
his client needed it done, and to a good programmer, asking the computer to do
something is cheap—no need to invest in expensive solar panels. Yet by giving
him a patent on the process of asking a computer to do certain things, we have
given him control over a potentially huge swatch of things a computer can do. For
example, a company which has no products, named Acacia, has a patent on the
concept of digital media, and has sued nine digital cable companies for infringing
its patents. [Cherry, 2004]
Since asking a computer to do something is cheap, the first to do so should not
have broad protection. But we are giving them the market equivalent of a harem for
very basic work. In cost-benefit terms, we’re getting ripped off. For this and many
other reasons, society is best off when innovators in computer code get narrower
protection—a properly enforced copyright on their code, instead of a patent on a
broad range of concepts.
10.5
Rewiring your ethics
14 June 2005
Quiz. Which of the following actions are legal and paperwork-free? Which one is
a felony?
1) Whistling a song while waiting for the bus.
2) Writing software to make copies of an entire DVD.
3) Writing software which allows making copies only of a few seconds of a DVD.
4) Writing software to hack into your neighbor’s wireless Internet connection.
5) Jaywalking.
6) Making a mix tape/mix CD for a friend.
7) Loaning an entire CD to aforementioned friend.
8) Closing out your band’s set with a kitschy cover of a song by your band’s favorite band.
9) Building a patented device from the blueprint on the patent, but only for a university experiment.
It’s a breeze, because the law is molded to your intuition, no?
272
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
How to enforce a law
Businesses have to comply with a whole lot more laws than people. Laws are
easier to enforce with a company, because most of them can’t get on a bus and
disappear. If a law seems onerous, it’s still not a violation of human liberty—if ya
don’t like the industry’s laws, then do something else. There are fewer businesses
than people, so the problem of communicating meticulous nonsense is that much
simpler, and ignorance is that much less of an excuse.
When you start your business, you walk in knowing that your gut instincts and
the letter of the law won’t match, so you consult loads of people to make sure you
conform. Intuition is irrelevant in a business because you know that you have to
find out the legal details.
Individual laws are different, because you’re not expected to call your lawyer
before rolling out of bed. As a very general rule, those laws which are imposed
upon individuals are of the ‘don’t hurt nobody’ variety, because it doesn’t take a
legal theorist to explain why the restricted action is bad. Taxes are a good example: although most would concede that they’re important, we don’t really ask
individuals to comply, because it’s too abstract and so too many people feel no
ethical qualm about not doing so; instead we dump reams of withholding rules on
businesses and individuals voluntarily ask the government that it return the excess
withheld. Meanwhile, littering, murder, and terrorism are readily enforced upon
the individual, because these laws are clear without philosophical treatises on the
leviathan and overcoming collective action problems: you feel it in your gut.
To summarize the section: laws on businesses are often supremely detailed and
arcane; an eight-year-old can understand most laws on individuals.
Ethics vs law
Meanwhile, here is a survey which found that people just don’t internalize intellectual property laws. They don’t feel in their gut that it’s wrong to pull down a song
from the Net, or for their band to do the kitschy covers. So, what do we do about
it?
The article reports that Michael Rawlinson, deputy head of Elspa [Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association] suggests: “The government has
spent millions of pounds to change public awareness of drink-driving and smoking.
As a society, we need to go through a similar process for creativity and intellectual
property.”
I think most sane people would distinguish between drunk driving and, um,
creativity. Both alcohol and tobacco have a direct effect on the brain and impair
one’s ability to make rational decisions. You pull the drunk driver out of the wreck-
10.5. REWIRING YOUR ETHICS
273
age and they say ‘I totally thought I was in control.’ Millions of quid in advertising
makes sense to combat a drug-induced irrational state. But, when you download
a song, are you less capacitated than when reading a magazine? You’ve thought
about the ethical consequences, probably ad nauseum. The message is out there,
rational people have thought about it, and they just didn’t feel bad about it. The
Elspa therefore recommends more advertising and more messages until the public
does feel bad about these things.
Intellectual property is often compared to physical property. This is only a
metaphor, and we all know it, but the laws for physical property are much more
stringent, both in our gut and in the law. There are exceptions all over the place in
intellectual property, and many things, like the pure idea underlying an invention
or composition, will never be covered by an honest IP law. Therefore, lawyers of
major IP holders are constantly pushing for judges to accept the physical property
metaphor, thus handing more control to the IP holder.
But that’s not enough, since intellectual property laws are now being enforced
on individuals. As our Elspa representative is explaining, it’s not enough that intellectual and physical property become identical under the law; we need individuals
to accept this metaphor as fact in their gut. Until they do, they just won’t feel the
same revulsion to downloading that they do to shoplifting.
I posit that such public reprogramming will fail.
How’d you do on the quiz? Here are the answers: 2, 4, and 7 are legal; the
others aren’t. Number three is the felony. [Full solutions are below.] Does the law
follow your intuition?
If we don’t want a consult-your-lawyer regime for every instance where someone opens their mouth or laptop, the illegality of the majority of the items on the
list needs to be internalized as ethical beliefs. Except, as the survey and our intuition shows, they aren’t. Few people (if anybody) feels bad whistling a song in
public or making mix tapes for people they have crushes on.
Intuition especially falls apart in situations where the work is disaggregated,
dissected, and componentized. OK, so the author of a song owns the rights to the
song, but do they own the rights to three seconds of the song? Different people
have different intuitive beliefs about where lines are drawn. The physical property metaphor makes it easy for those who believe in it: just as ownership of a
car means ownership of the paint chips, ownership of a song means ownership
of every microsecond. As Ms MKW of Washington, Columbia, pointed out in
the comments section last time, all of academia is a constant process of remixing,
and so has developed its own code of ethics—and it ain’t based on the physical
property principle. Academia would crumble if it had to follow the physical property metaphor, music would crumble if Metallica gets to own the F-chord, however uniquely strummed, and literature would fall to pieces if Heny Miller’s estate
274
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
owned the F-word. The physical property metaphor doesn’t work for disaggregation, and that leaves us with no intuitive principles on which to rely. But the law,
as interpreted by the courts and people with J.D.s in IP, continues to be enforced
on individuals cutting and pasting at their laptops.
So, my recommendation to the industry associations of the world: stop going
after individuals, both legally and ethically. Intellectual property law will never
pass the eight-year-old kid test—especially not IP law based on the physical property metaphor, which even the most pro-IP courts don’t entirely favor. So stick with
enforcing IP law upon the for-profit enterprises who aren’t expected to have any
intuition. Go after the people who work full time in making thousands of copies of
DVDs and CDs, like y’all did a decade ago, before you collectively embarked on a
campaign to reprogram individual ethics.
Quiz notes:
Here are my solutions for the quiz. I am certain that at least some number of my
readers will point out details, caveats, and corrections; please, bring it on. You
will only work into my overall point that there is no easy intuition to IP law, while
making the overall work more accurate.
1) Whistling a song while waiting for the bus: illegal. Public performance
of a copyrighted work is a violation of copyright law regardless of whether the
performance is for-profit [17 U.S.C. 106(4)]. For example, authors of fan fiction are
often made fun of by the public and harassed by the people who own the copyright
to the characters. Last night I dreamt about some of the characters from Lord of
the Rings (they were debating how to make Mordor into a more accessible tourist
destination), but for me to tell you the details of my dream would be to dilute
the market value of those characters. Similarly, random background music in this
documentary counted as dilution.
2) Writing software to make copies of an entire DVD: legal. Making backup
copies is fair use, and a bit-for-bit copy of a DVD doesn’t require decrypting the
contents of the disk. As of a few weeks ago, legality depends on the wording of
the software’s documentation.
3) Writing software which allows making copies only of a few seconds of a
DVD: illegal. Pulling scenes from a disk does require understanding (=decrypting)
its contents. The algorithm is commonly available, but writing software around
it is still a felony. One company was run out of business over this one, and one
individual prosecuted.
4) Writing software to hack into your neighbor’s wireless Internet connection:
legal. The DMCA, which makes (3) a felony, is currently interpreted by the courts
to only outlaw decrypting copyrighted works like music and movies, and not things
10.6. INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC MEASURES
275
like garage door openers. So decrypting your neighbor’s wireless signal doesn’t
count. Frankly, I’ve been working on the software IP book for a year and I’m still
not certain of the status of this one.
5) Jaywalking: illegal. Once you leave IP, it’s easy. They draw lines on the
pavement.
6) Making a mix tape/mix CD for a friend: illegal. Unauthorized copying to a
different medium; not fair use.
7) Loaning an entire CD to aforementioned friend: legal. Fair use. Do what
you want with the physical media, regardless of what Garth may tell you.
8) Closing out your band’s set with a kitschy cover of a song by your band’s
favorite band: illegal. Once again, public performance (and a typically for-profit
one, at that). This used to be a fun live show tradition. It was dessert, and if it was
a crappy band, you at least got one good song in your head. Fewer bands do it now,
and I suspect it’s because of IP concerns.
9) Building a patented device from the blueprint on the patent, but only for a
university experiment: illegal. Madey v Duke University shut down the concept of
experimental use exceptions to a patent.
10.6
Instrumental music measures
6 April 2004
This is a review of this paper by Oberholzer and Strumpf on music downloads
via peer-to-peer (P2P) networks and their effects on music sales. The claim by
the RIAA is that music sales are down over the last several years because of file
sharing, while this paper looks for such effects but finds none. Here is the response
by the RIAA, cut and pasted from the New York Times:
Amy Weiss, [RIAA Senior VP for Communications], expressed incredulity at what she deemed an “incomprehensible” study, and she
ridiculed the notion that a relatively small sample of downloads could
shed light on the universe of activity.
The industry response, titled “Downloading Hurts Sales,” concludes:
“If file sharing has no negative impact on the purchasing patterns of
the top selling records, how do you account for the fact that, according
to SoundScan, the decrease of Top 10 selling albums in each of the last
four years is: 2000, 60 million units; 2001, 40 million units; 2002, 34
million units; 2003, 33 million units?”
[. . . ] The industry response stresses that the new study has not gone
through the process of peer review. But the response cites refuting
276
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
statistics and analysis, much of it prepared by market research consultants, that also have not gone through peer review.
It should be noted that peer review is a painfully slow process in the social
sciences. I have a paper I submitted to a reasonably well-known and together
journal in November of 2002, and I still haven’t heard back; if these authors were
to wait that long for a full peer review, the downloading issue would be obsolete
and legislation enacted by then. Meanwhile, I count as a peer of these authors, so
here is my review of the paper.
Measuring the right causal story
The primary problem of measuring the causal effect of downloading on sales is that
popular tracks see both many downloads and high sales at the same time. Therefore, if you just regress sales of a song on downloads of the same song, you’ll get
a positive correlation every time. You’d conclude that that downloads are free advertising for an album, since more downloads mean more sales. But this mucks
up the causal story: the regression is driven by the fact that a track being popular
leads to both downloads and sales, but our question was whether downloads lead
to sales (or sales losses). We need more complexity to get at the causal story we’re
interested in. The authors are doing the RIAA a favor by providing a “incomprehensible” paper, since the naive method would have conclusively (and falsely)
praised P2P.
The standard econometric response in this causally ambiguous situation is to
use instrumental variables (IVs). An IV is a variable which is strongly correlated
to one feature (downloads) but is not correlated to another (sales). Once you find a
good set of IVs, you regress sales not on downloads but on the IVs.
So the story is:
A: the IV causes more downloading, and
B: more downloading causes fewer CD sales, therefore
C: the IV causes fewer CD sales.
We care about B, but can’t directly measure it. So we find something for which A
is true. If A is true and C is false, then we can reject B. OK—this isn’t quite true:
we can only measure correlations between these things, not causations. But with
the right variables, correlation will plausibly imply causation.
This turns what was one issue into many substeps:
(1) work out whether the IVs cause downloads
(2) work out whether the IVs don’t cause sales
(3) work out whether the IVs are correlated to downloads
(4) work out whether the IVs are correlated to sales
10.6. INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC MEASURES
277
Causation can’t be measured, so you’re down to sort of eyeballing (1) and (2).
The authors do a great job of coming up with creative IVs that clearly fit the first
two criteria: they use measures of Internet traffic, which affects how frustrating
it is to download a song, and a German school holiday, which led to a spike in
the availability of songs. Intuitively, these variables will have a causal effect on
the number of downloads, but there is no (non-convoluted) story as to why these
would directly cause a rise or fall in sales at U.S. CD stores.
As for step (3), the paper’s table 12, items IV and V, show that there is indeed
a high correlation between these measures of the IVs (Net traffic and German file
availability) and downloads, so they are a decent measure. They overall correlation coefficient, R2 = 1.4%, is lousy, but not surprising for this sort of regression.
I’ll get back to this below. [Technical detail: one of the dozen coefficients goes
the wrong way, saying that variability in download times increases downloads; I
didn’t see any explanation for this, but since this measure of Internet frustration is
correlated to other frustration measures in the same regression, this is not particularly crazy. Future studies should take this into account when designing their own
instruments. As for this study, I wouldn’t convict it over such a detail.]
Now for step (4): are these instruments correlated to album sales? O & S find
that they are not correlated in any statistically significant way, which is the result
reported by the media. So this effort to tell the causal story falls through, and the
authors find no causal link between downloading and sales.
However, the IV method loses power, which needs to be borne in mind. What
this means is that the regression has more variability than it had before: you’re
looking at the variability in downloads plus variability in Net traffic—or maybe
Net variability minus variability in downloads, if the two somehow cancel out. We
don’t know, and that means that the regression of sales vs the IVs doesn’t tell us as
much about sales vs downloads as we’d like.
Most academic papers aim to find some correlation, and if they do, then the
fact that the IV method is stacked against finding a correlation means that we have
still more confidence in the results. However, the authors here are reporting the
null result that there is no correlation, and the IV method stacks the deck in favor
of such a result. The low R2 above means the deck-stacking is potentially relevant.
It is possible that better IVs would find more of a relation between downloads and
sales. Or maybe not.
In conclusion
There is no such thing as statistical proof that downloads do or do not cause sales
losses, only persuasion one way or the other.
The question of how persuasive this paper is can be rephrased to: what is the
278
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
likelihood that somebody will come along with a new method and reverse the results given here?
This paper is persuasive to me. The IV method they use is the best that Econometrics has to offer. It is standard, well-accepted fare among econometricians,
despite its obscurity to Senior VPs of Communications. The quality of an instrumental variable paper depends mainly on the quality of the IVs chosen, and how
well they meet the criteria above, and I personally can’t think of any better measures than those used here. The R2 on the IV-to-download regression is not great;
there is some concern that the IV method loses power, favoring a null result, but
this is a problem that all null-result papers using standard methods face, and I’m
dubious that a better IV will come along and reverse the null result.
Competing papers
Amy Weiss has also said: “Countless well-respected groups and analysts, including Edison Research, Forrester, the University of Texas, among others, have all
determined that illegal file sharing has adversely impacted the sales of CDs.” So I
tried to track down these papers.
Stan Liebowitz wrote the University of Texas paper, which uses a time-series
method. It is a careful rendering of the RIAA argument above: draw a graph of
music sales and downloads, and sales go down while downloads go up, therefore
downloads cause losses in sales. This is wholly unpersuasive, and only demonstrates one of the primary lessons I’ve learned in economics: never trust a time
series. Why not draw a graph of cell phone sales, unemployment rates, or how
far Britney is past sixteen? With the appropriate specification, we could prove
conclusively that all of these are the coffin nail in music sales.
Stan is much more reasonable than this, and gives me the impression that he’s
sincerely trying to find the truth. He’s since changed his mind somewhat. But
personally, I think this is indicative of the whole problem with time series analysis:
it’s too easy to redo it more carefully and find a new result. Sorry, but time series
analysis has been so abused through the ages that I can’t look at such a paper
anymore without getting the creeps.
I tried registering at Forrester research, but had technical problems, and if it’s
the study I think it is, it costs $195 to view anyway.
I believe this is the study by Edison Research (but it could be another study
on this page). It found the results the RIAA reports in its e-z time series: more
people downloading, fewer people buying CDs. It also found a large number of
people who have burned or downloaded a CD instead of buying it—but it also
found “Many downloaders have gone on to buy a CD from an artist after downloading a track for free from the Internet.” and “9. Some downloaders, especially
10.6. INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC MEASURES
279
in the older [demographics], report purchasing more music since they began downloading music files.” Edison seems bent on reporting only those findings that it can
honestly back up, meaning that there is no statement in the report that says that it
has “determined that illegal file sharing has adversely impacted the sales of CDs”
as Ms. Weiss claims that this study did above.
In the “among others” category, The RIAA often cites a Field Research Corporation survey of 2,500 college students finds a negative correlation between Napster
usage and CD sales. Google couldn’t find me the survey itself, and I have no information about whether the RIAA directly commissioned the study or not. Lacking
the study itself, I can not say anything about whether the study is valid. My primary questions would be about how the sample was gathered and whether it is truly
representative. [Amy Weiss, any complaints about small-sample studies?]
So I couldn’t find two out of four of the studies I’ve seen cited by the RIAA;
one of the two I could find refuses to make any causal statements, and therefore
does not back up or refute either side of the debate above; while the other uses a
method which I believe leads to easily mutable results—and the author of the study
has confirmed this impression with his actions.
Meanwhile, the results by Oberholzer and Strumpf above are not perfect, but
are carefully done, open to scrutiny, and are probably the best effort to find a causal
link that Econometrics will be able to do. My experience with past papers is that it’s
easy to throw another variable into a time series like those supporting the RIAA
position and throw the results entirely askew, while it is difficult to do the same
with an IV study such as O & S’s study.
My editorial
One thing I’d like to see, based on my intuition as a music buyer, is a distinction
between major and minor acts—Britney vs the local bar band. As mentioned by
some speakers at the recent South by Southwest conference, indie music get good
publicity from free downloads, even if acts which appear on the Superbowl have
no particular need for grassroots publicity. Thus, I would expect that downloads
help sales of small acts but hurt sales of big acts. Notice that the figures cited by
the RIAA above are for the top 10 best-sellers, not for CD sales as a whole.
Oberholzer and Strumpf don’t say much about this. They find that twice as
many sales lead to more downloads, but less than twice as many. This could be due
to selection bias in the sample (downloaders are too hip for U2), or the fact that you
can just go next door and borrow the physical CD from a friend. Edison Research’s
result #9, that older demographics buy more when they download more, seems to
point to a superstar v bar band distinction, since the superstar acts are typically
aimed at kids.
280
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
O & S’s null result of no effect overall may be due to substitution effects, where
more downloads shift sales from the big acts to the smaller acts. If this were true
(and the paper sheds no light on my claim either way) this means that the RIAA’s
argument is not that downloads hurt sales, but that downloads favor small acts
over the acts the RIAA primarily represents. Legislation outlawing P2P networks
wouldn’t save the music industry as a whole, but it would save the big acts from
losing sales to the small acts.
10.7
Sound, fury
14 December 2004
Different networks (in the sense of humans connecting with other humans)
have different characteristics. A wide network, where everybody is connected to
everybody, provides utility for different situations compared to a friend-based network, where people are connected to only a few others. Similarly, different media
benefit from different types of networks.
Wide networks are potentially detrimental only to certain types of media. It is
difficult to argue that friend-based networks would be significantly detrimental to
any media relative to the status quo. This comment will conclude that the FTC and
media providers should make efforts to encourage friend-based networks, and at
the least not discourage them by threats or sabotage.
Network types
Gaim is an Instant Messenger client. It includes a list of the user’s friends, and the
user can click on their name to initiate a human-to-human conversation. The names
represent a network which very closely matches the sort of networks humans form
without the aid of machines. Of course, the network is probably a bit broader
because clicking an icon is easier than even a phone call, but the breadth is limited:
nobody wants their time wasted by constant requests for conversation, so most keep
their Gaim friends list reasonably close to their actual friends list.
Downhill Battle is developing a Gaim plug-in to permit filesharing, so that
friends can share media with friends. This mitigates many of the problems which
the panel has convened to discuss, such as viruses or spyware being transmitted via
file sharing, since one can expect that if a friend has put out a file, it is more likely
to be trustworthy. The method is a continuation of how music has been shared
for decades. The media industries have thrived with friends trading tapes with
friends, and has thrived with friends handing dubbed CDs to friends; the online
friend network is the next incremental step, but does not fundamentally change the
10.7. SOUND, FURY
281
speed at which goods are transmitted. I expect that friend-based networks for file
sharing will become increasingly more public and more common with time.
Compare to traditional file-sharing networks. The typical anonymous Internet
file sharing system comprises a complete network, where everyone on the system is
connected to everyone else. Humans rarely form complete networks in any groups
of more than a few people. For example, I recently did an analysis of junior high
school classes in LA; the average class size was about thirty students, yet few
students had more than about three friends in the class.
Music
We can draw a line from purely fashion-oriented music and consumers on one end
of the spectrum to the headphone-oriented music and consumers on the other end.
Everyone falls somewhere along the spectrum.
[[As an aside, I would like to clarify that although many look down on music which is fashionable but has little merit as music, that is not my intent here. First, the entire debate is about music,
not cures for cancer; even the music of the highest merit is still a consumption good for personal
enjoyment. Second, there is clearly a massive market for fashion goods, and these goods drive a
not-insignificant portion of the economy. But regardless of rhetoric on either side, music as fashion
good is a different type of good from music for headphones, and an analysis of the industry as a
whole needs to consider the two roles separately.]]
Music is a ‘networked good’, meaning that people consume more of it when
others are consuming more. But fashion-oriented music is a networked good for
different reasons than headphone music.
One who seeks to consume a fashion good simply seeks the goods consumed
by the maximum number of people. Even those who claim to eschew the popular
still tend to gravitate toward a few strictly delineated genres which have their own
sub-fashions; notice how so many fans of alternative (aka indie) music wear the
same trucker caps and t-shirts. But the great mass of people are not so subtle: they
seek only the most popular overall. For them, the complete network is preferred to
the friend network, since it gives fast information about the most popular.
The informational approach to networks assumes that people make decisions
based purely upon their private tastes, but they have limited information about the
goods available. The network provides that information. The standard example is
of two unfamiliar restaurants: if the first is crowded and the second is not, then a
passer-by may presume that others have information that the first is better.
Similarly with music, but the twist is that there are a multitude of genres and
tastes, so the tastes of a Metallica fan simply have no informational value to a
fan of Baroque and early liturgical music. Therefore, for the network to provide
information to consumers who will be listening privately on their headphones, it
282
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
must be subdivided into groups.
For those consumers and musicians who are in the fashion-oriented segment of
the market, the complete network is the ideal means of fast distribution (whether
desired or not), since it is easy to quickly obtain what is currently the most popular.
For those who seek the best music for private consumption, the friend network
provides information that the complete network does not; the friend network is
therefore more ideally suited to headphone music.
The fashion business
The approach to managing a fashion-oriented act is very different from an act oriented toward making music for headphones. A fashion-oriented act needs as large
a network as possible, and needs to pay attention to aspects peripheral to the music, such as visual artwork, costumes, videos, et cetera (and of course, the quality
of the music plays a part as well, though better technology has made producing
perfect-sounding music increasingly inexpensive).
For a fashion-oriented good, the value produced is an image, which is expensive to produce but intangible; instead, vendors sell a tangible good, music, which
has low marginal cost. In other words, the business model produces value in one
place, but then attempts to recoup profits from another. Such models exist throughout the business world, but they are often tenuous and run risk of failure. A good
example would be the sale of printers and toner cartridges: printers add most of the
value but are underpriced, while the cartridges are overpriced to provide profits. It
is no surprise, therefore, that a small cartridge-producing industry has sprung up to
undercut the producers of overpriced cartridges.
Nor is it a surprise that the printer manufacturers have begged the courts to
shut down its competitors and protect its business model. From the perspective
of market design, is there any reason that we should protect the ability of printer
producers to shift prices away from costs? Simply put, no. There exist situations
where the normal market model simply would not work, but it is difficult to argue
that the printer market is such a place.
Back to music: the question is whether the intangibility of music makes it
impossible for the producers of fashion goods to continue to operate. It does in the
sense that if the only means of producing a product from intangible fashionability
is in music, but this is clearly not the case: the names of successful performers sell
apparel, perfumes, music-playing devices, movies, and anything else to which a
name can be affixed.
In such a case, the vendors of fashion-oriented music may do well to shift away
from providing a purely informational product. Since the core of the product’s
value comes not from the music itself but from the performer and the advertising,
10.8. PRICING INFORMATION
283
hype, and style, the managers of such performers can vend physical goods such as
apparel and notebooks as easily as vending music and images.
But given that their primary product is currently information, their best bet is
to slow the speed at which the information can be transmitted. The best way to do
this, given that people will certainly trade music among themselves, is to encourage
systems based on friend networks instead of complete networks.
[P.s.: Want more writing on the subject that doesn’t quite lead to a conclusion
but is interesting anyway? Have a look at this PDF.]
10.8
Pricing information
30 April 2007
Since it’s interesting, we’ll begin with extradition. Extradition is not trivial. It’s
an infringement upon a state’s sovereignty to forcibly remove a person, so there are
treaties that allow extraditions only under certain conditions. The Australia/USA
treaty lists 29 types of crime for which a person can be extradited, and they ain’t
pretty:
1. Murder [...].
4. Unlawful throwing or application of any corrosive or injurious substances upon
the person of another.
5. Rape; indecent assault, including unlawful sexual acts with or upon children.
6. Illegal abortion.
7. Procuring, or trafficking in, women or young persons for immoral purposes;
living on the earnings of prostitution.
9. Bigamy.
10. Kidnapping; child stealing; abduction; false imprisonment.
13. Larceny.
14. Embezzlement.
17. Extortion.
18. Receiving any property, money or valuable securities knowing the same to have
been unlawfully obtained.
22. Arson.
25. Piracy, by statute or by law of nations; revolt on board a vessel against the
authority of the master of the vessel.
29. Dealing in slaves.
So your average shoplifter is safe; we’re talking about people who are selling
women and children into slavery or are true and honest pirates (a breed which still
exists in the seas between Australia and Asia). Major financial affronts like 17 &
284
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
18 are in there too.
Mr. Hew Raymond Griffiths5 is a UK citizen living in Austalia, and as far
as I understand it, he’s never been to the Western Hemisphere. But he’s just won
himself a ‘round the world ticket with accommodations for up to ten years, because
a court in Virginia found him guilty of copyright infringement, and the Australian
government has agreed to extradite him.
[I’m not sure if the Australia/USA treaty applies here, since the guy’s a UK citizen, but you get
the gist.]
As you can imagine, this guy wasn’t just making mix tapes for his pals. He
was running a warez site with heaps of software free for the taking. If you’re
not familiar with warez sites, they’re one of the dark corners of the web, mostly
inhabited by adolescents trying to prove their abilities by cracking security codes,
hosting big files (like an operating system or Photoshop), or just putting up lots
of porn. This is where ‘leet-speak came from, and everything about warez sites
and their denizens is a turn-off. They also tend to pick black backgrounds and tiny
fonts.
So let this be a lesson for any of you who have CSS that specifies less than a
ten-point font for your body text: the courts have no sympathy at all. It’s an easy
win for the prosecution, because warez site are so unattractive to normal folk like
judges and juries.
Pricing nothing But as above, extradition doesn’t happen for being a punk—it
takes big money crimes, with dollar figures up around seven or eight digits. And
here we run in to a problem. How do you evaluate intellectual property?
Let me give you another example: my think tank is a 501(c)3 nonprofit, so
contributions and donations are tax deductible. Microsoft, Inc. donates server
software to the think tank, which is one factor in why we have a famously slow
and messy web site. At the maximum, it cost Microsoft maybe $100 to send us
the software, what with the jewel cases and little holograms on the licenses and
the bubble wrap. Given that, how much do you think they’re deducting from their
taxes for mailing us those CDs?
I’m not in the mood to check right now, but last time I looked at Microsoft’s
annual report, their intellectual property was one or two percent of their assets,
where one percent of Microsoft is more than I’ll ever be worth. How did they
come up with that? They are reporting to shareholders, the SEC, and anyone else
who cares that their asset base is 1% larger than their physical plant. There are
accountants over in Redmond right now trying to work out how they can claim as
5
http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2007/04/copyright-extradition.html
10.8. PRICING INFORMATION
285
large an asset base as possible, and intellectual property (IP) is just a gimme for
them.
And not to pick on Microsoft, there are companies where IP is up there around
50 or 90 percent of their asset base.
IP is not the first thing in the world where evaluation is difficult. I had a job
that involved evaluating infrequently-traded options for a brokerage firm, and there
were yelling matches over it. The equations require an estimate of the volatility of
an asset’s price, and there are several ways to make that estimate. But at least there
are generally-accepted methods to do it, albeit a few too many.
The only method for pricing intellectual property is by current market rate.
This is common enough in asset pricing, but it’s problematic in this case, because
the distance between market rate and cost of production is so large. If Microsoft
sent the think tank ten copies of the server software instead of one, it’d be sending
ten times the market value, so it should be able to deduct ten times the amount
from their taxes. Gosh, why not just send a case of CDs and take the year off from
paying taxes.
Our intuition is that the recipients value the items at less than full retail cost.
Maybe they’d buy the first copy for full price, but the willingness-to-pay falls precipitously from there. But now we’re back to unobservable value, since we can’t
ask the recipients what a second or third license is worth to them. But it also seems
unfair to say that Microsoft can only deduct the price of printing and shipping.
The standard for damages in cases like that of Mr. Griffiths, as I understand it,
is to claim full retail price for downloads, which is why Mr. Griffiths’s web work
is sufficient to merit extradition proceedings usually reserved for child molestors:
the plaintiffs claimed $50 million in damages6 . The nice people at the RIAA often cite lost sales figures that assume full retail price for every downloaded CD
when arguing that the Department of Justice should allocate its scarce resources to
enforcing copyright laws. Especially with the losers on the warez sites, this is a
false assumption. If a kid who makes a few thousand a year from part-time at the
Seven-Eleven can’t get a free copy of Photoshop, he wouldn’t buy it retail (it’s very
pricey). He’d just get Linux.
This is not to say that none of the people who downloaded from a warez site
would ever buy retail. Sales were surely lost, but there is really no way to know
whether lost sales make up 1% of the downloads or 99%.
By the way, the operators of warez sites rarely make any money. They just do
it to be a leader among maladjusted adolescents. But, you figure, this has nothing
to do with whether the thief profits—if a gent steals some jewels to give to his gal,
it’s still theft. The Supreme Court commented on this very argument in its ruling in
6
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/25/copyright_plea/
286
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Sony v Betamax7 , which was a case over whether recording a TV show was theft
of intellectual property. Since it is mostly applicable to the situation at hand, here
is footnote 33 in full (minus citations; VTR = video tape recorder):
It has been suggested that “consumptive uses of copyrights by home
VTR users are commercial even if the consumer does not sell the
homemade tape because the consumer will not buy tapes separately
sold by the copyrightholder.” Furthermore, “[the] error in excusing
such theft as noncommercial,” we are told, “can be seen by simple
analogy: jewel theft is not converted into a noncommercial veniality if
stolen jewels are simply worn rather than sold.” The premise and the
analogy are indeed simple, but they add nothing to the argument. The
use to which stolen jewelry is put is quite irrelevant in determining
whether depriving its true owner of his present possessory interest in
it is venial; because of the nature of the item and the true owner’s interests in physical possession of it, the law finds the taking objectionable
even if the thief does not use the item at all. Theft of a particular item
of personal property of course may have commercial significance, for
the thief deprives the owner of his right to sell that particular item
to any individual. Time-shifting does not even remotely entail comparable consequences to the copyright owner. Moreover, the timeshifter no more steals the program by watching it once than does the
live viewer, and the live viewer is no more likely to buy prerecorded
videotapes than is the time-shifter. Indeed, no live viewer would buy
a prerecorded videotape if he did not have access to a VTR.
Pricing IP at market rates is based on metaphor to physical goods, but as our
intuition and the Supreme Court observe, this metaphor doesn’t really work out,
partly because consuming information without paying does not prevent the owner
from continuing to sell that information elsewhere, while the owner can’t sell stolen
physical goods.
As usual, I have no conclusion. You can decide for yourself whether running
a warez site is on par with throwing acid on a person. But be aware of the huge
open question that is the pricing of IP, and there’s a small industry built on trying
to come up with a passable (but self-serving) number.
On behalf of the IP experts of the world, let me say: we have no idea how to
price intangible assets. But despite our cluelessness, the number eventually made
up matters to us humans. After Enron, there have been many volumes written on
how to tighten accounting standards so companies can’t do what Enron did, even
7
http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/464_US_417.htm
10.9. CHINA VISITS THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
287
on a smaller scale—but then IP gives companies an exception big enough to drive
a truck through. By tricks like the one above, the US government loses what is no
doubt tens or hundreds of millions in tax revenue. Market pricing of IP is sending
Mr. Griffiths around the globe, and market pricing allows media producers to have
so much pull in Congress that they can use the USA’s finite political capital to
initiate extraditions.
10.9
China visits the Library of Congress
26 December 2005
Articles like this C—net article8 take as given that China’s prevalent copying
of works copyrighted in the U.S.A. is an evil that has to be stamped out; it’s just a
question of how. I’m not particularly happy about rampant copying either, but it’s
not as blatantly obvious an argument as such articles make it out to be.
Ethics First, the ethical argument: people deserve to not have their stuff copied.
If I’m the author of a work, then I should have the right to control how that work
is reproduced.
This ethical argument is supremely modern. First, it didn’t even make sense
before the printing press—and not just Gutenberg’s 1450 movable-type invention,
but the printing press that was so common that Earthly authors could have their
works reproduced, around the 1600s. In the law, it’s at most 300 years old, and
British authors have had the right to not be copied by US publishers for only 130
years.
By the way, when I say ‘author’, I mean publisher, because it is virtually impossible to get a nonfiction book published here in the U.S.A. without handing
your copy rights to the author (which you can verify on the copyright page of the
nonfiction titles on your desk now). As for a movie, it is the production studio, not
the director or lead actors, that holds the copyright. That ethical right for Andre
3000 to not have his likeness used to shill Happy Meals? My right to not be quoted
out of context? Signed away a long time ago. I’ve commented on this before, but
once you put your work into the public sphere, your ability to control that work is
limited, even with copyrights.
There are some weird laws here and there, like how visual artists have the right
“to prevent any destruction of a work of recognized stature” (17 U.S.C. 106.3(b)),
but the bulk of copyright law is not about artists controlling what is done with their
8
http://news.com.com/The+copyright+challenge+in+China/2100-7348_
3-5867480.html
288
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
work after it leaves the studio but about the accountants controlling profits derived
therefrom. There’s a bit of a conflict here between artists and accountants, because
a not-trivial number of artists care more about having their name spammed the
world over than about profits. If there’s a press somewhere in China counterfeiting
copies of my book and distributing it to everybody with fifty cents to spare, I will
be absolutely tickled, while my publisher will be taking every available avenue to
shut the thing down.
Buying China’s compliance So why does the Chinese government want to send
its police out to enforce a copyright on file with the U.S. Library of Congress?
The short answer: it doesn’t. China’s governors realize that, as above, copyright
is not an ethical issue, and that to enforce copyright is to work for accountants
somewhere in L.A., Nashville, or Seattle.
Then the negotiations kick in. “We’ll give you a favorable price on grain that
saves you 200 billion dollars, and in exchange, you enforce your IP laws, thus
sending 200 billion back to the U.S.A.,” the trade negotiators explain. Do not
presume that the negotiators for the Chinese government are so naı̈ve as to think
that TRIPs are in any way an ethical issue, or that they will allow more money to
flow out of China than flows in. Bilateral negotiations will ensure that the present
value of what is taken about equals what is given back. [That $200 billion figure is
from the C—net article above, citing the U.S. Trade Representative. The figure is almost certainly
exaggerated.]
The key question, then, is whether these negotiations are really desirable for us
in the U.S.A. They would be a $200 billion dollar subsidy to the movie, music, and
software industries, in the purest sense of the word: $200 billion that would have
been earned by other industries will no longer be collected, and the media people
will collect that money instead. Spin generally focuses on the positive side: we all
want our starving artists paid and better movies and music. But intellectual property laws don’t produce value where there was none before, but merely reallocate,
meaning that we will have less from whatever other unspecified industry loses in
the negotiations.
Further, let us not forget that if TRIP negotiations like the above don’t go
through, then we will not suddenly be in an entertainmentless world, but will simply be at the status quo. Movies will be made, bands will record albums, and Microsoft will keep churning out software. These industries have managed to make
a profit based entirely on those markets that already recognize U.S. copyrights.
There is a sunny future where they are making still more films and albums, but it
is not a for-free future. It is one where costs are borne by other U.S. industries that
will dwindle as the entertainment industry profits.
10.10. THE US TRADE REPRESENTATIVE: NOT WORKING FOR YOU 289
Summary paragraph: the debate over enforcing U.S. copyrights in developing
countries is not an ethical issue; if it were it would be about the rights of artists,
not the rights of agents and money-minders as the actual debate is framed. Nor is
it money that will be handed to the U.S.A. by grateful Chinese citizens. Instead, it
will be in the form of a subsidy, as other U.S. industries lose to approximately the
same extent that the media industries gain.
10.10
The US Trade Representative: Not working for you
28 June 2007
The US Trade Representative is a self-descriptive office of the Executive Branch.
I’ve followed them as closely as I can tolerate, which is not too closely.
Within the broad mandate of its name—to represent the US in trade negotiations—
it could potentially have a number of mandates. They could be free-marketeers,
and simply strive to lift all barriers. They could try to maximize well-being for US
citizens, under the presumption that the Indian and Chinese Trade Representatives
are taking care of their own. But there are opinions from the USTR that contradict
both of these options: they are no strangers to endorsing blocks on foreign goods,
even though those goods may benefit U.S. consumers. After all, the USA still has
a Harmonized Tariff Schedule9 with 99 chapters. How do consumers benefit from
the 2.5-10% import tax on station wagons (chapter 87)? Why is coffee free for
import but “coffee substitutes containing coffee” are taxed (chapter 9)?
They could be a pro-business organization, but that too fails, because there
are many types of business the USTR leaves on the back burner of trade; you’ll
see one below. The only consistent description of what the USTR does is that it
advocates for those companies and industry organizations that have contributed the
most cash to the current presidential administration. That is the minimally cynical
interpretation that is consistent with actual USTR behavior. I’ve tried my hardest to
accept sunnier interpretations, but none fit. The only way to read the Harmonized
Tariff Schedule is to ask who paid for each line to be added or removed.
As I’ve commented before, the USA has limited political capital. It’s certainly
a lot, and a lot more than Ghana has, but most trade negotiations are tit-for-tat
operations, and you only get one tit at a time. Thus, when the USTR stands firm
on a rule that maximizes profit for certain U.S. firms, it puts all other firms and
individuals in a worse position. We’ve all got to pick our fights, but the USTR’s
seems to pick the fight for pharma—Harmonized Tariff Schedule chapter 30, plus
appendix—pretty darn often.
9
http://www.usitc.gov/tata/hts/bychapter/index.htm
290
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
The USTR and intellectual property Because I spend most of my time looking
at IP, I can offer it as a case study. The USTR is not interested in strong IP laws.
Sure, they have documents10 that say things like “The Administration will continue to pursue the aggressive enforcement of intellectual property rights. . . ” And
they have repeatedly forced foreign countries to adopt U.S. patents so that they are
unable to produce generic drugs that would lower prices in those markets, which
seems to be a pro-intellectual property stance.
But on the other hand, it recently set up an agreement that some countries
outside the USA must weaken their laws protecting medical test results11 (pdf),
because such IP protection hampers the foreign adoption of US drugs. So there
went any thoughts that the USTR just believes in IP: they advocate strong IP only
when it benefits US interests.
The above document repeatedly states provisions that countries may limit the
agreement when necessary to protect the well being of their citizens, but (I’ve
briefly alluded to this before too) the USTR habitually puts pressure on any country that uses such compulsory licensing exemptions. The USTR is doing its part
to make sure that nobody in Africa bypasses U.S. patents to produce AIDS medications, even though the situation is a public health emergency by any measure.
There are likely tens or hundreds of thousands of people the world over who have
died thanks in part to the USTR’s selective position on strong intellectual property
law.
Not doing evil: the hard part Google, Inc., a provider of information services
the world over, has had trouble in China. They profess their goal of making all
the world’s information available everywhere, but Chinese culture as far back as
Confucius has pushed for greater restraint, pointing out that unfettered speech can
destroy social order. This is one of the great questions of civilization, and none
of us have an answer. Further, information covers a lot of ground with different
ethical implications, including kiddie porn, Faulun Gong tracts, and direct critiques
of government officials. So I’m not going to touch the question of what China’s
leaders should be doing. But the fact remains that they are currently among the
world leaders in censoring Internet traffic12 .
10
http://www.ustr.gov/Document_Library/Press_Releases/2002/
February/USTR_Announces_Results_of_January_2002_Special_301_
Out-_Of-Cycle_Reviews_of_Intellectual_Property_Protection_in_the_
Bahamas_.html
11
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%
2Fwww.ustr.gov%2Fassets%2FDocument_Library%2FFact_Sheets%2F2007%
2Fasset_upload_file312_11283.pdf&ei=1beCRoqeNaCUeIzZjbYK&usg=
AFQjCNEoyVxQKXu1_bP5L4uhCBOaiuqd1w&sig2=iL2r-uoiFK_7OrIG2UZjdg
12
http://opennet.net/research/profiles/china
10.10. THE US TRADE REPRESENTATIVE: NOT WORKING FOR YOU 291
But Google is sticking to its opinion that information wants to be free, and is
working hard to make sure that its services are as fully available as possible in
China. Is this because they want to maximize shareholder value, or because they
truly feel that censorship is evil? I dunno. Probably a little of both. But they took an
interesting approach to the issue: they petitioned the US Trade Representative13 ,
claiming that China’s blocking of valuable information products at the border is
exactly analogous to any other country’s blocking of textiles at the border. After all,
information is on par with textiles in dollar terms, and is the primary industry for
large swatches of California. Further, the USTR has spent many lawyer-hours on
convincing China’s central government to convince local police to arrest Chinese
street vendors who shill dubs of Star Wars, because doing so is in clear violation
of the copyright on file at the film department of the Library of Congress [which
is where I’m writing from, by the way]. So everything is in place for the USTR to get
involved.
So, what is the USTR’s opinion? From the article linked above: “‘If censorship
regimes create barriers to trade in violation of international trade rules, the USTR
would get involved,’ USTR spokeswoman Gretchen Hamel said. She added though
that human rights issues, such as censorship, typically falls under the purview of
the State Department.”
So they don’t even bother considering it. Now, the USTR’s lawyers are expected to argue three impossible legal interpretations before breakfast. For example, I’ve read too many articles where they claim that other countries are violating
a treaty originating in 1986 if their domestic courts make rulings that diverge from
a certain 1994 ruling by a U.S. domestic court. [Yes, the TRIPS treaty and In re Alappat.] They are such fans of disingenuous interpretation of law that I find their naı̈ve
statement that they can’t see censorship as a trade barrier to be disingenuous.
The USTR’s primary work is helping companies in situations where some
country is not allowing the company to vend its goods, and this is exactly the situation Google faces. The USTR works hard on maximizing foreign markets for U.S.
media. But here, the USTR rejects a media provider’s complaint of being blocked
from trade out of hand. Again, there’s an easy cynical interpretation—Google has
not contributed enough to the Bush Administration—but a non-cynical interpretation that is in any way consistent with other USTR behavior is not forthcoming.
Why are Merck, the RIAA, the MPAA, and the Intellectual Property Owner’s Association (a lobbying group for IP extremists) on the USTR’s IP advisory committee,
but Google is not invited? [IP is Industry Trade Advisory Committee14 number
13
http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/G/GOOGLE_CENSORSHIP?SITE=
WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
14
http://www.ustr.gov/Who_We_Are/List_of_USTR_Advisory_
Committees.html
292
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
15.]
Trade negotiations are going to happen, and India, China, and everybody else
do indeed have their representative. So the US needs the office of the US Trade
Representative. But it does not have to be an opaque organization that makes important policy decisions behind closed doors. I’ve tried, I’ve tried, and I can not
find systematic evidence to refute the hypothesis that the USTR’s purpose is to advocate for policies that make money for the small number of firms that are large
contributors to Republican candidates.
But there are alternatives. They could set a list of open priorities and stick with
them, except for circumstances that are understood and explained. Final agreements are half in the USTR’s control and half the control of the other side, but the
USTR could publish rationales for the agendas they bring to a meeting with trade
representatives from other countries. More generally, they could behave like a representative of US citizens and provide the level of transparency we expect from a
government bureaucracy with heavy influence on trillions of dollars in trade.
10.11
Yahoo: a person lacking cultivation or sensibility
26 July 2007
[The title is the OED definition of the word.]
The post from last time about the US Trade Representative15 was originally
about boycotting Yahoo!. I realize now that the whole thing is probably best entitled ‘my immense disappointment with the software industry’, but I’ll get to that
next time.
As you may know, Yahoo! voluntarily gave information to the Chinese government identifying three Chinese citizens (that we know of) who promoted democracy on Yahoo! web sites. Their finger-pointing led to their conviction and ten
years’ imprisonment. Software is not real, the Internet is nothing but æther, but ten
years in a forced-labor prison is as concrete as it gets. Yahoo! had a real, tangible
influence on fucking up three people’s lives.
The Chinese court that convicted one of these individuals pointed out that Yahoo! was instrumental in the arrest of one Chinese dissident16 . I’d detail the lives
these folks led after their inevitable conviction, but it’s so common that you already
know it: beatings, psychological abuse, deliberately inferior conditions to ensure
15
http://fluff.info/blog/arch/00000217.htm
http://watching-eyes.blogspot.com/2007/06/
amended-complaint-by-victims-of-torture.html
16
10.11. YAHOO: A PERSON LACKING CULTIVATION OR SENSIBILITY 293
that inmates are unable to sleep or maintain good health, and of course the forced
labor.
And so, in the U.S. courts, there is a federal lawsuit against Yahoo! claiming
that its actions have violated the Alien Tort Statue and the Torture Victim Protection
Act.
Why’d they do it? Because Yahoo! is big in Asia17 . It cares deeply about maintaining is position as a major advertiser and content provider in Asia—especially
China. Of course, so do other ‘Net conglomerates like Google and MSN, but those
guys have managed to operate without ratting out their customers. Google’s apologia for censoring its web results in China18 states: “No, we’re not going to offer
some Google products, such as Gmail or Blogger, on Google.cn until we’re comfortable that we can do so in a manner that respects our users’ interests in the
privacy of their personal communications.” Chinese folks can use blogger.com,
whose servers are located in the USA, and can safely expect that Google will
not aid the Chinese government in prosecutions based on what is stored on those
servers. That’s a fine approach, and I’m sure any of the big three conglomerates
have more than enough lawyers to make it work.
The Yahoo! shareholder’s meeting was a few weeks ago. A large shareholder
named the City of New York requested that the issue be addressed. Here is item
#1 on the six-point list that the City proposed: “Data that can identify individual
users should not be hosted in Internet restricting countries, where political speech
can be treated as a crime by the legal system.” Notice how this basically matches
what Google says it has in place right now.
And the board responded that “certain of the standards suggested by the proponent would give the Company insufficient flexibility in responding to applicable
legal requirements.” So it looks like the board comprehends exactly what the proposal was intended to do. Other proposals by other shareholders met a similar fate,
in the way of ‘Oh, we already have enough checks and balances in place’. This
is an awkward statement given that shareholders care exactly because there don’t
seem to be any checks.
What we get here is that Yahoo! is not merely complying with Chinese law,
but is actively working with it, even in policies that we consider to be downright
unethical. This makes Yahoo! money, because it continues to make billion-dollar
deals to expand its conglomerate within China’s borders, and those deals only work
if they have active government support.
Yahoo!’s board was handed an opportunity to apologize for their hand in send17
http://www.theregister.com/2007/07/09/comscore_asiapacific_
study/
18
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/google-in-china.html
294
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
ing two people to prison for writing words, to give shareholders and customers a
half-hearted signal in the way of ‘oops, won’t happen again :)’. Instead, they chose
signal to the Chinese government that they remain free to comply next time they
are asked to send somebody to jail.
Censorship My discussion above has focused on the question of cooperating
with police in prosecuting dissidents. There is also another question that I personally consider to be secondary: should media providers comply to China’s insistence
on censorship?
[ In the USA, by the way, Google has a preeminently amusing approach to corporate censorship:
if a company demands that they not post search results that the company dislikes, then they post the
takedown notice instead (via chillingeffects.org), thus making the complainant look like even more
of an ass, and leaving the URL available anyway, since it has to be in the takedown notice. Ha ha.]
But back to China, let’s not delude ourselves that the only way for a Chinese
person to get information is to search via Yahoo!, Google, or MSN. There are several hundred other search engines, and although google.cn is filtered, google.com
is much slower but not filtered. And hey, you can always use tor to get around all
this. So I take censorship as a lesser evil than cooperating with police because there
are easy ways around it. Although this isn’t strictly true, censorship feels passively
unethical while volunteering a person for torture is actively unethical. Of course,
you can decide for yourself whether you agree (and post in the comments if you
don’t).
Walking away I mentioned all this to Ms LKB of Baltimore, MD, and she points
out that the US isn’t really entitled to dictate how China runs its media. This is a
valid point, and one that I’m not disputing here. But Yahoo! is not obligated to
provide media either. New York’s point #1 above is not about Yahoo! forcing U.S.
child porn upon unsuspecting Chinese citizens, but about protecting humans from
persecution.
And while I’m on child porn, it provides a nice metaphor. [Is there a corollary to
Goodwin’s law that all Internet discussion eventually winds up at child porn metaphors?] Go type
“sex tourism” into your favorite search engine; there are parts of the world where
the prostitution of children is so commonplace that you could argue that the local
government condones it. This is a direct clash between the ethics of U.S. citizens
and the participants in these businesses elsewhere (though I can only guess the
extent to which the citizens of a sex tourism destination condone it all). So what
do U.S. businesses do about this moneymaking opportunity? They walk away and
leave what they consider to be unethical activity to those who don’t consider it
unethical. It’d be nice to have a hand in shutting it down, but walking away is
10.12. MY IMMENSE DISAPPOINTMENT WITH THE SOFTWARE INDUSTRY295
certainly the minimum threshhold. Above, Google decided it would comply with
the censorship requests, but walk away from any business that may lead to the
torture of its users.
For my part, I’m walking away from Yahoo!. Let me note that I’m banging this
out on a Microsoft keyboard, my backup PC is an IBM Thinkpad, and I generally
understand that a company, an artificial entity consisting of thousands of people,
is neither good nor evil. [See prior essay19 .] But the Board of Yahoo! is only a few
people, and for my tastes, they are being a bit too blatant in their efforts to support
what I consider to be unethical. So I’m giving up on them. Which is not to say that
I’m switching to Google; the author of an alternative search engine blog challenged
his readers to go a day without Google, and to help us along, offers a list of 100
search engines that are neither Yahoo! nor Google nor MSN. I’m not sure why, but
I’m personally partial to Clusty20 .
Of course, Yahoo! is a conglomerate, not a search engine. I canceled my
Yahoo! email account, which was just a wasteland of spam anyway, but then that
means that I can’t get into my flickr account, because flickr sold out to Yahoo! a
few years ago. And so it goes.
10.12
My immense disappointment with the software industry
14 September 2007
I dislike Jane Austen novels. Any novel by any author is about people, even in
sci-fi where the people are dressed up as sentient chunks of silicon. The characters
do things, things happen to them, and the novel is interesting for the reactions of
the characters. But Jane Austen novels cut to the core, because nothing actually
happens. The light coming through the swaying tree branch makes it look like one
character flinched, the other responds to the perceived flinch, the first responds to
the response, and soon you have a plotline built out of nothing. I acknowledge that
others love her writing, but I can’t stand it.
Next point. To a great extent, ethics is about efficiency. If I told you that most
of ethics is about individual self-interest versus achieving the most benefit for the
group at large, you’d wonder whether to class that as self-evident or a tautology.
So much of what we find to be deeply unethical—the smashed car window to steal
somebody’s favorite CDs, the tire company that shipped tires that fall apart and kill
19
20
http://fluff.info/blog/arch/00000106.htm
http://clusty.com
296
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
people because the accountants thought they could save two cents an hour in labor
costs—are the ones that are most destructive for the least gain.
So I’m finding the politics of software to be increasingly onerous. The politics
of coal mining is about people finding jobs, producing heat and electricity, environmental destruction. Things happen, and on that backdrop, people do the usual
asshole things to promote their self-interest and get more money than the other
guys. Human blood was likely spilled in the examples of unethical action above.
But there is nothing tangible to software. It’s just information, whose best
claim to actually existing is a weak differential in a magnetic field. A few episodes
ago, I wrote about people who were tortured to advance Yahoo!’s hopes of transmitting its weak electromagnetic disturbances across China, and the time before, I
had written about how the US Trade Representative has actively worked to ensure
the death of thousands (if not millions) of people with AIDS in the name of ownership of information. And hey, how about a story about a man who threatened to
kill a child21 so he could keep putting out spam.
Look, I know all the arguments for why software and intellectual property matter, and respect most of them. When I’m not writing about software, I’m writing
books and law review papers about software. If computers didn’t exist, I have no
idea how I’d buy food. But I can still acknowledge that it is all smoke, shadow, and
æther.
Can software make the world a better place? No doubt. Information, human
connection, learning about the world through data analysis beyond human ability,
fun—we can get all of that from software. And further, well-written software is
write-once, use forever, because copying code is so easy. I really have downloaded,
compiled, and used software written in the 1980s. I use the GNU’s edition of grep
a dozen times a day, as do literally millions of people around the world, and it hasn’t
seen any substantial changes in five years—even the changes in 2002 weren’t so
substantial. That is amazing value for effort.
Tragedies are not about people being stupid and dying, but about people falling
from grace. The software industry’s fall from infinite abundance to endless bickering is a tragedy.
Even the ones who are allegedly on the pro-efficiency team are asses. Just today I read about the GNU’s lawyer having a drag-out argument with the guy who
named the O’Reilly Press after himself. I won’t bother linking to it—you’d be
better off spending your time reading Jane Austen directly. Gosh, I’ve received a
nastygram or two from the lead author of a stats package because s/he didn’t like
the concept behind my stats library. Pardon my yelling, but THEY’RE FUNC-
21
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070802-30-years-in-the-slammer-for-online-p
html
10.12. MY IMMENSE DISAPPOINTMENT WITH THE SOFTWARE INDUSTRY297
TIONS TO SHUNT MATRICES. THERE IS NOTHING TO POLITIC OVER.
You use yours, I’ll use mine, and at worst there’s some duplicated effort.
“But B,” you protest, “hadn’t you heard? People suck.” And I would say
that yes, I realize this, but I’d been hoping for something a little better in the new
world. I mean, it’s just so easy out here, like a fantasy novel. You want a castle
on a cloud? No problem, get coding. Write your fiction, and it will compile and
run and on a good day spit out correct answers. My real failure was in thinking
that people’s suckiness came from scarcity, so in a world without scarcity, people
wouldn’t suck. But no, people just make something up and call it scarce. When
you light your taper at my torch, my flame is no dimmer—but now I’m not the only
guy on the block with light.
So where we could have invented abundance, people die and are tortured over
invented scarcity.
Manufacturing scarcity This is all an extended example of a class of actions
that create ethical qualms in virtually everybody. They take a situation of general
abundance and well-being, and manufacture scarcity therefrom. That’s why it’s
unpleasant to talk to most anti-immigration activists: as per the last column, they
take the world around us, a Land of Opportunity, and cast it as a wasteland of
scarcity.
Don’t manufacture scarcity is the neoclassical, capitalist, free-trade equivalent
to the old track, “Kids, be free. Do whatever you want, be whoever you want to be,
just as long as you don’t hurt anybody.”
It’s a simple and easy way to maintain some ethics, and all of the above examples manage to blare right past it. The hardcore neoclassicists are surprised that
you can do things in a neoclassically perfect system that still causes others harm,
like building barriers between them and the things they need, that you can then
promise to drop should they pay the right fee.
If we agree that people are subjective beings, and that their perception of value
depends on things besides just their immediate gut need, then it is possible to create
scarcity simply by claiming that there is scarcity, as does the anti-immigration team
with its constant hammering away at how the USA is a land of scarcity.
The problem is that the whole system rides on scarcity. Some of these forms
of manufacturing scarcity simply consist of withholding your services or goods
from others until they pay up. We think this is OK, and the system clearly won’t
work without that type of scarcity. For most of the world’s desirable goods, there is
simply not enough to go around—our infinite desires have to live on a tiny planet.
But there are other cases where the scarcity is an artificially built wall keeping folks from what they would otherwise have access to, like the formula for
298
CHAPTER 10. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
a medicine or a job opportunity. Intellectual property law is designed from the
ground up to create scarcity in the use of an idea, which is why IP law makes
so many people queasy: just because some dude is the first guy to come up with
some idea, he has the right to manufacture scarcity of that idea the world over?
Franz Kafka died in 1924, but if I disseminate his writings far and wide, I’ll get
sued? It takes a few steps to make that scarcity makes sense; sometimes it does and
sometimes it falls flat.
As usual, I have no conclusion, but intend only to point out that even though
our system depends on the existence (and sometimes creation) of scarcity, there
are still distinctions between creating scarcity in one’s own goods and services and
building artificial barriers so you can charge a fee to drop them. Free marketeers
see all manufacturing of scarcity as necessary and good, and the hippie kids see all
manufacturing of scarcity as evil, but both extremes go nowhere. It’s a case-bycase question that doesn’t admit sweeping generalizations like ‘all patents are bad’
or ‘all free market actions are Pareto-improving’.
11
M USIC
11.1
How to survive in a world without silence
14 June 2004
With the family today. My brother once explained to me that he doesn’t really
get why people don’t listen to upbeat music. If it doesn’t get the blood pumping,
what’s the point. Conversely, my mother has repeatedly complained that anything
more upbeat than Enya “scrambles her brainwaves”. Fortunately, we were in the
car with my brother’s pal, R of College Park, MD, who resolved the conflict by
finding smooth jazz interpretations of bossa nova classics on the radio.
Me, I just want something. My mother constantly narrates whatever it is that
she’s doing or thinking, and that scrambles my brain waves. [I’ve mentioned this
to a few people and they all tell me that their mothers do the same thing.] More
generally, I feel surrounded by noise all day long. There’s the usual cacophony of
cars, until evening, when the noise of the city’s refrigeration and air conditioning
units run all night long. Used to live upstairs from Morry’s Deli in Hyde Park, IL,
and we would all hang out on our back porch = Morry’s roof. It was a great place to
sit and chat, except when the mega-refrigeration unit kicked in, so we worked out
where its fuse box was. Sorry, Morry, but it was just too loud to talk over. The train
tracks were a block away, but as Mr. PS of Brooklyn, NY, points out, everybody
loves the sound of a train in the distance.
I once got to visit the NIST sound-measuring room. There’s noise-absorbing
foam on all six walls, so you walk on a grid of wires in the center of this padded
cube. It is arguably the quietest place on Earth. Me, I heard ringing. Others who
had been to fewer concerts and spent less time in traffic than me heard their heart
beating. Nobody could honestly say that they heard nothing.
In the morning, the birds start chirping extra-early, if they stop at all, since
they’re so confused by the sodium-whatever lights buzzing all night long. At my
volunteer work for (name of think tank), I wear ear plugs under noise-canceling
headphones, and if I crank the music, I can’t hear the keyboards and the case fans
299
300
CHAPTER 11. MUSIC
and the ubiquitous air conditioner.
More than anything, I want music to provide order to a disordered world.
A lot of things will do this, as pointed out by a certain Quiet American—though
somehow smooth jazz doesn’t cut it. It may seem like an innocent enough desire,
but I feel that most of the world opposes my wish for ordered sound over white
noise. Further, most people seem to believe that in a conflict between the music
listener and the white noise-seeker, the white noise-seeker is automatically in the
right. You can always tell somebody to turn down their music, and if they don’t
comply, they’re bad people. The guy in the next cube has occasionally asked me
to turn down my headphones, yet has never asked the interns to stop chattering, or
anyone at all to type more quietly.
Cars spew noise pollution constantly, though drivers typically don’t notice this
because their cars are carefully designed to deflect noise away from the driver and
out to the rest of the world that didn’t pay for the car. But nobody gets tickets
for driving noise-spewing cars—unless they’re playing the stereo too loud. Leaf
blowers, lawn mowers: no problem. Somehow, everyone else in the world can
tune these noises out, but can’t tune out music; and I can’t tune out the sound of
the thousands of little motors that surround me all day.
My first memory (at least what I tell the therapists who never fail to ask) is of
laying in bed listening to music from two apartments down. The train tracks were
right out the window (yes, we lived on the wrong side of the tracks), so apart from
the rare train that wandered that way it’d be relatively quiet, except for that far-off
record. I’d stay up trying to picture the people who were listening to it. It was the
late 70s, so it was silly Billy Joel-esque pop, but being from two windows down it
had just the right echo and distance to make it beautiful.
Even living in Washington Heights, where the same repetitive four-minute salsa
track can be played up to 360 times a day, I still felt the music from my neighbors
was a blessing, a little absolution from the constant noise of the city.
11.2
The mosaic of the air
20 November 2003
[See the last poem on this page.]
The drive finally gives me no errors, and I can pull the delightful music encoded
thereon, and it makes me happy. I can sit here in my cube, with earplugs under
noise-canceling headphones and some Beach Boys playing (Have I mentioned how
great Pet Sounds is?), or maybe the Beta Band (from a song entitled ‘Round the
Bend: “I listened to the Beach Boys just a minute ago,/ Wild Honey,/ it’s not the
best album but it’s still pretty good./ Got some funny little love songs on there./ But
11.2. THE MOSAIC OF THE AIR
301
it’s not mainly a Brian Wilson production so it’s probably not as good as something
like.../ Pet Sounds.”), and it’s like I’m not even here.
I like listening to music from hard disks, even though it cost me hours of futzing
the other day. Well worth it. You never, ever have to get up to change the record.
Not having to change the record does have the disadvantage that you’re more likely
to tune the music out, what with no reminder every twenty minutes.
[[Here’s an apropos factoid: CDs are about 74 minutes because the people at Sony wanted to be
able to put Beethoven’s Ninth on one disc.]]
The other wonderful thing about music from a hard drive is that there’s no cover
art. To many people, music is a fashion statement, and the cover art is therefore
essential. And just think how many chanteuses base their singing career on their
photogenicity. I have no objection to the music-as-fashion-statement people, and
certainly am not gonna dictate how they should relate to an abstraction (music);
but for me, the cover art is more often than not annoying. The band members
look like idiots. The lyrics are always disappointing relative to what I thought they
were saying. The liner notes (if any) never include figures. I’ve only discovered
the delight that is goth music after hearing it from a hard drive, because ya don’t
notice the high quality of the music until you strip away the dreary cover art and
excess eyeliner.
Did I ever tell you about the really wonderful trickery that went in to the MPEG
1, layer III standard? The problem was that one minute of music on a CD is 10MB
of data, which is a whole lot. For comparison, this blog page (before this entry) is
.036MB, equivalent to a fifth of a second of musical data. Now, the old standard
for dealing with this sort of problem was lossless compression: you find all the
redundancies in the data and eliminate them in a consistent manner, so you can
reinsert them later and get exactly the same result. [A clarifying example: if you
were to replace all the thes in this blog with an X, you’d save two characters every
time. This alone would make the blog 1.5% smaller.] But that didn’t work so great
with music, so better was invented.
[[Part of the motivation for caring about the size of digital music, by the way, was the development of the Sony MiniDisk. Even though nobody bought one, its technology lives on.]]
The brilliant new idea was that we humans can’t perceive certain things about
our music. If there’s a loud A (a frequency of 440 cycles/second), and then there’s
something playing quietly off-key at 441 cycles/second, we humans can’t hear the
off-key instrument at all. It may as well not be there, as far as we’re concerned.
Then there are those high pitches that only dogs can hear—no point encoding those
until dogs start buying music. There are other tricks, but I can’t remember them
right now. [[The ever-observant Mr. PH of Seattle, WA pointed the author to this article which
found zero difference in perception between a properly-encoded file and a CD. The person who was
most able to find a difference had hearing damage (and therefore the psychoacoustic models used for
302
CHAPTER 11. MUSIC
encoding didn’t quite describe him).]]
Anyway, through such trompe l’oreille techniques, we can get that same 10MB
of music on to 2MB and no human can tell the difference. I think that’s neat. Computational algorithms based on human perception are one of the great advances of
our time.
I’ve had a few readers, such as Ms. EB of Rockville, Maryland, comment
that my blog here is rather impersonal, and I tend to expound and/or pontificate
on dumb stuff like psychoacoustics instead of talking about my deepest emotions.
But the MPEG 1, layer III encoding and compression standard has had a profound
effect on my well-being and general emotional state. For example, I would not
be able to deal with sitting in this cubicle without it. In 1999, before the standard
became as well-known as it is now, I had to bring CDs to my cubicle, and I simply
could not bring enough CDs in to make the stay tolerable—and that cube even had
a window.
Visual just doesn’t have as much impact on me as aural. Maybe that’s just
my own fashion statement, or the music my mother played for me in the crib or
the erratic mappings of my brain, but that’s just how it is for me. As such, the
general buzz of traffic, air conditioners, and those annoying people everywhere is
just unbearable. This is one way in which I feel like an oppressed minority: people
care much more about visual aesthetics over aural, and so things like leafblowers
are somehow OK. And so, I care deeply about having some sort of order to the
airwaves pressing against my head. Rummaging through my closet yesterday, I
found that I have five pairs of headphones—I think I’d wear them all at once if I
could find a way.
11.3
The hot new sound of Classical
28 August 2006
‘Classical’ is a terrible term for music. It implies that everything in the classical
bin was written somewhere in the 1700s, which is so very far from true. There’s so
much there that is more influenced by modern pop sensibilities than by the church
music of the Renaissance.
So, here are some albums that are technically classical in that they are works
by symphonies or small collections of symphonic instruments, but which are decidedly modern in leanings. You’ll notice that the list barrels clear through from
the early 1800s to the present without much of a break—there’s classical from the
1970s and from two weeks ago, that I wouldn’t feel bad classing as Classical, but
which is decidedly not about powdered wigs.
11.3. THE HOT NEW SOUND OF CLASSICAL
303
The disclaimer, once and only once: this is entirely my opinion. Please read
every sentence below to begin with ‘I feel that’.
To give you my first opinion, I don’t really like music from back in the 1700s.
Much Bach-era music is written toward the harpsichord, which is like a piano except that it is incapable of dynamics (which is why the name pianoforte stresses the
quiet-loud capabilities of the new instrument). That means that building tension in
the music often requires speeding up or trilling or otherwise throwing in too many
notes. Even the non-harpsichord music, like Bach’s very listenable cello concertos,
are also advised by the overtrilling.
No, music began for me around 1800, when this guy Beethoven started composing. To many, he is the precursor to the romantic movement, which is characterized by less focus on form and more on the emotional content. That is, Beethoven
invented indie, and is thus the first composer to really appeal to somebody like me,
who was raised on radio pop and dubs of Velvet Underground cassettes.
The romantic period included a few other notables. I continue to (heart) Berlioz’s
Symphonie Fantastique, for example. But there’s a massive risk that less-structured
music takes: without caution, it winds up sounding like background music for a
movie. Since movie music times itself to screen action rather than musical logic, it
tends to have a certain stop-start feel that is unfun by itself. Thus, when I hear the
stop-start stylings of many romantic composers (Debussy), I start to wonder what
movie I should watch for the music to make sense.
Chronologically, George Gershwin fits in right here (we’ve jumped to 1920),
but you already know his classical works, between the United Air Theme and his
operatic aria, “Summertime/ and the livin’ is easy.” He’s notable for working hard
on folding popular music into a classical framework, and you’ll see that just about
every composer from here on in does the same. In fact, he was so good at it
that some people think that Summertime is a folk song that Gershwin adapted or
otherwise stole. But nope, he wrote it; Wikipedia says so. Gershwin is not the
inventor of the concept of folk adaptation; Modest Moussorgsky was doing this a
decade or two before him, and somebody better versed than me can surely give still
earlier examples.
Now skip forward to the 1950s, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, where
Communist-era composers were paid well to appeal to the proletariat. We can start
with Shostakovitch himself, who fell in and out with the Party, but wrote some
rollicking good music in the process. The ending to his Fifth Symphony might as
well have an MC on stage going ‘Everybody now pump your fists!’
Béla Bartók also knew how to rock out, as demonstrated by his Music for
Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and his Concerto for Orchestra. [Amazon link] At
this point (the early 1940s), music is already starting to look pretty experimental.
There are crashes and bells that are intended to surprise the audience, Bartók wrote
304
CHAPTER 11. MUSIC
in absurdly complex time signatures for novel combinations of instruments, and he
is once again often pulling from Hungarian folk music.
Antonı́n Dvor̆ák also demonstrates the basic rule that if a composer has an
accent in his name that doesn’t appear in English, he’s probably from Eastern Europe and works for modern listeners. His Ninth Symphony (From the New World)
leans on American Folk songs like Gershwin did, and rocks out like Shostakovitch
rousing the masses.
What are we up to here, the 1970s? I’ve only got one composer for ya from
1970, Philip Glass. To show his folk influence, he wrote two symphonies, Low and
Heroes, based on themes from the same-named David Bowie/Brian Eno albums.
But the stuff he wrote in the 1970s is often intolerable to most folks, because it
is harshly, decidedly repetitive. [Low and Heroes are OK.] The idea is to repeat
a phrase several times, and then make minor changes to a single element of the
phrase, so that the minor shift stands out. Since most of pop music is based on
repetition, you wind up hearing it everywhere when you look for it. But by itself,
in its starkest form, it’s a bit intolerable. However, he’s still alive, and is right now
somewhere composing something. After, oh, 1985, his music started to mellow
out, and he began to get into a groove that is decidedly informed by his minimalist
drones, but is also more recognizable as an orchestral work.
So, OK, to tide you over through the 1970s, how about Alfred Schnittke? He
was often off the deep end with the stop-starts, but how can you not love a guy with
a Symphony Number 0? Due to a few strokes, Schnittke composed a number of
his finer works after he was pronounced legally dead. I’m not sure how a musician
could be more badass than that. I’ve recommended Schnittke before in this list,
and brought up a few more composers above this list.
Now So here’s what I’m looking for to extend the Classical time line: it’s primarily instrumental, there are cellos, and the music is influenced by the sort of pop
that we’re familiar with, so it may be challenging but is not so foreign as to mystify
us entirely. That’s why Philip Glass’s earlier stuff is out, but his later stuff is in.
As above, I don’t have an ear for movie soundtracks, so John Williams is out, as is
Peter Gabriel’s Passion.
We immediately recognize a group like Rasputina to be not-Classical. They’re
three cellists, who dress in period-type costumes. But there’s vocals all the way
through, the songs are about four minutes long, they ride the cellos hard to produce
very uncello sounds, and the audience is all goth kids. Every one of these elements
appears in formal Classical. There’s cellos, bad costumes, short Leiden, treated
pianos, and always at least a couple of goths in the audience. The point being that
distinguishing the New Classical from pop is going to be hard.
11.3. THE HOT NEW SOUND OF CLASSICAL
305
Did you know David Byrne has a blog? It’s a good read, since he’s a smart guy
who gets to go to places we don’t. That link there is about a deserted factory in
Germany, which he proposes is a good set for his symphonic piece about industrialization, The Forest. There are vocalists, including soloists, but more in the style
of Mozart’s and Verdi’s Requiem than Rasputina’s songs about vampires.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The name just reeks of hipsterdom, right down
to the creative typography. But let’s let that aside, and stick with the music itself.
Most of their stuff has a build-and-release form; I’ve seen one or two curmudgeons
who characterized this as monotonous, and one or two other curmudgeons who
characterized their music as inaccessible noise. With half the world thinking it’s
obvious and half the world thinking it’s impossible, I think they’re doing fine. If
you have to get just one, get the Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada EP. Could a title
be more of a turn-off? But the storyline told by the music, including a lengthy rant
by a standard off-the-street nut, is moving. The cover is the Biblical Hebrew word
for the chaos that existed before the universe was created. No idea what it has to
do with the music, but dude, it’s deep. [Amazon link]
Tarantula A.D. show that yes, the cover art can get worse—and the name, oh,
I’m embarrassed to mention them. But they do good stuff. I saw these guys live
a few weeks ago, and it was wonderful to see a guy play a cello like a rock star,
throwing it up while playing, headbanging, and otherwise having a good time.
The music is like that too. The pieces are shorter than GY!BE’s but longer than
Rasputina’s, and are more about the standard rock drum kit interacting with cello
and violin.
Both of the above overpretentious bands are shooting for Post-rock, an genre
made famous by Chicagoans like Tortoise and non-Chicagoans like Sigur Rós. But
since the post-rock bands aren’t playing orchestral instruments and are often more
interested in interesting sound than musical narrative, few would be willing to give
them a slot in the Classical chronology.
Rachel’s, evidently named for a group member’s old car, is more on the chamber music side. But there’s a reason why the indie kids like it.
Then there’s Tzadik, a label founded by John Zorn, whose solo horn playing on
stuff like Naked City is just annoying. Tzadik is a pun referring to both the Hebrew
letter that is their logo and to the word meaning Righteous. Thus, it is a half-step
away from Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe label.
Tzadik CDs tend to be really expensive and a total crap shoot. The bad stuff is
as annoying as John Zorn experimenting on sax; the good stuff is stunning. As you
can tell by the name, there’s a Jewish leaning in the music selections, but there’s a
lot to avant garde Jewish music, let me tell you. Since I’ve already given you over
a dozen hours of music to run out and listen to, I’ll just keep the rest of the Tzadik
section down to a short list: The Cracow Klezmer band (From Eastern Europe
306
CHAPTER 11. MUSIC
⇒ Awesome), Roberto Juan Rodriguez (Cuban Klezmer ⇒ Righteous), Zakarya
Yves Weyh, maybe Steven Bernstein (more straight-up jazz klezmer) and some of
John Zorn’s stuff like The Circle Maker. [I want to mention Tim Sparks, who plays
Sephardic-influenced music, but he’s disqualified from the list for being only solo
guitar.]
And finally, they have no cellos, but this list would not be complete without
mention of the First Vienna Vegetable Orchestra.
11.4
A haphazard history of indie music
12 April 2005
Five years ago, indie music was called alternatyve music, but that died because
that phrase got overcommodified, so everybody had to move on to another phrase
that meant ”not mainstream” for the marketers to class everybody else into and then
eventually water down to the point of uselessness. I wonder what the synonym is
that we’ll be using five years from now.
As with most of the world’s dichotomies, the creative-indie vs cookie-cuttermainstream dichotomy doesn’t work in practice. Looking through the mainstream,
one finds an abundance of cookie-cutterdom, but also details that indicate that these
are musicians who have as much a sense of play and the avant garde as those who
wear their experiments on their sleeve. Here is a history of key events in indie
music, as told through works by people whom most people would consider to be
entirely mainstream.
• 1770: Beethoven is born.
• 1830: Berlioz composes the Symphonie Fantastique about a crush, including
a trip to hell and his eventual beheading by demons.
• 1867: Modest Moussorgsky (no relation to Modest Mouse) writes Night on
Bald Mountain about Walpurgisnacht.
• 1937: Bela Bartok writes Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, using
rhythms so complex they sound like noise until several listens through.
• 1959: The Bossa Nova hits it big, beginning with the Black Orpheus soundtrack, including tracks where Luiz Bonfá plays guitar with street noise such
as dissonant drumming in the background. The album features occasional interjections such as the female lead of the movie being shocked by the devil.
11.4. A HAPHAZARD HISTORY OF INDIE MUSIC
307
The Bossa Nova continues its ubiquity via Tom Jobim classics like Insensantez. (”How insenstitive/ I must have seemed/ when she told me that she
loves me.”)
• early 1960s: Phil Spector works out what to do with multitracking, including
strings, horns, and everything else that comes to mind, in otherwise basic
doo-wop rock ’n’ roll numbers.
• 1965: The Righteous Brothers put out a song entitled “Unchained melody”,
even though that phrase does not appear anywhere in the song itself.
• mid–late 1960s: Psychedelia.
• 1966: The Beach Boys and Beatles put out a few albums that are entirely not
danceable, and somewhat histrionic. [See Beach Boys discussion (p
• 1966: On the same album that brought you Scarborough Fair, Simon and
Garfunkel sing ”Silent Night” over a newsman reading the evening news
headlines about Lenny Bruce dying of an overdose, Nixon complaining about
war protesters, and a serial killer brought to trial.
• 1973: Roxy Music forms, featuring Brian Eno and Brian Ferry, putting out
the only album ever produced in the genre of ambient glam rock. The star
track is an ode to a blow-up doll. (”I blew up your body/ but you blew my
mind.”)
• 1975: The Ohio Players put out a peppy song entitled ”Love Rollercoaster”
with haphazard screaming at the tail end of the song.
• 1975: Lou Reed, who was indeed trained to write advertising jingles, puts
out four sides of noise1 .
• 1978: Guitar Center, a supermarket vending musical instruments to kids trying to rebel and distinguish themselves from everybody else, incorporates in
California.
• 1984: Benny and Björn, the Bs in ABBA, team up with Tim Rice to write an
album (later a musical) about chess. The single, sung by Murray Head and
also about the favorite game of math nerds, peaks at #3.
• 1991: R.E.M. scores a hit single with a song involving a mandolin. (single:
#4, album (Out of time): #1)
1
http://www.dancingaboutarc.com/essays/e050101.html
308
CHAPTER 11. MUSIC
• 1991: Nirvana tries its hardest to be unpopular with the mainstream (”He’s
the one who likes all our pretty songs/ and he likes to sing along/... But
he don’t know what it means.”) but fails miserably: Nevermind takes #1 on
Billboard’s charts, as frat boys the world over sing along to the above lyrics.
• early 1990s: Radio stations whose tag line is “The New Rock Alternative”
crop up in every city in the U.S. larger than Austin.
• 1995: U2, a band with six albums to hit number one and a Superbowl appearance to its name, puts out an album in collaboration with Brian Eno and,
oh, Luciano Pavarotti, mostly featuring ambient soundscapes, plus one song
about Elvis (”[he] didn’t mean sh*t to Chuck D”.)
• 1995: Prince, author of an album that spent 24 weeks at number one, plus
more number one singles than you can count, demands indie status from his
label.
• 1997: The Spice Girls, who had a movie and a saturday morning cartoon
and a following that was mostly born after CDs, put out an album including
about a minute of vinyl end-of-record hiss.
• 2000: Gothiness and geekiness become mainstream and nobody sees any of
the above as unusual anymore.
11.5
Why I like Prince
2 February 2004
I like Prince, and the rest of the world hates him, I think, for basically the same
reason: he doesn’t stick to a genre any more.
It all began around 1992, which is also the year when he started shaving the
word ‘slave’ into his facial hair and being generally overexpressive in public. He
put out the symbol album, which included the pop single ‘Seven’ and any of a
number of other tracks, all in different genres: an R&B tune (Sweet baby), a rave
tune (Wanna melt with U), a reggae tune which I don’t recall because I always
skipped it, and even Prince doing a decent job of kind of rapping (My name is
Prince). His subsequent album, which remains my favorite Prince album, gets still
more divergent, including rave, blues, plain old pop, and artsy sort-of-spoken-word
stuff. Allmusic.com gave that album (Come) two stars. “it’s a record fulfilling a
contract, nothing more and nothing less.” Silly me; there I was putting half the
songs on repeat for a month.
11.5. WHY I LIKE PRINCE
309
Compare this to Prince at his five-stars-and-a-little-check-mark pinnacle, Purple Rain. That album is wonderfully consistent, ranging from synth pop to guitar
pop and everything in between.
Of course, all results based on a time series are suspect, but I think his loss of
popularity stems from his boredom with doing just pop all day long. Mr. GK of
San Diego, CA and I saw him in Madrid in 1999, and he played the song Purple
Rain; the solo matched his improvisation on the album from fifteen years before
note-for-note. The audience loved it.
There are a few people that I would class with Prince, including They Might
Be Giants and of course the Magnetic Fields. These people are explicitly not of
one genre, which sort of bends one’s conception of what music is supposed to be.
I had a friend many years ago, Mr. Carter Green, who could play anything with
strings. He studied music at the University of Chicago, the most theoretical music
school around, and could strip away the fashion and break any of it down for you.
‘Oh, you like the bossa nova? That’s all diminished seventh chords’ and he’d play a
few diminished seventh chords (or something) and it’d be like Brazil in 1967 right
then and there. He’s the one who pointed out to me that surfer rock is just Sephardic
oud music played double-time. [[See, Dick Dale, author of Pipeline and other tracks that
defined the surfer genre, was a Middle Eastern immigrant.]] He had a menu of techniques at
his disposal for playing to evoke mood or place or time. He understood not just
rock or classical or blues, but music.
People like Carter challenge our conception of what music is supposed to be
about, because the hard part becomes not about evoking a certain mood—‘cause
that’s easy—but about something deeper and more ineffable. It’s that part of music
in which the musician expresses something that the listener understands and feels.
Gee, I can’t describe it, because if I could describe it with an essay it wouldn’t
be uniquely musical, now would it, but it’s what distinguishes the technically apt
from the really valuable, and it’s something that’s different to every person, and
it’s something that most of us (myself included most of the time) don’t consciously
look for in music.
Because true expression-in-a-sympathetic-way is so hard to gauge, and technical aptitude is so much easier, we grade our performers on how well they execute
the technical requirements of a chosen genre. Those that eschew one set of tricks
in search of that part of music which is not moored to a genre have thus chosen a
hard path in life. Whether they succeed in their search is up for debate, but simply
choosing the search over just playing Purple Rain over and over again is admirable.
310
11.6
CHAPTER 11. MUSIC
Why I don’t go to record stores any more
20 October 2004
I buy all of my music online now, partly because I’m lazy and partly because record
stores depress me.
The first thing that depresses me about record stores is that there is so much
there that I will never hear. At the bookstore, you can fool yourself into thinking
that you can read that painfully thick novel or that algebraic topology treatise in a
few hours and then move on to the next book, but to listen to a 60 minute record
will take you a full hour, no matter how fast your brain works. Your average used
CD bin is maybe three days’ worth of music. The entire store, especially the ones
that call themselves megastores, may literally be more than a lifetime. And so,
every time I walk into Tower records, I am reminded of my mortality.
The other thing, which I’m sure most of you are thinking right now, is that even
though there’s so much out there, most of it is complete crap. There’s the bargain
bin, with Moth and the Dandelions and the Axis Y. These guys were convinced
enough that they had something special that they put months into composing, rehearsing, and recording—and still further, the producers were convinced enough
that they put tens of thousands of dollars of effort into it, hiring the studio, engineers, cover artists, et cetera. I can buy the culmination of all that effort for a
quarter.
Some record stores have the congenital problem that they file records by genre.
This sucks for a few dozen reasons. At different record stores, I have found Arto
Lindsay, my fave beyond faves who does experimental bossa nova, in Dance, Pop,
Rock, International, and The Outer Limits. So for those of us who come in with
a specific musician in mind, we have to ask the counter guy, thus defeating the
purpose of sorting things.
The other type would be the browsing customer. First, browsing in a record
store, on top of the depressingnes, is frustrating. Here’s a random album, say Roxy
Music’s Country Life. I know the band is all boys, but the folks on the cover
are clearly female. There’s foliage. All of this tells me absolutely nothing about
the music, and the instinctual flipping-of-the-box to check the track listings tells
me nothing as well (except that ‘More than this’ isn’t on the album). So I can’t
understand people who haphazardly browse for music to begin with, but say that
people really are likely to buy a CD alphabetically near their favorite musician; I
don’t understand how breaking things down by genre can really help. If I like Roxy
Music, am I destined to not like Al Green? If the answer is no, then they shouldn’t
be in different parts of the store.
Which brings us to one more problem of genre-sorting. It perpetuates bad
race relations. The categorization works like this: if it’s a white lead singer, it’s
11.7. I JUST WASN’T MADE FOR THESE TIMES
311
pop/rock; if it’s a black lead singer, it’s R&B/hip-hop (aka Urban, implying that
pop/rock should be synonymous with Country). Yes, there are exceptions, which I
know you can list for me, but this works for the vast majority, and it doesn’t help
anything in any way.
Even classical music, I’d contend, should not be ghettoized. First, there are still
a dozen composers who are cross-category (Gershwin is the standard example; or
how about the Low symphony? [BUY!]). As noted above, I’m really dubious that
many people actually buy much music just based on the cover and the musician’s
name, but if they do, then there’s all the benefit in the world from mixing genres.
Pop/R&B lovers stand to benefit from not segregating classical, since they all recognize names like Beethoven, but classical listeners may recognize popsters-withstring-sections like Björk as well. If we class classical as ‘any instrumental with a
string section’ then pop fans are happy to buy it in the form of movie soundtracks,
so why underestimate their Beethoven-buying abilities.
Now, one way in which it would all make sense is if people only select their
music as a fashion statement. Their only interest in Mozart is that only pseudointellectuals listen to it, and their only interest in Björk is that she’s so darn quirky
(and hot). Then the current system works great: they come in and look at pictures
of stuff, and buy whatever visual most fits their self-image. Categorizing by type
of fashion statement only makes the search more efficient. Which brings us to the
core of my frustration (which I guess I’ve mentioned in a previous entry): records
stores, and the bulk of the record industry itself, is entirely built around people who
are in search of the most appealing fashion statement. There’s no moral reason why
that’s a bad way to do it, and those who buy music as a fashion accessory are free
to do so, but it’s not how I search for new music, and in some ways like store layout
and assorted marketing and funding issues which I leave to the reader to sort out,
pandering to the fashionistas is an impediment to the rest of us.
11.7
I just wasn’t made for these times
22 October 2003
I’m taking a break from bitching about economists today to actually speak positively of somebody. Namely, Brian Wilson, head of the Beach Boys.
In today’s episode, I’ll repeat Brian’s oft-repeated story, since its fable-like
qualities are very applicable to us here in the modern day.
So: born and raised in Hawthorne, CA, which is somewhere near LAX. Played
the guitar a lot, listened to the radio a lot, sang with his brothers a lot. Thus began
the Beach Boys’s teen pop group phase, which you’re familiar with: Surfin’ USA,
California Girls, Help Me Rhonda, I Get Around. The lyrics were basically empty,
312
CHAPTER 11. MUSIC
but they sounded good, and they all included four part harmonies which, like all
great art, seems effortless but is really hard to compose and execute.
After the first album, Brian was given a lot of leeway in production. I.e., he
got to decide how stuff was recorded, who played the instruments, how things
were mixed, and so on—stuff you don’t think about but which matters a lot in the
final product. For example, Brian Wilson was both deaf in one ear and a control
freak. Bothered by how you could move your speakers around in the room and get
a different sound, he mixed everything down to monaural, guaranteeing that it’ll
sound the same everywhere. Compare with The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, which you’ll
barely recognize when you hear it at that coffee shop with only one speaker.
This went on for a while, and Brian got more and more into the production side
while the other Beach Boys went out and toured Asia. Brian got good, culminating
with Pet Sounds, which used all of his abilities as a writer and producer and vocal
arranger. Here’s Paul McCartney, bassist for a competing band, on the album: “[it]
blew me out of the water. ... no one is educated musically until they’ve heard that
album.” (full interview ).
So Pet Sounds sold lots of copies and got wide acclaim, and if you don’t have
a copy, Paul says you’re uneducated. Wilson also liked the work, described it as
writing “teenage symphonies to God”. He followed Pet Sounds up with that short
masterpiece, Good Vibrations. Yeah, the oldies staple. The one from the Sunkist
commercial. That dumb little song cost $50,000 (in 1966 dollars, or $284,000 in
2003 dollars), and Brian produced 90 hours of tape which he eventually mixed
down to the final three minute and 37 second version of the song which has been
so painfully overplayed.
So your next homework assignment is to go listen to that darn song again. It’s
unfortunately weighed down with a lot of baggage—thanks a lot, Sunkist—but
there are a lot of things which stand out which probably don’t come to mind when
you play the song in your head. First, there’s the theramin, which, just by itself,
would have made the song innovative. Then notice the entirely un-pop percussion,
with an arrhythmic drum adding color to the main beat, which is being played on
a cello. The song vaguely follows a verse-chorus thing, but not quite: like the
usual post-adolescent symphony, it includes a number of movements which are
thematically related, but which basically stand up on their own as musical pieces.
None of these were pop song features, although there’s nothing surprising
about them when we hear them in a pop song now. This track defined modern
music, and it took five months and everything Brian (age 24) had to put it together.
Now, part of how it went about defining modern music is through its influence on that other band, the Beatles. While getting over their Pet Sounds-induced
reverie, they put out Revolver [Pet Sounds: May 1966; Revolver: August 1966,
so it was mostly done before Pet Sounds came out], famous for being their first
11.8. THEY SAY I’VE GOT BRAINS, BUT THEY AIN’T DOING ME NO GOOD.313
truly experimental work. As the story goes, Brian and the Beatles were now in
head-to-head competition on equal footing. Brian was working on his next album,
Smile, while the Beatles were working on Sgt Pepper. It was a close competition: if
you’ve heard the stuff from Smile, most of which he finished (ask me nicely and I’ll
get you a copy), it’s pretty great stuff, which maintains his symphonic standards.
Then Brian broke down. About two weeks before the Beatles put out their
album, Brian just canceled Smile. He needed to put out his album first, he was the
perfectionist who recorded 90 hours of tape for Good Vibrations, and the two were
clearly not compatible. So he gave up. He got depressed, gained lots of weight,
and put out some frankly crappy songs (“doughy lumps, stomach pumps, enemas
too/ That’s what you get when you eat that way.”).
And that’s how we got to today’s situation: we in the public have relegated
the Beach Boys to cute boy band status, and their closest competitors have led a
blessed life ever since.
So, dear reader, there is the story of the rise and fall of Brian Wilson, as told
by me. You get to draw your own moral for today.
11.8
They say I’ve got brains, but they ain’t doing me no
good.
24 October 2003
So for the past decade or so, I’ve been in and out of some rather well-known,
intelligent-sounding places. And so, it has happened to me many, many times that
I am introduced to some stranger with something in the way of ‘This is B. He’s at
(name of institution)’ and stranger replies, ‘Oh, so you must be really smart’.
Boy, is that ever annoying.
There is no way that I am ever going to live up to a start like that. That’s why
I prefer to introduce myself as an artist living on welfare. Keeps the expectations
low, and is basically honest. [Pablo Picasso defines, “Art is the lie which allows us to see the
truth.” Is this not a perfect description of economic modeling?]
Now, I’m not complaining. I mean, having associated myself with all of these
places with lots of smart people has been a decided boon for me, and I have gotten a
job or two because the interviewer looked at my resume and exclaimed, ‘Oh, so he
must be smart.’ And if ya hang out with smart people, it sorta rubs off sometimes.
But I haven’t particularly produced all that much. No publications over here. No
starving children fed. I mean, I did write a video game, but that’s a far cry from the
brilliance that’s frequently foisted upon me.
So I feel for Brian Wilson, as I believe many people do (or would, if they knew
his story).
314
CHAPTER 11. MUSIC
Much research has been done on responses to pressure, showing that there
are distinct types. Few people perform best with zero pressure, but some people
are better with only moderate pressure, and some are better with whole heaps of
pressure. The heaps-of-pressure people are the athletes and type-A businessmen of
the world. The moderate-pressure people, well, that’s the rest of us, including Mr.
Wilson.
He’s the poster child for a generation set up for failure. We’ve all read about
the type-A people to no end, and there’s the constant, implicit imperative that we
should be like them. I mean, why not? There wasn’t anything that was keeping
Brian from finishing Smile: he had the funding, a few hundred hours of tape and
the know-how to edit them together. The theory says that he should have easily
finished. Yet, it didn’t turn out that way.
There’s a strong incentive on the part of a public figure to try to give the impression that everything they do is easy, and most pull it off. And that’s why Brian
Wilson is the pop icon for me, whom I best relate to. He’s not the flawless creative
genius who just threw together brilliant works, but someone for whom creation was
a fight the whole way along, and although he fought well and created great things,
it was a fight he eventually lost.
12
W HY W ORD IS A TERRIBLE PROGRAM
Efficient computing matters to me. It pains me to see people who spend all day in
front of a computer serving inefficient tools. Most of the technical essays remain
online, where they are readily found by search engines. But I amalgamated many
of the more general essays around a critique of a single, commonly-used program
named Microsoft Word. After a few words from the New Yorker, I will discuss
the value of semantic markup, efficient interfaces, and (most importantly) standard
data formats that allow documents to be shared among everybody.
First of all, it is time to speak some truth to power in this country:
Microsoft Word is a terrible program.
[. . . For example,] there is the moment when you realize that your
notes are starting to appear in 12-pt. Courier New. Word, it seems,
has, at some arbitrary point in the proceedings, decided that although
you have been typing happily away in Times New Roman, you really
want to be in the default font of the original document. You are confident that you can lick this thing: you painstakingly position your cursor in the Endnotes window (not the text!, where irreparable damage
may occur) and click Edit, then the powerful Select All; you drag the
arrow to Normal (praying that your finger doesn’t lose contact with
the mouse, in which case the window will disappear, and trying not
to wonder what the difference between Normal and Clear Formatting
might be) and then, in the little window to the right, to Times New
Roman. You triumphantly click, and find that you are indeed back in
Times New Roman but that all your italics have been removed. What
about any of this can be considered high-speed?
From The end matter by Louis Menand, The New Yorker, issue of
315
316
CHAPTER 12. WHY WORD IS A TERRIBLE PROGRAM
2003-10-06.
If you are a casual user, then Word is probably fine for you—maybe even ideal.
It’s great that there is a product out there that will help complete novices and your
proverbial Aunt Myrtle to produce beautiful documents.
But for many office workers, regardless of their job title, their actual occupation
is “Word user”. They come in at nine-ish in the morning, edit documents in Word
for eight hours, and go home. If that describes you, if half of your waking life is
spent staring at that program, then you no doubt have a strong interest in working
out how to use your most-used tool efficiently. Maybe the right tool for Aunt
Myrtle is not the right tool for you, and your life would be better if you could jump
ship for something better.
I realize that Word is a standard that many of you are forced to use by your
employers or colleagues. After you send your boss or colleague a copy of this
paper, you may want to have a look at Section
I recently wrote a book entitled Math You Can’t Use: Patents, Copyright, and
Software, so I should clarify that that book and this document are 100% unrelated.
That book was about the law and politics of software, but this paper isn’t: this
paper is about efficiency and usability, and I promise you minimal discussion of
the politics of Microsoft in the pages that follow.
By the way, my publisher asked me to write that book in Word, so I have ironic
first-hand experience with using Word to write a complex document.
12.1
Semantic editing
The key failing of Word is the difficulty of semantically-oriented editing.
The way most of us format a document in a word processor is to change the
formatting of individual elements as we need them. Titles need to be marked in
boldface; there needs to be this much space put between paragraphs; the margins
should be just so on the cover page. I will call this literal markup, where you make
changes on the screen until the text looks the way you want it to look.
The alternative is to specify what each element actually means, and then worry
about how the formatting happens later. Mark the titles as <title>, mark the paragraphs as <text>, and mark the cover page as <cover>. Then, write a style sheet
that lists rules that titles should be bold, that text has this much space between
paragraphs, and that the cover page’s margins are extra-wide. Then, the computer
knows to apply the formatting described in the style sheet to your document.
The benefits to semantic markup are immense. First, your boss’s boss is going
to tell you to change your titles to italics instead of bold as soon as she sees the
document. In the semantic system, you change the definition of a title element in
12.1. SEMANTIC EDITING
317
one place and you’re done; in the literal markup system, you need to go through the
entire document and change every title individually—and then repeat when your
boss’s boss decides that no, you were right, it does look better in bold.
And did you catch the title on page sixty-eight down at the bottom? With
semantic markup, because you didn’t change fifty points in the document, you
don’t have to worry about whether you are still consistent or not. More generally,
it is by construction impossible to have inconsistent style with a semantic markup
scheme, because you define each style exactly once. With literal markup, you need
to be on guard for consistency all the time.
In the literal markup world, you wear two hats at the same time: author and
typesetter. In the semantic world, you wear the hats one at a time. When working
on content, you are not distracted by stylistic junk. Some would describe working
only on content and putting off stylistic issues until the very end to be “no fun”,
but it is certainly more efficient. Of course, you are welcome to play around with
the style sheet between writing every other sentence if you so desire.
The document you are working on now is probably not the only document you
are writing during your career. Once you have a visual style that you like, you
can save those definitions of titles, text, and cover sheet to use on every future
document. In the literal markup world, you have to redo the margins on every
cover page every time, duplicating a few minutes’ effort with every document.1
Along a similar vein, your company has a standard letterhead, and may have
a graphics department that would prefer all documents to have a consistent style.
In semantic-land, your company can distribute a single style sheet and ask that
everyone apply it (even if they think it looks ugly; there are always dissenters in
this system). In literal markup-land, the graphics department sends out a list of fifty
rules everyone must follow when setting up their cover page, wasting everyone’s
time and guaranteeing that half of the rules won’t get followed.
Finally, it is increasingly important that your document be available as a PDF,
a web page, and in your company’s legacy TPS format. The semantic system,
done right, is output-independent. You send the same document to one program
that marks up titles appropriate for the printed page, and another that marks it up
for the web. If you had to do literal markup appropriate for both the web and
paper, it will look terrible in one or the other, and you’d just wind up writing and
maintaining two documents.
Semantic markup is hands-down the way to format a document. It doesn’t
take any more cognitive effort or ability to mark up your title with \title{Intro}
1
There are of course tricks, like cutting and pasting the cover sheet from past documents and
hoping the formatting follows. Even when they work, you can see that they are still inefficient
relative to applying a style sheet.
318
CHAPTER 12. WHY WORD IS A TERRIBLE PROGRAM
or <title>Intro</title> than it does to mark it up to read as Intro, so semantic
markup provides all of the above benefits over literal markup for basically no cost.
Semantic markup v WYSIWYG Too bad Word is written from the ground up
as a program for literal markup. If you read the manual, you will see that there
exists a style editor, which claims to allow semantic markup. It lets you define
paragraph types and character types, like a title style or a text style.
So the first tip, should you be using Word, is to use the style editor. Avoid
hard-coding any sort of formatting; instead, define a style and apply that style.
But it’s not entirely that easy, because Word will try its hardest to frustrate you.
Word thinks it is smarter than you, so it will often guess the style you mean to
be applying to a line, and sometimes revert styles back to where they were. Each
element can have only one paragraph and one character style, but there are often
reasons to apply multiple styles at once (blockquote on the cover page, italics in
a title). Be careful to note where your styles are being saved. If they are being
saved to your normal.dot template, then when you send your document to your
colleagues, your styles won’t go with.2 Best of luck cutting and pasting between
documents with different style sheets. There is a style organizer that allows you
to move style sheet elements from one document to another; it is well-hidden (ask
the paperclip for it) but it works. If you want one style for the web version of your
document and one for print, you want too much.
The markup is always invisible: you need to click on the item while the style
editor is up and then scroll through to see what is highlighted. This may seem
trivial, but is frustrating if you have multiple, subtly different styles. And you will,
because Word eagerly tries to manage the style list for you. If you italicize an item
currently in the title style, then it will autogenerate a title-1 style. Now, when you
change all of your titles to non-bold, the lone item in title-1 may or may not follow
along.
In short, you can use Word for semantic markup, but only with discipline and
patience. Word is a literal markup system, and the style editor is your window on
Word’s internal means of organizing literal markup. It is not a full-blown semantic
style sheet, as shown by its little failings above.
The bibliography If you are writing bibliographies by hand, you are wasting
your life. Remembering where to put the commas, what to italicize, when to use
the full first name and when to use initials, is the sort of work that a computer does
easily and that we humans have trouble doing perfectly. Word’s demand that users
2
Tip #2: write yourself a template. Depending on whether the Earth is in a Fire sign or a Water
sign, you may need to send the template with your document.
12.2. MULTIPLE VIEWS
319
need to hand-edit their bibliographies has no doubt cost the world literally millions
of person-hours.
The correct way to do a bibliography is via a database. You provide one entry
for each reference, typing out the author, the title, the publisher, et cetera. Then,
the computer reads the database and puts the result in your document according to
a style sheet such as that published by the University of Chicago or the APA. That
is, the best means is via semantic mark-up: you tell the system that “Joe Guzman”
is the author, and leave it to the computer to decide whether to print “Guzman, J”,
“Guzman, Joe”, “J. Guzman” or what-have-you on the page.
OpenOffice.org wins points for including a bibliography editor. LATEX includes
bibtex. Word does not include one, although you can purchase one from a third
party for a hundred dollars or so.3
12.2
Multiple views
A major contribution of the IT era has been to allow multiple views of the same
work. The paradigm of the product has moved from the book, which is a fixed,
indivisible object, to the song, which is merely a brief view on something for which
hundreds of other views exist.
Your favorite pop song was probably recorded onto 24 tracks, and then loaded
onto a sound mixer such as Audacity, a program built around facilitating multiple
views of the music. There’s a visual representation of the sound and of course the
noise the thing makes. The data is multilayered, and the user can view/hear the
final work with some layers processed, muted, inverted, et cetera.
Users of the GIMP or Photoshop are familiar with the same process: there are
all these layers, and each can be viewed differently, separated, processed. At some
point, you set a fixed view and publish it as the final image, but with both the
visual and audio systems, the base version holds much more information than the
final view.
Databases have what is literally called a view, but even without them, users are
encouraged to think in terms of the root data existing in the database and what’s on
the screen being a slice of it. The root data needs to be taken care of, but mangle
the view all you want; it’s disposable. HTML is the markup language used by web
pages; it is plain text but then viewed via a cute renderer like Internet Explorer or
Firefox. On your hard drive, file browsers give you a dozen perspectives on the
same pile of bits.
3
Of course, if you use an add-on like this, you won’t be able to email your document to a colleague
(or yourself at another computer) for editing unless the recipient has also paid out the hundred dollars
for the same program.
320
CHAPTER 12. WHY WORD IS A TERRIBLE PROGRAM
Almost all information processing in all media takes the views-of-base-data
form. But there are three hard-and-fast exceptions to the paradigm: spreadsheets,
word processors, and presentation software. There is a picture of the page on the
screen, and that’s the document. There are few ways to view the work differently
when you’re working on it than when the final output will be printed or displayed
on somebody else’s screen. With due creativity, you can find the outline view or
other marginal shifts, but for the most part, these systems work by vehemently
insisting that there be only one view. All of the document’s information is present
in all versions.
And that is one more reason why Word is a terrible program: it constrains the
user in the classical paradigm of “one work, one view”. Can I distribute drastically
different views of the same work to different people? They would just be two
different works, that you’ll have to maintain separately. When I present to the
world congress, is there a clean version that I can use? Nah, just hit <F9> to blow
up your working copy to full-screen size.
This is clearly what many people wanted, and most are happy with it. The
two-bit philosophy questions of which is the true version of the work evaporate;
the conceptual structure of a root object which is viewed in different ways flattens
out; our documents are just like they were in the 70s, but backlit. But being stuck
in the seventies means that there is a clear and evident ceiling in efficacy, because
the ideal view for working on a project matches the output view in only the most
simple and lucky of circumstances.
HTML gives us some hope for the future here, because the actual work is
done in a markup language, and then there are hundreds of possible views of that
marked-up text—and people have no problem with the concept. One person can
read the work on his telephone, and one can hear it on her text-to-speech reader,
and both agree that they’ve read the same document.
A compounding failing of Word is that it won’t let me insert the wealth of
expletives that it inspires in me. With the one work = one view paradigm, there is
nowhere for me to leave personal comments to myself that won’t go into the public
version.
Computer programmers have a trick known as ‘commenting out’. Because the
computer ignores anything marked as a comment, a coder can mark functioning
lines of code as a comment to see how the program would run if that line were
eliminated. It’s a sort of purgatory for code that should maybe be deleted, but the
judgement hasn’t yet been handed down. Similarly, I write more than enough prose
that is maybe a bit too verbose to put in the final work. I am reluctant to delete it,
because I spent ten minutes composing that paragraph, but commenting it out is
painless and reversible.
In Word, I am unable to leave personal notes to to guide myself, and I am
12.3. INTUITION AND LYING TO THE USER
321
unable to comment out sections that should probably be deleted. That is, Word
gives me fewer tools to write with so that it can enforce its intuitive paradigm.
12.3
Intuition and lying to the user
A book entitled Design of Everyday Things, by Donald A Norman, very clearly
had an influence on the design of many of Microsoft’s products. It in turn was
influenced by what was trendy at the time (1988): the original Macintosh features
prominently, there is a whole page on the promise of hypertext, and he complains
about EMACS. In his section on Two Modes of Computer Usage, he explains that
there’s a third-person mode wherein you give commands to the computer, and then
the computer executes them; and there’s a first-person mode where you do things
your own darn self, like telling the computer to multiply matrix A by matrix B
versus entering numbers into the cells of a spreadsheet. At the ideal, you can’t
tell that you’re using a computer; the intermediary dissolves away and it just feels
like working on a problem. Of course, some tasks are too hard for first-person
execution, as Mr. Norman explains: “I find that I often need first-person systems
for which there is a backup intermediary, ready to take over when asked, available
for advice when needed.” This paragraph, I posit without a shred of proof, is the
genesis of Clippy the Office Assistant.
Although Mr. Norman points out that we feel more human and less like computer users when we are in first-person mode, it is often a terribly inefficient way
to work. A word-processor document is not like handwriting a letter, so pretending
it is is sometimes folly. For example, you don’t hard-code numbers: instead of
writing Chapter 3, you’d write Chapter \ref{more rambling} (LATEX form; Word
has a similar thing), and let the computer work out what number goes with the
more rambling reference.4
In the context above, first-person mode matches literal markup. Don’t write a
note to the computer that it should find all titles and boldface them; instead, go and
boldface them all the way you would if you had a highlighter and paper in hand.
Third-person commands are inhuman, unintuitive, and how we get computers to
make our lives easier and more efficient.
Forcing the user DOET has much to say about saving the user from him, her,
or itself. Make it impossible to make errors, he advises designers. His shining
4
I used the LaTeX markup for Chapter \ref{more rambling} here because it saves me the trouble
of having to explain the seven-step process it takes to do the same thing in Word. And by the way, if
you change the chapter’s title, all of the references will break and you’ll have to repeat the seven-step
process for each reference.
322
CHAPTER 12. WHY WORD IS A TERRIBLE PROGRAM
example of good design are car doors that can only be locked from the outside using
the key. There’s a trade-off of some inconvenience, but it is absolutely impossible
to lock the car keys inside. Word clearly fails on this one: you want to hard-code
your references? Feel free; in fact, we’ll make it hard for you to do otherwise, since
doing otherwise doesn’t follow the metaphor of simply writing on paper.
More generally, a good design has restrictions: if you can only put your hand
in one place on the door’s surface, then that’s where you’ll put your hand, and the
door will open on the first try. What about LATEX? It gives you a blank page. You
can type a basically infinite range of possibilities. This is where DOET leaves the
command line: it isn’t restrictive enough to guide the user, and therefore is a bad
design.
I think he’s got the interpretation entirely wrong: there is only one thing that
you can do with the blank slate that you get in EMACS, LATEX, or a command line:
read the manual (RTFM). Just as your car won’t let you lock yourself out, you can’t
write a crappy document in LATEX until you’ve gotten a copy of the manual and at
least had half a chance to expose yourself to the correct way to do things. Mr.
Norman again: “Alas, even the best manuals cannot be counted on; many users do
not read them. Obviously it is wrong to expect to operate complex devices without
instruction of some sort, but the designers of complex devices have to deal with
human nature as it is.” True, people won’t read manuals unless you force them to.
So force them to.
Ease of initial use The benefit of the intuitive interface is that you don’t have to
read the manual.5 You can jump in and go. Aunt Myrtle only writes one letter a
month, so making her spend an hour reading the introduction manual—which she
will entirely forget by next month—is inefficient and bad design.
But ease of initial use is only important for those items that we only use once
or occasionally. Think of the things you use every day: your preferred means of
transport may be an automobile, a bicycle, or your shoelaces. You spend all day
typing with a QWERTY keyboard. Perhaps you play a musical instrument. The
fact that you are reading this indicates that you are literate. None of these things
are intuitive. You spent time (in some cases, years) learning how to do them, and
now that you did, you enjoy driving, riding, playing, and reading without thinking
about the time you spent practicing.
Simply put, not having to read the manual is massively overrated. If a person is
going to use a device for several hours every day for the next year or even the next
5
By the way, I rarely find intuitive interfaces to actually be intuitive. They’re designed around
certain target users whom I’m evidently incapable of thinking like. More generally, the concept of
having an intuitive interface assumes that the intuition of everybody on Earth is exactly the same.
12.3. INTUITION AND LYING TO THE USER
323
decade, then for them to spend an hour, and maybe even weeks, learning to use the
device efficiently makes complete sense.
Metaphor shear Another problem is what Neal Stephenson calls metaphor shear.
That’s when you’re happily working with a mental model in the back of your mind,
and one day your metaphor breaks. Back to DOET: “Three different aspects of
mental models must be distinguished: the design model, the user’s model, and the
system image [. . . ]. The design model is the conceptualization that the designer had
in mind. The user’s model is what the user develops to explain the operation of the
system. Ideally, the user’s model and the design model are equivalent. However,
the user and designer communicate only through the system itself: its physical appearance, its operation, the way it responds, and the manuals and instructions that
accompany it. Thus, the system image is critical; the designer must ensure that everything about the product is consistent with and exemplifies the operation of the
proper conceptual model.”
This is where DOET overestimates computing. It’s a book that’s mostly about
doors and faucets and other everyday objects. He’s right that if you have to RTFM
to work a door (even if the manual just says Push), the door’s design is broken.
He’s right that for complex systems, like panels of airline instruments, they should
not work against intuition (e.g., if two levers do different things, they should look
different). But he combines them into a false conclusion: complex systems should
work with intuition so well that you shouldn’t have to read the manual.
First, this is absurd in any setting but desktop computers. Would you feel OK
if your pilot told you the plane was so intuitive that she didn’t bother learning how
to use it before the flight?
But back to the main point, making a word processor which is so intuitive to
the user that he or she doesn’t have to RTFM is a much more complex task than
making a manual-less faucet. If we needed to build a faucet such that it runs if the
user presses it with his hand, bangs it with a pot, or bumps it with his elbow, that
would be easy—put a button on the top. But to program a picture of a faucet such
that the user can click on the thing, or double-click on the thing, or type R and all
make the picture of a faucet run requires programming a call to the Run method
for three separate events. If the user comes up with something that the programmer
didn’t think of, like holding down the alt key and clicking on the picture, then the
user’s metaphor shears. What your momma told you is true: it’s easier to just
present the truth than to weave a whole world around a lie.6
6
For those down with the lingo: every event has to have a method for every object, which is
dozens of events times dozens of objects equals hundreds of things that could go wrong with the
metaphor—assuming you got good rules about passing the right events to the right objects to begin
324
CHAPTER 12. WHY WORD IS A TERRIBLE PROGRAM
Mr. Norman’s call for simple interfaces (he doesn’t really say anything about
metaphors to physical objects, but he does talk about simple mental models, and for
most of us that means physical metaphors) therefore leads us down a supremely difficult path: first, the program designer must lie to the user by presenting a metaphor
that is easy for the user to immediately guess at. Then, the designer must now design the program so that anything the user does, no matter how unpredictable, will
cause the program to behave in the correct metaphorical manner. This is a very
high bar, to the point that a program as complex as Word simply can not achieve it.
Feature creep Mr. Norman is right that we shouldn’t have to RTFM for simple,
everyday tasks. Writing a letter or one-page paper is so common that his principle that it should be manual-less should probably apply. Further, we have the
technology. However, as I’ve learned ever-so-painfully, writing a book is an order
of magnitude more technically difficult. Programs like Word and Scientific Word
imply that writing a letter and a book are are identical, just a matter of extent,
when in the end they aren’t: one has a valid paper metaphor attached, which programmers can easily implement, and one does not. A good word processor, then,
would let you do basic things without effort, and then put its foot down at some
point. You get all the tools you need to write a business letter, and then if you
want more, you’ll need to get a new tool with a manual. Clearly, nobody is ever
going to write a program like this. To some extent, this is a good thing, since it
pushes technology forward, but at the expense of annoying users who have to sit
through half-appropriate metaphors badly implemented. Mr. Norman writes about
creeping featurism as an evil which pervades all of design, and he’s right: nobody
ever says “I’m done.”7
The right way to implement this would be a simple graphical front end to the
basic features of a less metaphor-laden back-end program. When you’ve sapped
the offerings of the graphical front end, you’ll have a bearing when you RTFM on
the less intuitive stuff. This is how a host of Unixy programs work, but the front
ends also eventually succumb to featurism. Scientific Word takes it to the extreme,
by trying to give you a button for every last feature and refusing to admit that it is
a front-end—perhaps because it is an expensive front-end to free software.
Since no programmer will ever have the discipline to admit that their manualless tool will work only for a limited range of tasks, the discipline falls upon the
with. Inheritance doesn’t help because most of the time the inherited methods don’t quite work as
they should, leaving you with objects which almost fit the metaphor.
7
There is a stand-out exception to this: TEXwas done in 1988, after nobody claimed the author’s
cash prize for finding bugs, and the code base has not changed since then. The add-on, LATEX, was
cemented in 1994. Authors who want to change something in the system must add a package to the
base systems.
12.4. ERGONOMICS
325
user to realize that it’s OK to use simplifying metaphors for simple situations, but
complex tasks require tools that don’t lie to you.
Word is carefully built from the ground up to be intuitive, not to be efficient—
and it lies to you every step of the way to give the impression that the system
actually works the way you intuitively guess it does. The next section describes
how even the smallest intuitive but inefficient detail can add up to immense time
costs in a system you use all day, every day.
12.4
Ergonomics
Google recently put out an RSS reader. It’s pretty cute, and I personally have
switched to it.
If you aren’t familiar with RSS, then that is no matter here (it’s a syndication
system for web sites). The interesting feature of the reader for our purposes is that
the j key will let you go down in the list of headlines. Yes, j, as in jo down. K,
as in kup goes up in the list. No, there is absolutely nothing mnemonic about the
J and K keys, but they feel wonderful. I assume you knows how to type properly,
with hands on the home keys; I generally find my hands are on the home keys even
when I’m just staring at the screen, and my hand doesn’t need any help from my
brain to find the little nubbin on the J key.
But that J key. It’s the index finger of 90% of the world’s dominant hand, and
the keyboard is designed so that that index finger knows exactly where to rest.
Moving down on the page is the most common operation, both in reading and even
editing, so it makes complete ergonomic sense to attach this to the strongest finger
of the strongest hand. Even the lefties will have no problem with it.
But it flies in the face of all mnemonics. Maybe you can come up with some
word having to do with the process of scrolling down that begins with the letter J,
but I’ve got nothin’. Nor could I think of a more efficient keymap.
I personally think the use of the J key is easy to learn because of its ergonomic
delight. But it throws ease of initial use out the window—almost belligerently. You
want to use the nifty hotkeys? Then RTFM.
You use your word processor or RSS reader for the first time once, but may
subsequently use it five days a week every week for the rest of your life. Do the
math: an extra minute a day lost due to an inefficient-but-intuitive interface means
about four and a half hours a year lost. An interface which works against intuition
can be destructive, so if U went down and D went up, we’d have to write off the
application as hopeless, but J doesn’t work against anything. It’s just a gesture.
Within a week of Google’s RSS rollout, Bloglines, a competing RSS aggregation service, added a little header to its page: “You can now navigate through
326
CHAPTER 12. WHY WORD IS A TERRIBLE PROGRAM
Bloglines with hotkeys[. . . ]: j - next article k - previous article [. . . ]”
Anybody familiar with the OpenOffice.org internals? bdamm (at) openoffice
(dot) org will give you a hundred bucks to write code to have J move the cursor
down a line (plus a handful of other keystrokes like K).
The war Lest you think this J thing is some sort of recent meme, it all comes
from vi, a text editor written in 1976. I am using a version of vi (vim) to write this
right now. Let’s pause for a second and let that sink in: most programs have a shelf
life of about six months, and this guy wrote a program thirty years ago which is
still in somewhat common use today. j goes down, k goes up, {jfw will go to the
first instance of the letter w in your paragraph. Also, since I can’t stand seeing that
unclosed open-bracket, I have to tell you that }j%d% will delete a parenthetical
remark in the first line of the next paragraph. Which is all to show you that Mr.
Joy, the author of vi, fell soundly on the efficiency side of the efficiency vs intuition
scale—and that is why his text editor has survived for thirty years, and is being
imitated by cutting-edge web services.
We sometimes like to write documents which actually have Js in them, and vi
thus has modes: in editing mode, j goes down and d$ will delete the rest of the line;
in insert mode, the j key puts a j on the screen, and typing d$ puts gibberish on the
screen which quickly reminds you you’re in the wrong mode.
There are two competitors to J. The first is the ctrl-D school, rooted in EMACS,
written by a certain Mr. RM Stallman. EMACS’s keymap is sort of like vi’s, in that
it’s not particularly intuitive, but once you’ve learned it, you’re done. However, it’s
a compromise along the efficiency vs intuition scale, because you don’t need to
deal with modes (more intuitive) but reaching for the ctrl key all the time is not
nearly as pleasant as twitching your index finger to hit the j key.8 The EMACS
vs vi war is a long-standing one, which is just silly, because they’re of basically
comparable efficiency. No, the real drain on the economy is the other school—the
down-arrow school.
Let me take a paragraph or two to make this as clear as possible: the downarrow school is a total failure when it comes to efficiency. On my screen right now,
getting to the first w in the last paragraph via arrow keys is 27 keystrokes (using
ctrl-arrow to go by word where possible). It’s about three or four seconds for a
single navigation. Do forty three-second navigations in a day and you’re already
up to nine hours in a work-year—a full work day a year just hitting the arrow key.
You get to multiply by your wage to see what your company is spending per annum
to facilitate ease of initial use. Even if it’s one tap of the arrow key, your hands are
already off the home keys; going off and on again is another half-second. If you do
8
The joke is that EMACS stands for escape meta alt control shift.
12.4. ERGONOMICS
327
a hundred arrow-key navigations in a day (and if you’re an office worker who does
a lot of writing, you probably do closer to a thousand), that’s another full work day
a year just moving your right hand back and forth between the arrow keys and the
home keys.
There is only one school that fails with such vehemence that it makes the downarrow school look like Nirvana: the mouse school. In the mouse school, you take
one hand—typically your dominant hand—off of the keyboard entirely, reaching
to some part of the desk that is ergonomically suboptimal (because your keyboard
is already in the optimal location). You position your hand on the mouse, and then
move the cursor along the screen. It is an analog device, so aim and precision
matter, meaning that some people simply do not have the eyesight and dexterity to
use the mouse at all: try getting Aunt Myrtle to highlight the letter i in a font where
that letter is one pixel wide. You guide the mouse to the pixels that are by the word
you want to change, click, carefully drag, and return your hand to the keyboard.
The entire process can easily take more than four or five seconds, just to position
the cursor. And if you have to scroll through the document to find the point, that’s
easily ten seconds as prelude to a single edit.
The rabidness of the aforementioned text editor wars comes from the fact that
text editing absorbs a huge amount of one’s life. If you’re like most office drones,
most of your time at the computer is spent writing and editing plain text—and
you’re just one office drone; there are millions in the U.S.A. who are all operating
computers basically identical to yours, using a down-arrow school text editor of
some sort. Sure, there are people doing flashy data-slinging with big servers, but
the bulk of computing is the literally billions of person hours per year spent editing
text. Now multiply that half-second to move the right hand to the arrow key; at this
scale, it adds up to literally millions of person-days per year spent on making that
little twitch. With an entirely straight face, I can say that on the order of a billion
dollars per year is spent on paying people to hit arrow keys.
When the programmer guys got together and wrote whatever it is you use to
write your documents and navigate your web pages, they had all of the paradigms
above at hand. Half of these guys are using EMACS or vi themselves. We get
frustrated when we ask Mr. Computer Geek for help and he (always a boy, eh)
comes back with over-everyone’s-head exposition about just opening up regedt and
doing a quick ctrl-f for HKEY {343-f2ea53e}. Less blatant but just as insidious is
when Mr. Geek assumes you are an idiot. He knows that he knows more about PCs
than you do, therefore you are dumb and wholly incapable of learning the reams
of knowledge that he has compiled. I have been at many a workplace with IT
departments that are stocked with such people; it’s only some vestige of courtesy
that keeps them from installing drool-guards on all the company keyboards.
Of course, the IT department is thinking about the worst-case users. But when
328
CHAPTER 12. WHY WORD IS A TERRIBLE PROGRAM
was it ever efficient to force everybody in a several-hundred person organization to
work with exactly the tools that the least-able could work with? You may have a
legally blind worker at your workplace, but that doesn’t mean that every computer
in the building needs to operate exclusively at super-magnified resolution. A reasonable approach would be a system where you could select between the various
schools of navigation. Most versions of vi let you do this (and EMACS allows
ctrl-D and down-arrow), but few down-arrow school programs include the wealth
of editing keystrokes that those programs provide.
And so I take Google’s j and k keys as a slight victory in a long battle against
the forces of condescension. It’s just two keys, a far cry from a word processor
with a full vi keymap, but it’s a sign that the guys who designed and programmed
the system felt that it was more important to make usage efficient than to make it
drool-proof. As such, it gives me hope that maybe the software of the future might
focus on long-term efficiency over the quick sell.
Formatting and ergonomics Beyond editing, all this applies to formatting in
Word too, because you have to use the mouse or an absurd amount of tabbing and
arrowing to navigate the menus and dialog boxes to get to the option you want
to change. For almost every step of the way, Word eagerly picks intuition over
efficiency.
Of course, the most commonly-used features, like boldface, have their own
ctrl-key combination, to at least save the user mouse and arrow-key inefficiency
for the dozen most commonly-used operations. Also, you can use alt-F to access
the File menu, alt-E to use the Edit menu, et cetera.
But even having the few control-key combinations you do have creates problems, because there are only 26 control-letters to use. If they are taken up with the
typesetting features of Word, then they can’t be used for the plain old editing of
text. EMACS and vi give the user fifty-odd keystrokes that edit text (I’m guessing
because I couldn’t possibly count them all); Word gives you cut, paste, copy, and
that’s about it. For every other editing task, you have to make do with the arrow
keys. Since the majority of your time putting together a paper is spent writing
and editing, having so many keystrokes at your fingertips for formatting but almost
none for editing is backward.
There is no place in Word’s intuitive editing model for a key combination to
delete a word at a time, or a key to repeat the last edit, or a key to jump to wherever
you were last working. But such keystrokes provide immense speed gains to users
who have taken the time to learn them.
One reason we have so many formatting commands is—once again—the lack
of style sheets, which means that formatting is not produced by listing what you
12.5. THE DOC FORMAT AND STANDARDS COMPLIANCE
329
want the formatting to look like, but by applying it over and over again, which
means that keystrokes to apply formatting are competing with editing keystrokes
for frequency of use. It would be nice to have a dedicated editing program plus a
separate dedicated formatting program, but Word’s DOC format precludes this.
12.5
The DOC format and standards compliance
The World Wide Web consortium (the W3C) maintains the standards for what is a
valid web page, and they provide a validator for web authors to use to check the
validity of our own pages, at http://validator.w3.org.
Most authors could care less about validation. They figure that if it looks OK
on the browser they’re using, and maybe one other, then they’re done. For example,
try validating the home page of the World Bank (265 errors).9
Even as esteemed an organization as the Library of Congress (whose front page
validates perfectly) has considered building web pages that violate standards to the
point of only working in one brand of browser, but at least they were polite enough
to float the possibility with a request for comments first. Tim Berners-Lee, the
author of the original HTML standard and frequently credited as the founder of the
Internet, submitted a comment that explained the importance of documents written
around standards instead of programs:
At the outset, we would like to stress that nothing in this letter should
be construed as a criticism of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer [. . . ]. We
would write the same letter if the choice was to offer support solely
for Mozilla Firefox, Safari, or any other product. [. . . ]
While a large proportion of the marketplace uses the Microsoft Internet Explorer to browse the Web, certain classes of users will find it
either impossible or extremely inconvenient to do so. [. . . ] Users with
disabilities often must augment their browsing software with special
assistive software and/or hardware (“assistive technology”). [. . . ] In
addition, some individuals with disabilities rely on alternative browsers
(for instance, “talking browsers”) that are designed to meet their specific needs. Users with disabilities rely on a standards-based Web to
ensure that services they access on the Web will be usable through the
variety of mainstream software and specialized assistive technologies
that they use.
9
Stats are from validation attempts in late 2005. I sincerely hope they do better if you try them
today.
330
CHAPTER 12. WHY WORD IS A TERRIBLE PROGRAM
He also points out that when a security flaw is found in a product, people or
institutions will often switch to a competitor until the security flaw is patched. That
is, even we of decent eyesight would do well to keep a variety of readers on our
hard drives (I use three). This is obviously only possible if a variety of readers can
all understand the same document format.
12.5.1
Extending the standards
So standards are good. But despite the obviousness of that statement, folks still
insist on not complying.
Surely, the most common reason for ignoring a standard is that it does not
allow for some form of expression that the author eagerly wants to use. But the
author needs to bear in mind that freer expression bears all the costs of broken
standards. My favorite Thai restaurant near work, Thaiphoon,10 has a website that
I sometimes check so I can order ahead. When I open with my usual browser, I
get a notice that I need to get the Flash plugin to view the site. Since I’m checking
from a heavily restricted work computer, I can’t install Flash, and often wind up
eating at the Chinese place instead. But what happens when I visit the website in a
Flash-enabled browser? I get a menu. A plain English text menu.
Or consider the sad state of email. Like a restaurant menu, about 100% of email
is also plain text. You tell people things, using words. For about 40 years, there has
been a standard (ASCII) that allows different programs to interpret text correctly.
Ah, what Nirvana: all the information we need to get across can be gotten across
with an easy and supremely well-supported standard. If the UN worked this well,
we would have world peace. In fact, now that the computing world is increasingly
international, there are more character sets than English-centric ASCII, but nearly
every known language is supported by the Unicode standard (yes, Ogham, Ugaritic,
Deseret, and Limbu are in there.) Yet people increasingly throw the standard out
and encode the text into a word processor document in a proprietary format. If
you’re lucky, you have a word processor that can read the proprietary-format documents your colleague emailed. For example, if the sender has Word 2000 and the
recipient has Word 95, communication won’t happen. Putting plain text in a word
processor document—even with a bit of extra formatting—is exactly on par with
putting a plain old menu in a Flash plugin: yeah, there’s a little more glitz, but it
comes at the price of potentially excluding, imposing work upon, or alienating the
reader.
Of course, word processor documents are nice because they do provide extensions on top of plain text. They let you control the font and layout that the recipient
10
CT & S, NW DC. Try the Panang tofu.
12.5. THE DOC FORMAT AND STANDARDS COMPLIANCE
331
sees in ways that plain text can only approximate. Flash certainly does things that
HTML will never even think of supporting. But there is a trade-off that many people ignore, under the presumption that everybody is just like them. “Well, I have
a copy of Word 2000 and an email client that displays web pages, so everybody
else must too. My eyesight and dexterity with mouse and keyboard is fine, so my
recipient’s must be too.” In a social context, the presumption that everybody is
like you is the source of a great deal of impoliteness, offense, and general unhappiness, and we teach people from early childhood to understand that others are not
like them and that they should maintain standards of decorum until they know that
the other party is OK with breaking them. Sure, we can wear the risquè t-shirt to
work and maybe make some people smile, but we know that such free expression
carries a trade-off in the form of a risk of offending some. We should do the same
when writing documents: stick to the basic standards unless we have a reason to do
otherwise and we know that the recipient is OK with our new-fangled alternative.
There do exist valid reasons to ignore standards or set out to establish new
ones; e.g., the correct response to a spoken “thank you” is “you’re welcome”, but it
is accepted custom to send a “thank you” email but not a “you’re welcome” email,
because that sort of thing just sort of clutters up the in box. But those who ignore
the standards for no reason or for lousy reasons (“I don’t have to say thanks—he
owed me.”) are just rude.
Bringing it back to the subject at hand, Word establishes its own standard, when
it doesn’t have to. First, users often write a Word document when a simple plain
text file will do. An email with no text in the body but a Word attachment with a
single paragraph of plain text is a waste in every sense.
Second, there are standards that do approximately everything a Word document does, such as HTML. You can probably think of a few things that you can
do in Word that you can’t do in HTML. You can also probably live your entire
professional life not using them.
12.5.2
Alternative tools
Microsoft goes out of its way to make its DOC format opaque, because users are
better locked-in if they can only edit their colleagues’ documents with Microsoft
tools. But I promised you a paper that does not discuss Microsoft’s business strategy, but how Word’s design hurts your efficiency. The closed-format design means
that, by definition, the only way to edit a Word document is in Word.
There are literally hundreds of editors for a LATEX or HTML document. You
can use anything that can read ASCII-formatted files—even including Word. That
means that a market has sprung up that eagerly attempts to appease the needs and
skills of different users. As above, EMACS and vi are specialized text editors and
332
CHAPTER 12. WHY WORD IS A TERRIBLE PROGRAM
therefore have dozens of commands to just edit text, but there are literally hundreds
of other text editors that I didn’t mention; pick the one that most fits your lifestyle
and run with it. For Word documents, you have no choice but to edit them in Word.
On the output end, there are a wide variety of programs that read LATEX-formatted
documents and display them via formats like HTML, PDF, or plain text. Because
the file format is open, many people have implemented programs to process LATEXmarked text to produce interesting new output.
Meanwhile, the only thing you can do with a Word document is open it in
Word. If Word is not to your liking for any reason, you are stuck. If you need to
output something besides Word DOC format, you had better hope that Word allows
you to do the conversion.11
XML The more tech-savvy readers know that the next version of Word uses the
extensible markup language (XML), which is a commonly-accepted standard for
semantic markup. However, this is slightly misleading. First, there is not yet
a mechanism to write your own style sheets as I described above. Markup like
<b>this</b> is valid XML, but it’s just an elaborate way to say boldface. That is,
Word takes a system designed for semantic markup and uses it for literal markup.
Second, the XML format depends on a document type definition (DTD) file that
is Microsoft-specific. Politics: although there exist open DTDs for text documents,
including DocBook and OpenDoc, Microsoft is insisting on supporting one and
only one XML schema: its own. It has applied for patents on that schema in
the U.S. and Europe, and although it has stated that it will allow others to use its
soon-to-be-patented technology for free, many are wary of whether the format will
remain open.
12.6
Alternatives to Word
Plain text Just open up the NotePad in Windows or TextEdit on the Mac and go
to town—without formatting. You won’t miss it. Need a graphic? Place a note like
“[Place logo.gif here.]” Italicizing? Use underscores .
At the end of the project, you will want to have a beautifully-formatted document, which means moving your text to a document prep system or word processor,
but put that off until the last minute. That is, spend the bulk of your weeks of editing and revising working on content and worry about format and visual appeal
11
Yes, many people try eagerly to write Word-document compatible extensions, with varying success. But the market for such extensions is absolutely miniscule compared to the market around plain
text. OpenOffice.org will save DOC files as PDFs, by the way. Even if you are married to Word, you
may want to download OpenOffice.org and keep it around exclusively as a PDF converter.
12.6. ALTERNATIVES TO WORD
333
only as a final step. Because of Word’s fundamentally first-person paradigm, you
still need to change underscores to italics yourself, but (1) Word’s macro feature
can help with this, and (2) you may still save time and effort, because the editing
features of text editors can add that much more efficiency.
Above, I had mentioned that it’s nice to have a specialized program to do editing of content, and another specialized program to do formatting; the procedure
here basically uses the text editor of your choice for the editing program and Word
as the specialized formatting program.
HTML The Web has a text-based standard that can be successfully read by
dozens of web browsers on all types of computer. HTML documents from the
birth of the web in the mid-80s can still be read today. Even Word can read HTML.
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, and although the HyperText
part is probably not too relevant to the discussion here, the Markup Language part
indicates that this is exactly the sort of semantic language discussed above. This
is especially true with the advent of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS lets you
define a class, and describe how that class is to be formatted on the screen. Then,
you mark up your text with class delimiters: this is a header, this is a digression.
That is, HTML with CSS is exactly the sort of semantic markup language that
we’re looking for.
Your colleagues will be able to read these documents with their web browser,
and even edit them with software on their computer.
LATEX If you are in academia, use LATEX. It was written for academic publishing,
and universities are used to LATEX users. It is designed around semantic markup
of articles, books, and letters, and pegs them perfectly. This document is written
in it, and as you can see, it looks beautiful. Any journal you want your papers
to be seen in accept (and frequently prefer) LATEX-formatted documents, and will
provide you with a style sheet to apply to your document so that you can comply to
their rules. Mathematics in Word looks amateurish, because only 0.02% of Word’s
buyers have equations in their papers; LATEX’s math typesetting makes you look
smarter instantly.
It is not a strictly semantic markup, but a bit of a hybrid. I think it does a good
job of combining the two, and if you want stricter semantics, then you are welcome
to add \defs to the top of your documents to effect that.
One thing Word is good at, by the way, is deliberate inconsistency. If you
want your first page in Helvetica, your second in Times, and your third page to
be two-column format, this will be a pain in most semantically-oriented systems.
But because Word’s literal markup has no mechanism to impose consistency on
334
CHAPTER 12. WHY WORD IS A TERRIBLE PROGRAM
the document, inconsistent formatting is much easier than in LATEX. So there’s my
token compliment to Word.
If you are not in academia, then you have a stronger compatibility-with-Word
problem, but consider using LATEX anyway. Because there are reasonably effective
(but imperfect) LATEX-to-HTML translators, you can think of the language as a
document-oriented HTML-producing language, and can then send HTML to your
trapped-in-Word colleagues. This method will especially benefit those who want
to use bibtex or makeindex to autogenerate the end matter in larger works.
Now, the above methods require work and learning, but I hope by now you
agree that spending time learning something that you will use every day for years
is worth the effort. But, I’m not going to tell you how to go about learning HTML
and CSS markup or which text editor to use. You know how to ask your favorite
search engine for “efficient text editor”, “HTML tutorial” or what have you. Many
of these open standards and tools are entirely free, so there is at least no financial
cost to downloading the tools and playing around. Better than the search engines
is to ask your favorite guru for help; many are happy to take time to help a friend
work more efficiently.
Also, because standard formats are so open, there is somebody who has fixed
every problem you have, but it might be a separate tool. Some text editors include a
spell checker, some depend on full-time external spell checkers. If you want to see
the difference between your version of the document and the one your colleague
edited, your editor may include a dedicated diff mode, or you may need a copy of
the diff program.
OpenOffice.org This is a word processor initially from Sun Microsystems. Its
key claim to fame is that it can read and write Microsoft’s DOC format very well,
meaning that you can interoperate with your coworkers without their knowing that
you aren’t one of them.
Its stylist solves many of Word’s style editor problems, so you may have better
success with using it semantically. It has a built in bibliography database system.
Maybe Mr. bdamm will get his wish for a basic vi keymap for efficient editing.
The format is open, and you can save to PDF. So complaints about some details are
alleviated, but it tries to imitate Word to the point of imitating Word’s paradigmatic
failings. The literal markup, intuitive-over-efficient, and one work = one view
paradigms remain.
12.7. CONCLUSION
12.7
335
Conclusion
A great many people have spent a great deal of time thinking about how to best
edit and format text, and most of them have come up with solutions that look very,
very different from Word. Part of the reason for this is that the authors of Word
were writing for Aunt Myrtle, while the author of LATEX was writing a package for
his own use; meaning that Word was built around ease of initial use, while LATEX
was built around efficiency. There is no metaphor that one could make between an
HTML document with a cascading style sheet and a physical paper with text—but
this is liberating and allows for new possibilities and an easier time with formatting.
Perhaps you are stuck with Word, and company policy dictates that you write
and maintain long, complex business documents using the same tool Aunt Myrtle
uses to write her thank-you notes. Hopefully this paper has given you some ideas
for working more efficiently: use the style sheet, stick to plain text where possible,
maybe get a copy of OpenOffice.org on the sly for saving to PDF. But hopefully
you have the liberty to take the effort and time to learn some of the other paradigms.
It will take you days or even weeks, your first documents will look amateurish, and
over the next several years of your career you will thank yourself over and over
again as you gracefully produce output with truly efficient tools.
13
M ORE COMPUTING
The last chapter was a coherent narrative; this chapter presents a few more interesting tidbits of computing. It’s primarily an excuse to print the stick diagrams.
13.1
How to write about being organized
18 September 2007
• Use the imperative tense:. Nothing makes you sound like an authority faster
than the imperative tense. Sites like Lifehacker, LifeDev, LifeClever, which
are aggregated by by LifeRemix, post a dozen imperative-tense posts per
day; if you want to be linked by them you’d better sound like an authority.
Now, when it comes to organizing, your experience is dubiously better than
anybody else’s. I mean, if you’re writing about how to implement cubic
splines in n dimensions, the odds are good that you are an expert relative
to your reader. But every last one of your readers has had to face the task
of improving their productivity. Some would think that they should save the
imperative tense for the points where they’re an authority and use a form like
“In my experience, I have found the following to be helpful. . . ” when only a
step or two ahead of the reader. But Lifehacker and the other thousand sites
like it ain’t gonna link to you with an attitude like that.
I was visited by a guru the other day. I’m looking for roommates again,
and one of the applicants was raised on a relatively impoverished farm in
India (“We only had a black-and-white TV.”). While most people ask me
about the utilities and cleaning schedule, he opted to spend the hour speaking
on the importance of good breathing (“The body follows the mind, and the
mind follows the breathing.”). It was a good strategy, in that he was pretty
interesting, and built his own world around him that swept you in. He spoke
336
13.1. HOW TO WRITE ABOUT BEING ORGANIZED
337
with comforting authority. I have been more focused on my breathing during
my continuing search for a roommate.
• Use new products to reduce clutter: The great and wonderful irony of the
minimalist lifestyle is that it requires purchasing heaps of stuff. The little
foam wedges to put between your wine bottles that replace your wine rack
with twenty foam wedges, the designer knife block for your minimalist set
of six knives, and of course the binder carousel for all your binders—all of
these are essential for the minimalist life. It’s hard to be a minimalist traveler
if you don’t have a laptop bag, a day bag, a backpack, and a carry-on bag—
which means you’ll need to have a bag box at home.
• Use new organizational products to reduce organizational clutter: Just as a
simple tupperware under-bed box won’t do for holding your clutter, don’t
expect people to keep their data organized until they have several competing
tools with which to do so.
Your home PC will need an address application, a calendar application, a
notes manager, as will your work PC. You will need a telephone with its own
address/calendar/notes features, an online address/calendar/notes system for
when you’re away from your home/work PCs and your telephone, and maybe
a system of 3X5 card management for when you want to use a pen. You
might also want to buy 43 folders (one for each month, one for each of 31
days), so you have a place to put all your future-relevant papers. The next
step is to get a series of syncing systems, which you’ll need to check in on
daily, to make sure everything is organized. Maybe put it all in a revisioncontrol system just in case.
Bill Gates, a CEO of Microsoft1 explains that he has three big-ass screens,
with several Microsoft products simultaneously running, like a project manager, email, et cetera. Marissa Meyer, a VP at Google2 , uses Pine.
The consensus among the superproductive—and I know the consensus because I’m writing about it and am therefore an authority—is that they put all
their information in one low-tech bin, like a plain old text file. Your haphazard notes, your phone numbers and addresses, your to-do list, are all plain
text. From there, just use your text editor’s search feature to find the person
or detail you need right now.
1
http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/30/news/newsmakers/gates_howiwork_
fortune/
2
http://money.cnn.com/popups/2006/fortune/how_i_work/frameset.
exclude.html
338
CHAPTER 13. MORE COMPUTING
Some folks threw together a few scripts to help you put your to-do list in a
text file3 , which I find to be convenient, though it’s only marginally easier
than just directly editing a text file. I keep things a bit more structured by
keeping an entire notes directory with a few per-project files; I use grep
to search them all at once when necessary.
If that’s too much effort, maybe buy a notebook.
• Write about not putting things off: It seems simple enough, but think of the
bullet-points you could mine from this one: act on every email so you can
keep your inbox empty, get papers off your desk as quickly as possible, don’t
put off making a decision if it won’t be any different tomorrow, keep an eye
on how much time you spend procrastinating by reading about how to not
procrastinate.
• Use bullet points: Bullet points have a feel of value-for-money. The thesis
sentence and essay structure take time to get through before you can get to
the take-away final points. People don’t have time for such things. [Bonus tip:
describe what People want, because distinctions about how different people have different
Further, one thesis sentence can easily be
rewritten as ten bullet points, so readers will feel like they’re getting a full
page of information, not just a single concept. Would you rather read the
single sentence “productivity enhancers tend to just turn into more clutter”
or three bullet points offering lengthy elucidation?
goals only obfuscate what’s going on.]
13.2
Efficient laptopping
14 August 2004
I’ve given you advice about efficient computing before—and I do so because I love
you, dear reader, and want you to be happy—but I haven’t made much mention of
the thing that has most helped me live a comfortable and happy life in front of a
machine: I keep the keyboard in my lap.
The first figure shows the typical laptop user. The laptop’s screen needs to be
placed in a comfortable position relative to the user’s eyes, and the keyboard needs
to be in a comfortable position relative to his hands. But the keyboard and screen
are connected—what is our hero to do? He compromises by putting the laptop
on the table, at about the right level for his eyes, and then rests his hands on the
keyboard on the table. Three things result: his eyes are close to the screen, his arms
3
http://todotxt.com/
13.3. IT POLICY FOR ORGANIZATIONS
339
(especially his wrists) are a mess, and he’s probably slouching forward in his chair
so he doesn’t have to hold his arms in front of himself, zombie-like.
Desktop users have the freedom to put the keyboard wherever they please, and
yet they often wind up with the same keyboard-right-under-screen setup. There’s
just no position that is comfortable for both hands and eyes simultaneously—the
input and output have to be separated in space.
In the second figure, our hero has blown ten bucks on an external keyboard. [If
your laptop has only one PS/2 port in back, you’ll need to buy a Y adapter; that’s
another seven or eight bucks. Or go with a USB keyboard.] His posture is better,
since he’s sitting in the chair the way chairs are supposed to be sat in; his hands are
as easily placed as otherwise folding his hands in his lap; his vision is gradually
improving since he no longer needs to focus on a screen half an arm’s length away.
Our eyes do adapt: if they look at something a meter and a half away for eight
hours, then they will be able to easily focus on things a meter and a half away. Instead, we often look at things much closer, and train our eyes into nearsightedness.
I’m not looking up citations today, but I believe that one’s long-term vision can
improve or at least not deteriorate if one just keeps the monitor a little further away
than usual. Blow up the fonts some if you have to.
The other side effect of this is that you’ll spend less time staring at the keyboard. It’s not really going anywhere, and deep down inside, you know exactly
where all the keys are; it’s just a question of having the confidence in yourself to
not peek. Also, since the types of pointing devices attached to keyboards aren’t so
hot, you’ll be less inclined to use the mouse. Using <alt>+F instead of clicking
the file menu and <shift>+<arrow key> instead of clicking and dragging takes
getting used to for some people, but also quickly leads to more efficient computing.
So there you have it: the joys of keeping the keyboard in your lap. It takes
some getting used to, but it is so worth it that I’ve devoted an entire column to the
subject. It’ll certainly make a more noticeable difference on your life than a few
hundred dollars on a zippier processor or more memory.
13.3
IT Policy for Organizations
14 November 06
This paper will provide a few useful points to the managers who are overseeing the managers of information technology. Its intent is to give those who have
not spent their lives reading computer manuals an idea of what options exist for
IT organization, and the social and business problems that the technologists must
340
CHAPTER 13. MORE COMPUTING
overcome.
Business v academia One could think of two paradigms in how an IT department
is organized. The first is the business-oriented system. At an organization with such
an IT department, every desktop has the same software, which is typically installed
from a central server at the IT department. The IT department focuses its expertise
upon this list of programs. All users must log in to the network, and all network
activity is monitored and logged. Security is a very high priority.
One finds the other paradigm at many academic institutions, where students
log in with virus-laden laptops that attempt to bring down the network without
the student’s knowledge. Ornery professors bring their 1985 copy of WordStar
from home and insist that the IT department provide support. Network activity is
generally logged, but everyone in the computer science department knows how to
get around the logging system.
One may expect that the business-oriented IT is far-and-away more stable, but
the reality is that the two paradigms are head-to-head. In the last few years, I
have worked at two academic departments and two business-oriented organizations. Both academic departments had one (1) full time employee running the
entire system, and suffered major failures at the rate of about once per year. Both
business-oriented organizations had a IT staff taking up somewhere between one
floor and one building. One organization was an IT mess where little worked, and
the public-facing web page was filled with technical glitches and broken links. The
other department suffered failures at the rate of about once per month.
Which leads us to the central question of this essay: with so much less effort put
into security and stability, why don’t universities have significantly more security
and stability problems?
The remainder of this essay covers a series of small topics that address this
question, including both business, social, and technical reasons. The summary:
academics keep it simple, in a way that business users typically do not. There are
forces familiar to any businessperson, that push business systems toward complexity, that non-IT management needs to guard against.
I will try to avoid the details of software, but it is worth noting that the businessoriented users tend to run the Windows operating system, while academic-type
users tend to run a POSIX system. [UNIX is a trademark of AT&T, so POSIX
refers to any UNIX-like system.] This is not a hard-and-fast division, but you will
see that each type of software facilitates its matching paradigm.
The division of labor Corporations are often divided into “Battlin’ business
units” (as a comic by Scott Adams describes them). Each unit has an internal
13.3. IT POLICY FOR ORGANIZATIONS
341
budget that it hopes to maximize, by billing other departments as much as possible
while minimizing the list of tasks with which the department will dirty its hands.
Thank goodness the building services department is not organized like this.
Imagine how unpleasant a workplace would be if a department was billed every
time a radiator broke in mid-winter. The building services department, knowing
that it has a full monopoly on radiator-fixing, could charge what it chose to, and
perhaps the local department manager would give up and just leave the radiator
broken. Maybe she would buy a few space heaters. Perhaps building services has
already stated that radiators are not in the scope of things they are equipped to
fix. Providing a vital service via a budget-maximizing, monopolistic department
creates abundant opportunity for gaming on behalf of the monopolist.
Rather than allowing building services to define its list of services it will provide, it is typically given a broad mandate: keep the building in good condition.
The details of what that means is left to evolve. On the consumption side, no one
is ever billed for maintenance services.
This is how the academic IT department works. Their mandate is to keep the
network working and the desktop PCs in decent working order. Some departments
bill per computer, but this typically means a per-head charge rather than a perservice charge.
Conversely, many business-oriented IT departments bill per service or software
item used, and carefully select the services they are willing to put on that price
list. This is all entirely natural, and is exactly what is expected of them under the
paradigm of the budget-maximizing business unit.
Having established that they will bill for services, what will the IT department
offer? As a general rule, the more complex service justifies bigger budgets. That is,
complexity goes hand-in-hand with budget-maximizing behavior–and complexity
is the worst thing one can have in a computing system.
User expectations The sad truth is that the job title of every office worker may as
well be “computer operator,” since almost all of us spend eight hours a day (about
2,000 hours/year) in front of a computer. Yet many complain bitterly when asked
by a manager to spend a few hours learning details of the workings of the machine.
IT departments and software authors often concur, stating that systems should be
designed so that users can be blissfully ignorant of the machines they use day in,
day out.
Imagine this in any other context: a truck driver who does not know basic
auto maintenance, an airline pilot who didn’t read any flight manuals under the
presumption that the controls will be entirely intuitive, a jackhammer that anybody
can just pick up and use, a librarian who doesn’t learn the cataloging system under
342
CHAPTER 13. MORE COMPUTING
the presumption that if it’s not immediately obvious then the system is broken.
Intuitive is good, and a system that works against intuition needs to be fixed.
Casual users (the archetypal Aunt Myrtle) will never see a payoff from hours of
training. But the office worker of today is a “power user” by the standards of a
decade ago, working at a job that vitally depends upon good software. It is absurd
to say that the best tool for such a person is always the one that is most immediately
intuitive and requires the least learning on the part of the user.
The presumption that users have the right to be ignorant of computer matters bolsters the Battlin’ Business Units division of labor. Users who log in to
a business-oriented computer see only those programs that they can use without
training. The tools needed to do basic maintenance or adjust their system’s configuration are for the most part missing. The expense and effort of training is saved,
but in return workers can do less and are dependent upon IT for more. By mechanical metaphor, the oil for the jackhammer is kept in a locked box that only the
jackhammer administrator can access. Keeping users ignorant and disempowered
means that the IT department will never be obsolete, but means that even simple
tasks require a call to the IT department.
In the academic approach, IT is more like building services: office workers
aren’t expected to take out the trash, but they are expected to maintain certain
standards of cleanliness. There are usually abundant paper towels and waste bins
scattered around to help with this. There is still a division of labor where most
of the hard work in upkeep is given to specialists, but every user is expected to
maintain partial responsibility and is given the tools to execute that responsibility.
In the IT context, that means users are expected to have some level of training in
maintaining the tools that they use every day.
The academic IT department aims to minimize users’ dependence on support
services. Typically, the IT administrator writes up a page explaining basic guidelines for maintaining system health, and users are expected to put out a reasonable
effort to follow them. When major spills occur, the IT department is ready to clean
up. Some users never read the instructions and never quite catch on. But they know
enough to ask somebody nearby how to clean up their mess, and so a lightweight
and decentralized support network evolves.
Security The basic strategy for secure systems is to keep it simple. A server on
the Internet hosts a number of services that wait for data to come in, such as a web
server or email server. To oversimplify a complex field, for an attacker to remotely
break your organization’s security, it must find a service that is taking in data and
then send malicious data to the service.
If no services are listening, then there is no route to attack. So the basic rule of
13.3. IT POLICY FOR ORGANIZATIONS
343
security is to keep it simple: leave open as few services as possible.
Most academic departments closely adhere to the keep-it-simple rule. Their
servers and workstations use a POSIX system that allows control over all network
services, and leave open only ports for web, email, and a service known as secure
shell (SSH).
Here, I am forced to briefly mention the architecture of the Windows operating system. For its operation, it requires a multitude of services that can not be
turned off [Windows Time Service, taking input on port 123; Distributed Component Object Model, taking input from port 135; Microsoft Distributed Transaction
Coordinator, taking input from port 3372; many more]. Are these services secure?
Only Microsoft knows. So, for those who are daunted by the thought of keeping
track of ports, services, and sockets, here is a simple summary for basic system security: don’t run Windows. Because its complexity involves leaving open ports and
services that users can not secure, it fails to follow the basic principle of keeping it
simple.
Transparency means that you know what code you are running. Some argue
that the route to security is to keep the programs you are using confidential–security
through obscurity. The absurd name of this technique should tip you off to the fact
that this method is not well-regarded. We must presume that those who hope to
break into a system are smart enough to work out such details.
Unfortunately, many software vendors build their business on obscurity, keeping code that interacts with the outside world under lock and key. In such a situation, the IT department is simply handing its security concerns over to an external
vendor, and hoping that that company will provide secure products.
Academia, meanwhile, has developed a number of systems that are entirely
transparent–notably Apache to serve web pages, Sendmail to send email, and OpenSSH
to serve SSH clients. In fact, the majority of the world’s web and email (both academic plus business) is served using these open systems.
The summary: keep it simple. Every additional feature, in the operating system, in programs being run, and even in document formats, could potentially be
adding a security hole. Which would be easier for an intruder to attack: a word
processor document that only supports text, or a word processor document that can
include embedded videos and web applications? Vendors and budget-maximizing
IT departments press for these features, but in doing so they create potential security issues.
Interoperability The reader is well aware that standards are vital for interoperation. For example, the Internet exists because of the wealth of tools that implement
the HTML standard in which all web pages are written. But the reader may not
344
CHAPTER 13. MORE COMPUTING
know how many sirens call to the IT worker pleading with him to break the standards.
For any standard, there are things that are difficult to do. Tool providers are
well-aware of this, and thus provide 100% standards-compliant tools that one could
use to write documents that comply to the standard–plus a few nifty features that
make things easier. For example, Microsoft provides ActiveX controls that make
it easier to write web pages that change based upon conditions such as the user’s
location or preferences. One could implement a simple web page to get the point
across using strict HTML, or use ActiveX to write a page filled with bells and whistles. However, only Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) can read ActiveX controls.
This is no problem, our programmer reasons, because every Windows computer in
the office has IE installed by default.
This is how the siren traps its victims: IE has never existed for a POSIX system,
and is no longer supported on Apple systems. Thus, once our poor programmer has
a large system in place using ActiveX, it is increasingly costly for the organization
to switch to any other system.
The entrapment only gets worse. Let us say that you are confident that your
company will never, ever switch away from systems that support ActiveX–that is,
Microsoft Windows. Between now and the End of Time, no matter what shows up
in the future, you will be a Windows user. Next month, the Microsoft representative will come in to negotiate licenses and upgrades for next year, and since your
company has firmly committed in ActiveX code to using Windows until the End of
Time, and your company can not operate without information technology, the sales
rep can ask any price he wishes. By using ActiveX, you have signed away any and
all bargaining power.
The summary: keep it simple. By sticking with standards rather than proprietary extensions, you have a lower risk of creating problems with other users,
including both the people in the next department over and the clients who give you
money. Standards allow you to keep your options open for future changes in the
landscape, rather than wedding your enterprise to a single system.
Conclusion Politically, the stereotypical businessperson believes in the free market’s ability to combine the efforts of free individuals to produce productive and
even optimal outcomes, while the stereotypical academic is a socialist who believes in command-and-control central oversight by the well-informed elite. Given
these stereotypes, it is ironic that the typical business IT system is a command-andcontrol system, and the typical academic IT system is a free-for-all.
The academic IT department makes promises like a laissez-faire government:
we will make sure that the infrastructure you need–working computers and a work-
13.4. A CULT I ALMOST JOINED
345
ing network–are in place and secure. If we have time, we will try to help you with
your individual issues. Run whatever software you want, but you should be aware
of the risks you take.
The business IT department expands upon this base significantly: we will also
watch your behavior on the system, handle all underlying issues of computing so
users can remain ignorant of the systems that they work with eight hours a day,
and enforce our security policy by making sure that your computer runs only a
limited range of programs. We will confer with our vendors to determine what
new features users will receive.
They would do better to keep it simple. Every additional promise and demand
by the business IT departments is one more potential security flaw and one more
moving part waiting to break. The reasons for the over-engineering are typical: the
IT department wants to maximize its budget, and every new bell and whistle is a
justification for more funding, and the IT department is feeling pressure from vendors who know that the company already has word processors and spreadsheets and
must convince it to buy a new one anyway. Empowered users may compete with
the centralized IT authority, and so tools are kept out of their hands–but supporting
disempowered users requires greater complexity.
The academic approach depends on putting a modest amount of work in the
hands of the users, giving them the responsibility of learning about and caring for
their most essential tools, and then keeping things as simple as possible in the
server room. Some especially inept users get to know the help desk very well,
most just go about their business, and the entire system runs with a fraction of the
oversight and costs of more command-and-control structures.
13.4
A cult I almost joined
14 May 2005
Although I had previously commented on how minimalist I want my life to be, I’ve
found my limit—the point at which minimalism becomes madness, and that is lisp.
Lisp (list processing) is a programming language and a cult. Now, I know
you’re thinking that you’ve seen many a programmer’s favorite whatever become
cults, but lisp actually shows signs of culthood. Ms TNH of Nueva York, NY has
this simple definition of a cult:
If, on appropriate occasions, the members tell, enjoy, trade, and/or
devise transgressively funny jokes about their denomination, it’s a
church.
If such jokes reliably meet with stifling social disapproval, it’s a cult.
346
CHAPTER 13. MORE COMPUTING
So, I can’t find any self-poking jokes about lisp. Self-deprecating Unix jokes,
no problem. Jokes about frigging text editors, hilarious. But lisp has nothing but
theological proselytizing. [The ”My other car is a cdr” bumper-sticker doesn’t
count—it’s not self-deprecating or transgressively funny, just an in-joke.]
See, we geeks never played sports, and even if we did, nobody would pick us
for the team and we’d wind up on the shirts team just because nobody would want
to see us on the skins team. And so, we pick teams by programming language.
Which language you use doesn’t just determine what kind of syntax you’re going
to stare at for the rest of the project, but also who you’ll be associating with and
who you’re going to be making fun of. One could make Sapir-Whorfesque arguments about how different types of thinking are attracted to different languages,
but those only go so far; like a sports team, it’s a basically pointless division of a
homogeneous group of people which people wind up caring far too much about.
[[Of course, this essay is making fun of the lisp team. What can I say.]]
Exhibit B: a guy who explains that lisp is a language for smart people, while
everything else is for code monkeys. When I was on the fence between putting
too much time into learning lisp and too much time learning python, this tipped
me over the fence into python land. Do I really want to be on this guy’s team?
I’m up to number seven of this delightful computing tutorial right now, and glad
I went with python. Have been judiciously avoiding articles entitled ”Python vs.
[anything]” since.
The next thing that stands out in how people praise lisp is the frequent mention
of the fact that Yahoo! Stores run on lisp. When I was in Morocco, several different
people told me that Neil Armstrong converted to Islam after seeing the Earth, and
that Cat Stevens converted. At first, this was OK, but soon, after the third person
or so mentioned this pair, I got to wondering, maybe they’re the only ones. Islam
seems to be doing OK for itself, but I know that lisp is not very commonly used, and
it may be true that Yahoo! Stores is indeed one of the only global-scale successes
of lisp. Oh, and Mathematica implements a lisp-like syntax, but sort of hides it
from the user.
Open source proselytizers, conversely, have it easy: two-thirds of the web
(69%) runs the open source Apache, which was written in C. MySQL is taking off,
OpenOffice is used by various municipal governments, et frigging cetera. Whatever you’re reading this with, be it Firefox or Internet Explorer or Safari, was
written in a variant of C.
Which brings us to the fundamental question driving all discussion about lisp:
if it’s so great, why isn’t anybody using it? Here’s a story where Lisp follows the
MIT/Stanford approach (good), while the rest of computing trundles along with
the New Jersey approach (not good enough). [A great deal of what we use today
was developed at Bell Labs, in NJ.] It’s an amazing read–the archetype of the cult
13.4. A CULT I ALMOST JOINED
347
essay–because it explains the overall success of the dominant paradigm as being
entirely due to its evilness. This is on par with an essay on how McDonald’s sells
so much because it sells fattening crap. Partly true, but it also packages blobs of
animal fat in a cheap and convenient package, and cheap and convenient is good
even if factory animal slaughter isn’t. If we rate cult essayists by their ability to
maintain the fiction that there are absolutely no good goals in the world but their
own, our lisp author gets a gold star. [[The rest of the article gives some pretty good selfcritique of how to save lisp, and seems to recover from the juvenalia of the subessay I’m bitching
Indeed, from what I can gather, lisp is a good language. Its key feature
over the New Jersey languages (C, C++, Java, et cetera) is that it can execute its
own output. It’s easy to write a program that can modify its own code, or that can
write new programs that improve upon itself. You don’t have to be into artificial
intelligence or computer learning to appreciate the coolness of a program-writing
program.
(Don’t like lisp’s syntax (and (’nobody) does))? Then the first half of your
program can be a set of instructions giving new syntax, and the second half can be
the actual program, in your new, cozier syntax. This is also kind of cool.
As well as being cool, it is the death knell of the language for serious computing.
For the non-programmers among you, here’s the executive summary of how to
program: 1. Surf the Net for packages by other people that do what you need to
get done. 2. Repeat step one until you’ve gathered everything you need. 3. Write
a program that calls the modules you’ve collected. This is a great method, because
step three is potentially very brief, provided there are enough modules out there.
Here is Google’s directory page for python; notice that thing in the corner where it
says “Modules (249)”; that’s a low estimate. Other comparable languages like Perl
or Delphi have a comparable or greater abundance.
And lisp modules? Well, every part of the code can modify every other part.
You can write a whole new grammar if you’re so inclined. None of this helps
with the goal of downloading a random package and easily calling whatever you
want from it with minimal hassle. There’s just a fundamental conflict between easy
modularity on the one hand, which requires lots of restrictions and boring standard
forms, and fluid modifiability on the other.
So with most proselytizing. If only you saw it our way, the proselytizers insist,
you’d be a happier person. But we wouldn’t be, because our goals fundamentally
differ. I want efficient albeit boring; lisp programmers want fluid and clean; sales
figures show that most people want a dancing paperclip. The more typical proselytizers have the same problem: they want inner peace, while most people just want
to get laid.
Exacerbating the failure of communication, everybody lies about what they
about here.]]
348
CHAPTER 13. MORE COMPUTING
want: in the working-with-machines context they say they want to work quickly,
but their true goals are to make the work go away as quickly as possible. Achieving
the first involves finding good tools and reading their manuals while the second
typically involves playing some music, not trying anything too hard, and generally
tuning the tools out and thinking about sex. And we all want inner peace—provided
it doesn’t hinder our chances of getting laid.
And this is why lisp will always remain a cult. It provides cleverness and
beauty, which we all want on the surface, but it’s fundamentally at odds with laziness and transparency. When we’re pressed, the surface desire for beauty and elegance evaporate and reveal our base, underlying desire for the easy and fattening.
13.5
The schism
6 May 2006
Those of you who actually read my posts about efficient computing, rather than
just going to read the comics4 at the first sight of the word ‘computing’, may by
now have noticed a few patterns.
The most basic is that standards are important. I know this sounds obvious to
you, but if it’s so obvious, why do people get it wrong so darn often. Why are
people constantly modifying and violating standards that work just fine?
I know many of you have suspected this for a while, but let me state it loud and
clear: I am conservative. Rabidly conservative. I think that people need to have
a really good reason for not conforming to technical standards, and I think most
people don’t—they just use the shiniest thing available. A large amount of my
writing on technical matters is simply pointing out that well-thought-out technical
standards tend to work better than the newest and shiniest, and that the value of
stability often more than makes up for any flaws in the standards. Even my work
on patents is aimed at making sure that open standards remain open and free to
implement.
I originally tried to make this into an essay about both computing standards
and general customs, but over the course of writing it, I came to realize that the
two are fundamentally different. If somebody doesn’t quite conform to your human customs—if they use the wrong fork or speak non-native English or wear
ratty t-shirts to the office—then the person will be funny or diverse or annoying or
just normal. Meanwhile, if computing standards aren’t followed—if somebody
gets sick of C’s array notation, array[i][j], and decides it looks nicer as
array[i, j]—then their writing is 100% gibberish and they might as well be
4
http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=09132005
13.5. THE SCHISM
349
speaking Hindu to an English-speaker. Standards-breaking in social settings can
be fun; standards-breaking in computing is just breaking things.
So although I usually try to put something in the technical essays that will
be interesting to those who could care less about machinery, I don’t think any of
the below is truly applicable to social norms. Or you can read on and decide for
yourself.
[Nor is this a comprehensive essay on standards drift and revolution, because that would take
a volume or two. Just file this one as assorted notes on one question with an interesting proposed
solution: what to do with all those people who keep trying to revise and update and modify the
standards?]
Schisms Intuitively, there’s the English-teacher approach, where we force everybody to stay in line with the basic standard. When you go home to write your pals,
your English teacher instructed you, be sure to use perfect grammar at all times.
But another approach is to let the whippersnappers fork. On the face of it, it
may seem contradictory to think that splitting a standard in half would somehow
make it purer, but under the right conditions, it can be the best approach.
For any technological realm, you’ve got one set of people who just want features—
lots and lots of features, enough to wallow in like they’re a bed of slightly moist
hundred dollar bills—and you’ve got another team that wants fewer moving parts,
and takes care to maintain discipline and stick to the existing norms. We can bind
the two teams together, in which case they will constantly be fighting over little
modifications to the system and neither team will be happy. That’s what happens
with English. Or you can have the schism.
Allow me to cut and paste from Amazon:
The C Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie
274 pages
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR; 2nd edition (March 22, 1988)
Amazon.com Sales Rank, paperback: #4,457
Amazon.com Sales Rank, hardcover: #445,546
First edition 228pp, 1978:
Amazon.com Sales Rank, paperback: #60,113
The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup
911 pages
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 3rd edition (February 15, 2000)
Amazon.com Sales Rank, paperback: #11,797
Amazon.com Sales Rank, hardcover: #6,215
350
CHAPTER 13. MORE COMPUTING
First edition Amazon.com Sales Rank, paperback: #1,243,918
Things we conclude: C++ is much more complex than C—274pp v 911pp.
C++ keeps evolving: from 1986 to 2000, the book has had three editions, over
which it has tripled in size. People are still buying the 1978 edition of K&R C
because it’s still correct; the first edition of Stroustrup is so incompatible with
current C++ that people can’t give it away. Finally, Prentice-Hall really needs to
lower the price on the hardcover edition of K&R. I mean, my book is selling better
than their hardcover, which ain’t right.
Meanwhile, C is as stable as can be. Cyndi Lauper has put out seven albums
since K&R C came out. The changes from first to 2nd ed. of K&R are pretty
small—literally, they’re a fine print appendix. And, I contend here, it owes its
immense stability to Bjarne Stroustrup. With Bjarne putting out a new version of
C++ every few years that frolics along with still more features, Prentice-Hall is
free to reprint the same version of the C book without people whinging about how
it’s missing discussion of mutable virtual object templates. The guys who want
simplicity and stability buy K&R and the guys who want niftiness and fun features
buy Stroustrup and everybody’s happy.
The other technical standard I use heavily is TEX, and I’d been meaning, for
the sake of full disclosure, to give a critique of TEXcomparable to this here critique
of Word5 Fortunately, Mr. Nelson Beebe already did it for me, in this (PDF) essay
entitled 25 Years of TeX and Metafont6 . The article alludes to exactly the sort of
schism in typesetting as in general programming: you’ve got the people who are
totally ignorant of standards and just want the shiniest new thing, and the people
who built a standard system that has been stable for the better part of 25 years.
Since he’s on the standards-oriented team, he gives many examples of how such
stability has led to large-scale projects that have significantly helped humanity.
His discussion of its limitations is interesting because there really are features
that need to be added to TEX—notably, better support for non-European languages
and easier extensibility. But ”TEXis quite possibly the most stable and reliable
software product of any substantial complexity that has every been written by a
human programmer.” (p 15) Changing a code base that hasn’t seen a bug in fifteen
years is not to be taken lightly, so the process raises interesting questions.
Evolution So when you read about the raging debate between Blu-ray and HD
DVD (I’m rooting for the one that isn’t an acronym), don’t think ‘oh, now I have to
worry about all my stuff being obsolete’. Thank those guys for distracting attention
5
6
pdf
http://fluff.info/terrible
http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb25-1/beebe-2003keynote.
13.6. HOW TO PICK A COMPUTING LANGUAGE
351
from DVD, which is a nice, stable format that hasn’t changed in a decade, ensuring
that your stuff has not become obsolete. People have made haphazard attempts
to revise the CD format, but thanks to distractions like the MiniDisc and even
DVD, your copy of Cyndi Lauper’s first album is still the cutting-edge CD standard
(specified in The Red Book, 1980), while attempts to subvert the CD standard never
took off. Remember CD+G? If so, you’re the only one.
So how do conservatives evolve? Are we trapped in using standards from the
70s forever more? Of course not. But the evolution is not from clean standards to
floundering in pits of features, but revolutionary breaks from old clean standards to
new clean standards. The feature pits are just distractions.
The process of evolution via incremental fixes to follow the trends has an unimpressive track record. Corporate-sponsored standards often suffer this failing (but
not always), because setting standards that last for two decades and selling frequent
updates are hard to reconcile. One company spent a while there naming its document standards with a year—standard ’98, standard 2000, et cetera—which in my
book means none of the formats are actually standard. The right way is to ride a
system until it really doesn’t do what you need anymore, and then revolt, building
a new one that is clearly distinguished from the old, as we saw with DVD’s overthrow of CD because CDs truly can not store movies, or Ω’s eventual overthrow of
TEXbecause TEXtruly can not typeset Tamil.
The trick is to know when to revolt. When is a new trick so valuable that the
old system should be abandoned? Many a dissertation has been written on this
one, and I ain’t gonna answer it here. But for well-thought-out technical standards,
it’s much later than you think, as demonstrated by the active 25-year old standards
above.
13.6
How to pick a computing language
18 October 2006
I can not stand how much debate there is about computing languages. I hate
the fact that the Web is filled with it, I hate the fact that so many postings on Usenet
in the way of ‘I need a Matlab routine to...’ get replies like ‘Why aren’t you using
Algol!?’, and I hate that my own work is so often evaluated based on choice of
computing platform rather than actual output.
So, in my little effort for world peace, here are my notes on picking a language.
I’ll generalize this a bit next time, but the basic theme is that there is no One True
Way. The process of picking a language is picking which is the least annoying
trade-off, over the course of a series of many trade-offs.
352
CHAPTER 13. MORE COMPUTING
The moral here is that, even though you will no doubt have a preference on one
side or the other with all of the debates below, there is indeed a sensible other side,
that other people prefer. That is, there are languages on both sides of any debate
because there are valid reasons, both in terms of æsthetic preference and in terms
of practical issues, for picking both options. Anybody who tells you otherwise, for
example insisting that we must all use dynamically-typed languages from now on,
is just being an ass. Pick the least annoying paradigm for yourself, and let your
neighbors pick the least annoying paradigm for themselves. We’ll all get our work
done in the end.
Having ranted, here’s a list of a dozen primary axes along which generalpurpose computing languages differ. Work out which side you prefer, find a language that is on the same side as you, and go code.
1. Are the libraries what you need? The primary joy in using an existing computing language is the strong hope that somebody has already written the code you
need. However, I have never seen a language that really has a good library for
everything I’ve wanted. I see the big schism as languages with lots of libraries for
numerical and otherwise number-crunching routines versus languages with lots of
support for Web handling, though you will no doubt find your own divisions among
what type of code base supports what languages.
2. Does it assign types dynamically or statically? The evangelists here all seem
to be on the dynamic-typing side, but the issue is more muddled than a one-sideor-the-other split, and neither extreme is great.
If a system is enthusiastic about dynamically typing, then odd problems crop
up. What if the first piece of text input happens to be "14"—will your system
then assume that the input is all integers, and then crash when the next input is
"fifteen"? Say you are trying to build a list of lists. Start with an empty list,
then add the first list, then add the second list, and so on. The interpreter may cast
an empty list to NULL, and may flatten a list of a single list to just a list—and if
the first list happens to have no elements or one element, there may be still more
casting until you’re left with no list at all. With experience, you’ll figure out what
tricks you need to fix the problem, and will see it as no big deal.
With static typing, the annoyance is that you’ll need to explicitly re-cast variables from time to time. For many but not all static languages, you will need to
declare the type at first use, which is also potentially annoying—just as playing
guess-the-type can be with a language that doesn’t allow you to just come out and
declare a variable’s type.
Anyway, the question is not dynamic versus static, but how dynamic the lan-
13.6. HOW TO PICK A COMPUTING LANGUAGE
353
guage is. What is its list of auto-casts and what is its list of casts that you have to
make yourself, and how well does that list fit your expectations?
3. What are the scoping rules? Every language has different rules for when a
variable is in or out of scope. One paradigm is the location of a variable in a file
or a directory path. E.g.: in C, a file-global variable can be read by every function
beneath it in the file; or in Matlab/Octave, a function is accessible if its .do file
is in a specified path. The other paradigm is to define objects, and say that most
variables have scope only within the object or its friends. In the first paradigm, files
or portions of files can be read in (included) in other files so that scope is somehow
shared; in the second, there is a syntax to say that one object inherits another.
The intent in both cases is to allow modularity and encapsulation, wherein one
unit represents some self-contained concept and doesn’t interfere with other selfcontained concepts. Every useful language in existence has this concept, and every
one of ‘em does it in a slightly different manner. I.e., the choice is the epitome of
personal taste.
Evangelists here tend to be on the object-oriented side. But the scope-by-file
method manages the same encapsulation and flexibility.
4. Is it too verbose or terse? There is general agreement that too much verbosity
in code is a bad thing.
But too little verbosity can also be bad. Coding textbooks often show off oneline programs that calculate the GDP per capita of Bangladesh based on the price
of toothbrushes, with fourteen intermediate steps neatly cascading on a single line.
This looks very impressive, and looks much more pleasing than the half-page version with all the intermediate mess on fourteen separate lines. It’s certainly fun to
write one-liners, but guess which routine is easier to debug. Hint: most of your
time debugging is spent tracing a process through its intermediate steps.
Some languages are very good at hiding intermediate cruft—so good that you
have no idea of what’s going on. Some languages are terrible at hiding anything,
and require that you always go through every step yourself. There’s a practical
and æsthetic balance to be drawn here; let’s not pretend that terse code is always
superior to more verbose code.
5. How does it handle aliases? Let us say that you want to put a box at the front
door so anybody can leave things or take things as necessary. For this to work,
you have to tell everybody where to find the box. In computing land, you are not
assigning to var1 and var2 the contents of the box, but its location.
354
CHAPTER 13. MORE COMPUTING
So there needs to be two types of assignment: one that goes to the box and
copies its contents into var1, and one that indicates that var1 is hereby an alias
for the box itself. This is an inherently confusing concept, because the two types
of assignment have so much in common. But gosh golly, you’ve gotta have it.
C and friends use variables and pointers to variables. Some languages use
immediate and lazy evaluation for this. Some languages always assume that you
mean aliasing unless forced otherwise. And some languages, which I consider to
be too limited for anything more than teaching, eliminate confusion by disallowing
aliasing entirely.
6. Call-by-what? How are arguments passed in to subfunctions? Typically, languages do this by passing the value itself or by passing an alias for the value.
Again, I’d consider a system to be braindead if it doesn’t allow both, but, due to
speed issues, the ability to pass aliases is the one that really shouldn’t be passed
up.
7. How does the language pass functions? It would be nice to write a function
that takes a function as an argument, such as apply(fn, list), that replaces
every element of the list with fn(element). More generally, there are many
reasons for passing functions as arguments to other functions. Some languages
encourage this by treating functions like any other data, Lisp being the paradigmatic example. Others make it not-so-easy, like C, which lets you pass function
pointers, but has no syntax for writing in-line minifunctions. There exist systems
where functions can’t be passed at all, which I again recommend throwing in the
waste bin. But among the mainstream options, it’s a question of how convenient
you want function-passing to be—is this something you expect to use every other
line, or something that is good to have handy when necessary?
8. Does it let you hang yourself? This one is self-descriptive. The best example
would be in the dynamic/static type issue. If you have a function that acts on text
strings, and you give it the number 14, should it automatically cast it to "14" or
give you a gentle ‘I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that’? C is famous for not stopping
you when you access element fifteen of a fourteen element list; some hate it for
that and some rely on it heavily.
Every system glosses over errors in some directions and refuses to act in other
directions, so the question here should really be: in what ways does the system let
you hang yourself and when does it stop you, and are those the constraints that will
help or frustrate you?
13.6. HOW TO PICK A COMPUTING LANGUAGE
355
9. Is it fast or is it easy? You can’t have both, though every proselytizer advertises that their fave has achieved such a miracle. If you want something that
is superpaternalistic and takes care of everything without your thinking about it,
then you’re asking the processor to do a lot of work. For example, if a system
is enthusiastically dynamically typed, then the system will check the type of the
variable at every single use; if you have a vector of a million data points, that’s
a lot of overhead. If your system thinks you’re too dumb to understand aliases or
call-by-reference, then it will copy the contents of the box where other systems just
point to the box, again creating overhead. As I’ve noted before, all that ease and
convenience can mean not just a ten or twenty percent speed drag, but a slowdown
of about fifty times7 .
Joel the Guru has complained8 about people who just assume away all computational issues, and recently berated an evangelist9 who insisted on not caring.
You’re allowed to pick user friendliness over speed, but you have to acknowledge
that you’re making that decision.
10. Does it lean toward ease of use or ease of initial use? Ease of initial use
means that a new user can intuitively guess at what needs to be done with few
errors. To achieve this, there are usually restrictions in place that prevent the user
from doing the wrong thing, details are elided, and lots of in-place documentation
produced. Ease of long-term use means that the user has few restrictions, can
tweak as many detailed as desired, and is not frequently interrupted. Most systems
focus on either making the details easily accessible or on hiding them; few if any
do a truly good job of guiding early users and at the same time getting out of the
advanced user’s way.
Evangelists miss this trade-off all the time, and pretend that because it is so
easy to type print ’Hello, world’ it must be that the system will always
be easy to use. This is a condescending belief that users are unable to learn and
adapt. Lisp coders have reason to brag about their great effectiveness even though
their code is just a pile of parens to outsiders, and C coders who really understand
pointers do things that are impossible in other languages, and all those guys have
valid reasons for why Visual Basic isn’t working for them. Let’s not pretend that
everybody’s idea of ease of use is identical to that of a dilettante who will never go
much further than printing ‘Hello, world’.
Anyway, in terms of picking the language, you can ask yourself if you will be
using this darn system for the rest of your life, or are hoping to just do a one-off
7
http://fluff.info/blog/arch/00000172.htm
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html
9
http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/12.html
8
356
CHAPTER 13. MORE COMPUTING
project that will not grow into a big mess, and pick a language accordingly.
11. Does its fluff seem useful to me? Perl handles regular expressions as part of
the language, which provides some nifty text-handling that is much more ornery
in other languages. Some languages have built-in databases, or hashes, or lists.
This may seem more fun and useful to you than calling these things in from a library. Every language has a library to handle regular expressions, interface with
databases, and use hashes and lists; the question is only whether they are immediately on hand or up on the shelf, and what you want to have on hand. But if
everything is immediately on hand in the form of a quirk in the grammar then you
get, well, Perl, which has a very complex grammar and can often be hard to read.
12. Does it use too many parentheses? Finally, there is the actual visual appeal:
is the code filled with parens, tabs, stars? This is the last question on the list
because, frankly, you’ll get used to it.
So, there you have it. A dozen ways by which different languages distinguish
themselves, all of which require balance rather than a direct proclamation of The
Right Answer.
13.7
Is Ruby Hallal?
26 October 2006
The starting point here is last episode’s essay on programming languages, and
this here is basically an explanation and generalization of why I wrote it. For those
who didn’t read it (and I don’t blame ya), here’s a summary in the form a description of my ideal girlfriend: she should be an Asian Jewess, around 172–174cm tall,
gothy, sporty, significantly smarter than me, significantly cuter than me, significantly better socialized than me, willing to hang out with me, very well organized
but endlessly spontaneous, enjoys walks along the beach, does intellectually challenging work that involves being outdoors, and plays guitar in a rock band. Yeah.
So: too bad half of those things contradict the other half, eh.
The first key difference between the problem of picking a programming language and the problem of picking a significant other is that the programming language doesn’t have to like you back. The liking-you-back issue creates many vol-
13.7. IS RUBY HALLAL?
357
umes’ worth of interesting stories, all of which I will ignore here, in favor of the
the other key difference: unlike many girl/boyfriends, programs are often shared
among friends and coworkers, meaning that there are externalities in my arbitrary,
personal-preference choice.
Personal preference plus externalities is the perfect recipe for never-ending,
repetitive debate.
Debating the undebatable Under Jewish law, one must never say the Name of
God. In fact, there is none–it’s sort of a mythical incantation, used to breathe life
into Golems and otherwise tell monotheistic fairy tales. Under Islamic law, one
must speak the Name of God when slaughtering an animal for the animal’s flesh
to be Hallal. My reading here is that there is therefore no way for meat to be both
Hallal and kosher.
And let’s note, by the way, that kosher and Hallal laws are not cast as rules
about keeping clean for the sake of disease prevention. They’re ethical laws, meaning that, like personal preference, they can’t really be debated. It’s not like somebody will finally find the correct answer and write it down for everybody to see.
We can’t even agree to basic axioms like ‘you should be nice to people’ or ‘don’t
be wasteful’.
Do ethical laws induce externality problems? From the looks of it, yes they
do, because so many people spend so much time trying to get other people to
conform to their personal ethics. Ethics are an extreme form of that other personal
preference, æsthetics, and seeing somebody commit what you consider to be an
unethical act is often on par with watching somebody wearing a floppy brown
sweater with spandex safety orange tights.
Fortunately, almost everybody understands that there is no point going up to
Mr. Brown-and-orange and telling him he needs to change, because we all know
exactly how the conversation will go: some variant of ‘I have my own personal
preferences’ or ‘who are you to impose your arbitrary choices upon me’. That is,
it would be a boring argument, because there is fundamentally no right answer.
When does human life begin? I have no idea, and anybody who says otherwise
is guilty of hubris.
Gee, that was a fun debate, wasn’t it.
And the problem with that non-debate, as with this essay, is that it has no
emotionally satisfying conclusion. The natural form of a debate is for one side to
present its best arguments, the other side to present its own, and then both sides go
home and think about it. But the form of debate that is emotionally satisfying has a
resounding conclusion, where one side tearfully confesses to the other, ‘OK, I was
wrong!’ But with arguments of ethics or personal preference, this sort of resolution
358
CHAPTER 13. MORE COMPUTING
happens about once every never.
But there’s a simple way to fix this problem: invent statistics.
After all, not all debates are mere issues of personal preference. A question
like ‘will building this road or starting this war improve the economy’ has a definite
answer, though we’re typically not smart enough to know it. There is valid grounds
for debate there.
But for ethics and personal preference issues, we can still make it look like
there are valid grounds for debate. Find out whether abortions decrease crime [The
paper that claims this, by Steven “Freakonomics” Leavitt and another not-famous economist, has
been shown to be based on erroneous calculations. PDF],
find out whether people commit
more errors when commas are used as separators or terminators, run benchmarks,
accuse the author of the file system you don’t like of being a murderer. With
enough haphazard facts, any debate about pure personal preference regarding simple trade-offs can be extended to years of tedium.
This turns debates that should be of the natural form (both sides state opinions,
then go home) into the resounding form of debate, where both sides attempt to
get the other side to tearfully confess the errors of its ways. But the sheen of
facts doesn’t change the fundamental nature of debates over ethics or personal
preference, and because these are debates where nobody is actually wrong, nobody
will ever be convinced to bring about an emotionally satisfying conclusion. We
instead simply have a new variant on the recipe for tedious, never-ending debate.
13.7. IS RUBY HALLAL?
Figure 13.1: Our work is sorrow.
359
360
CHAPTER 13. MORE COMPUTING
Figure 13.2: Such ease!
14
A SSORTED
14.1
The legacy of the French
14 January 2004
You’ve probably noticed this yourself, but since September of 2001, there’s
been a resurgence of appreciation for the French here in the U.S.A. The most obvious way that this manifests itself is of course the colors of the French flag—Blue,
White, and Red—absolutely everywhere. The second is renewed chatter about the
values of the French Revolution such as representative democracy.
But amid all this excitement which the U.S. press calls ‘patriotism’ and the
rest of the world calls ‘nationalistic fervor’, there’s one more result of the French
Revolution which is often overlooked: the Metric system. Instead we continue
to use what is known as the Imperial system, in honour of our former benevolent
ruler, the Queen, and her majestic empire, upon which the sun never set (until one
day it did).
For those of you unfamiliar with the Metric system, let’s review: the distance
from the equator to the North Pole is 10,000 kilometers. A kilometer is 1,000
meters, and a hundredth of a meter is a centimeter. If we fill a cube which is ten
by ten by ten centimeters with water, that water would weigh one kilogram. That
same water boils at 100 degrees Celsius and freezes at zero degrees Celsius.
The fact that this is all based on things with which we have day-to-day experience, like water and the North Pole, makes converting from one thing to another
easy. For example, a two liter bottle of Pepsi is, in metric, exactly two liters in
volume. Pepsi, being mostly water, would boil at around 100 degrees, give or take,
but it would leave a sticky residue on the pot so you’re best off not testing this—
and anyway, how would you know when it’s boiling and not just enthusiastically
carbonated? When driving, if the littler set of numbers on the speedometer tell you
that you’re going 100 kph, and you’re at the Equator, then that means it’ll be 100
more hours of driving at that speed before you reach the North Pole, assuming that
361
362
CHAPTER 14. ASSORTED
you’re going North, you take infrequent bathroom breaks, and road conditions are
favorable in Saskatchewan.
So you see, conversions which would be intolerably annoying in the system of
our proud nation’s former oppressors are easy in Metric. For example, the British
to this day weigh people in stone (which is the plural form of one stone). Converting from stone to a more familiar Imperial measure, such as degrees Fahrenheit,
requires complex mathematics involving the speed of light (300,000 kilometers
per second, or 186,282 miles per second) and squaring things—no easy task for
those not trained in special relativity.
Hopefully, our country will one day finally shed this last vestige of our dark,
painful history, perhaps after Congress passes a bill to rename the Metric system
as the Freedom system. Those who point out that Congress now lacks scruples
(=1/24th of a fluid ounce) will be labeled as terrorists and indefinitely relegated to
Guantanamo Bay, and the U.S.A. will finally be free of its chains, rods, gills, and
fluid drachms.
14.2
A high school geometry lesson
28 November 2008
I think of wine glasses and martini glasses as a sort of sobriety test. Wine
glasses are so fragile that singing the right note can shatter them, and yet we give
them to people filled with alcohol? Martini glasses, with their heavy-end-up conic
section, are some sort of perverse engineering school homework: design a glass
that maximizes the odds that the user will spill most of the drink while walking
across the room.
Which brings us to another, somewhat less perverse question from high school
geometry: what is the volume of a Martini glass? We have a good sense of how
much liquid a plain cylindrical glass holds, but the martini cone is harder to get
a handle on. Glass-makers often produce eye-fooling equipment like those shot
glasses with three centimeters of glass surrounding a tiny indentation in the middle
for liquid; is a Martini glass just an elaborate shape that holds next to nothing?
[Here’s the first use that the nice people at the Oxford English Dictionary could find: “1884 O.H.
Byron Mod. Bartenders’ Guide 21: Martinez cocktail. . . Same as Manhattan, only you substitute
gin for whisky.” The OED continues: “The earliest examples of the name of the cocktail have the
form Martinez, and a number of anecdotes associate the name of the cocktail with the name of the
Californian city Martinez. For further details see: P. Tamony in Western Folklore (1967) 26 124.”]
It’s easy to find the area of a conic section, as the mathematicians call your
Martini glass. I’ll leave the double-integral as an exercise for the reader, but the
14.2. A HIGH SCHOOL GEOMETRY LESSON
363
Figure 14.1: The height is 2.25in, and Ms GP is slightly confused.
Figure 14.2: The diameter of the rim is 4in.
final volume formula is simple: πr2 h/3, where r is the radius of the base of the
conic section, and h is its height. [If you’re too drunk for these things, notice that π/3 is about
one (1.0472), so as far as inebriated calculations go we can just reduce the formula to r2 · h.] To
clarify, here are a few examples, appropriate for any eighth grade geometry class.
Figures 1 and 2, at a hotel bar in DC, are of a rather standard Martini glass.
Prominently displayed in Figure One is Ms GP of Washington, Columbia. Ever
kind and trusting, she brought the tape measure.
From Figure 1, we see that the height of the glass is about h = 2.25in, or
h = 5.5cm. Now, reading this is not so easy, because the theoretical point of the
cone, where the two sides meet, is well into the stem, and I don’t recall if this is my
first or second Martini, making things only more difficult. So we’ve got to finesse
things a bit; as they say, this is an engineering problem. Below, we’ll see that the
bottom bit, the corner that would be liquid in a perfect cone but is glass in the real
world, is not a concern.
In figure two, we measure the diameter, a line running through the center of
the circle, which is d = 4in, or d = 10cm. We cut that in half to get the radius,
r = 5cm.
With those two measurements, we have all we need to fill in the above formula
(V = πr2 h/3) and find the volume: it’s π · 52 · 5.5/3cm3 , or about 144 cubic
centimeters. Now, liquids are measured in milliliters, not cubic centimeters, so we
need to convert, and here we see why I’m switching from Ms GP’s imperial tape
measure to metric units: 144 cubic centimeters = 144 milliliters = .144 liters.
The glass bit at the bottom, where the cone is rounded off from the mathematical ideal, is about a cubic centimeter or two. That is, we need to get the height right
so we have an idea of the overall cone, but that little corner itself is the least of our
364
CHAPTER 14. ASSORTED
Figure 14.3: This narrower glass has a rim diameter of only 6.5cm.
Figure 14.4: The height is 12cm.
worries, and if we took into account that it’s not holding liquid, the measurement
would be about 142mL instead of 144.
Or, to give you an easier time of it in your bar metrics, let’s compare to a
shot. Unlike the gill [a quarter pint] or stone [14 pounds], the shot isn’t an official part
of the Imperial system of measures, so different sources have different ideas of
what a shot is. As I understand it, at most places it’s 1.5 ounces (45ml), except at
corporate bars where they use those ball-in-tube things to measure every frigging
drop, where one shot = one ounce = 29.5ml. Going by the more common 45ml
shot, the Martini glass in Figures One and Two holds a little more liquid than about
three shots. At the corporate chain bar, they probably use smaller martini glasses
too.
A taller example You know how, in movies from the fifties, the characters would
come up with some odd idea, and say ‘oh, waiter, would you bring us a pack of
cards, a rifle, and two pigeons’ and it’d be no big thing? Yeah, that doesn’t happen
in the real world, and my request that the waiter ask the maintenance guy for a
ruler or tape measure went sour. So, as shown in Figures Three and Four, I went
across the street and got a ruler from America’s Most Eco-Unfriendly Restaurant,
the Rainforest Café.
I repeated the exercise here because the glass looks pretty different: it is much
taller and narrower, and gives the impression that the darn thing won’t spill as
easily. Behind the glass in Figure four, we see Ms ABR of Washington, Columbia,
wearing her QT π shirt. So, same measurements, blurrier photos: h = 12cm (to
the crux of the mathematically perfect cone), r = 3.25cm, and so total volume is
about 133 mL. That’s within about 10% of the other glass, though given that my
14.2. A HIGH SCHOOL GEOMETRY LESSON
365
lab technique is that of a drunkard, we’ll just say that the second is a bit smaller
than the first.
The glass is 90% full But here’s one more problem: many bartenders don’t fill
right to the absolute brim, and even if they did, you’d spill all over yourself on
the way to your seat across the room. My measurements were from the rim; what
if there were half a centimeter less liquid? A half centimeter (.19 inches, .000003
miles, or maybe half the width of your pinky) is a marginal length that you wouldn’t
notice at the edge of a glass. For the first glass, h = 5cm now, and r = 4.5cm;
total volume is thus 108 mL. Yup: that top sliver is on the order of a quarter of the
drink.
If you go down to a centimeter of margin—still less than a pinky’s worth of
lip—then h = 4.5cm and r = 4.1cm, for a total volume of 79mL. Down from
144mL, that sub-pinky margin is just shy of half the drink.
For the second, taller glass, same calculations: a half-centimeter off the top
gives us h = 11.5cm, r = 3.1cm, and total volume of 117 mL, down from 133mL.
So the half centimeter here is about 12% of the volume. Go down a centimeter to
h = 11cm and r = 2.98cm, and you’re at 102mL.
The shorter and wider glass is a touch bigger when full, but we quickly see a
turn-around when real-world spillage comes into play. The tall and narrow glass
holds more liquid when both are just a half-centimeter underfull, and when a centimeter underfull, the narrow glass is holding almost a corporate shot more liquid
than the wide-mouthed glass.
Results and implications In terms of other metrics like booze per dollar, how
does the Martini compare to other drinks? It’s hard to say, because the glass and
recipe gives the bartender wide latitude. In theory, a Martini glass, filled, is three
shots of gin with a splash of vermouth. But shaking a drink with ice can water it
down immensely, and then leaving a pinky of margin at the top means the drink
may only be a shot and a half of liquid. The froofier Martini variants include
various mixers, adding still more doubt.
But one thing is certain: the Martini glass’s design guarantees that slightest
nudge can spill about a quarter of the drink, meaning that I’m too klutzy to be
entrusted with such as glass. Also, your bartender can easily give you twice the
drink (or half the drink) with only a few millimeters’ change in the appearance of
the drink. And that’s why we tip our bartenders.
366
CHAPTER 14. ASSORTED
14.3
Peanut sauce
28 October 2006
• half a jar of peanut butter
• soy milk
• red pepper to taste; maybe some ginger sauce
Pour soy milk and optional spices into peanut butter jar, screw lid on tightly,
and shake vigorously.
Sample usage:
• pasta
• soy sauce
• sesame seeds–white and black
I’m not entirely sure of the difference between pasta in the packaging with the
colors of the Italian flag and the peasant woman carrying wheat, and the pasta in the
packaging with Japanese text on it and a delighted-looking cartoon girl. They’re
both about a buck, take seven minutes to cook, and are entirely wheat plus water.
Trader Joe makes a curry noodle that goes very well with this peanut sauce.
Anyway, throw out the wrapper and you won’t have to worry about the implied
ethnicity of your pasta. Cook pasta as normal, stir in the peanut sauce, add soy
sauce to taste, top with sesame seeds, serve.
Asst notes:
You can mix the soy sauce into the recipe above, but I like to give the user the
option of adding more or less.
If you haven’t worked it out yet, never buy spices from a place that calls itself
a supermarket. Enough black and white sesame seeds for thirty servings is three
bucks at any shop in Chinatown, and about ten at the supermarket.
Since soy milk requires refrigeration, so does this sauce. It thickens in the
fridge.
Thanks to Ms ABR of Washington, Columbia for helpful additions.
14.4. DATA IS TYPICALLY NOT A PLURAL
14.4
367
Data is typically not a plural
26 June 2008
When we learned all those darn grammatical exceptions, we were usually told
that they came about in some distant past, due to some arcane relic of old Dutch
or something. But here in the new millennium, we have the chance to witness the
development of a new grammatical exception.
If this sounds boring, bear with me: by the end of the column, about 360,000
people will die over this corner of grammar.
See, English has the concept of a collective singular, wherein a group of elements is treated as a unit: e.g., that clump of birds is moving pretty fast. The new
exception is that this concept can apply to any group of anything except data. The
data shows a steep slope is considered incorrect by some, who prefer the data show
a steep slope.
If you are one of the people who think that the data is is wrong, please stop.
Some examples First, let us imagine a world where English grammar would
require all groups to remain plural:
1. The agenda are on the table.
2. The trivia in this book are silly.
3. Steely Dan are playing at the pavillion.
4. The NIH owe me $12,000.
5. The U.S.A. are in a recession.
• Agendum/agenda has the same Latin-based form as datum/data. Yet I have
never heard a person who uses the data are use the agenda are.
• Sentence #2 is the only one that is actually incorrect, due to the odd history
of trivia. Here’s the definition of trivium from the OED: in the Middle Ages, the
lower division of the seven liberal arts, comprising grammar, rhetoric, and logic.
That is, trivium was itself once a collective singular. The meaning evolved, and we
can now group together a collective unit of facts about the trivium into bundles that
are collectively a unit: trivia. In the present day, trivia is always a plural, because
trivium refers not to individual facts but to the above fields of study. The singular
of trivia is basically lost. [And since I know you’re gnawing to know, the other part of the seven
liberal arts is the quadrivium: “the four mathematical sciences, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and
music”].
• Bands and orchestras are a great example of the whole being more than its
parts.
• The acronym in number 4 expands to National Institutes of Health, and they
do continue to “lose” my invoices as quickly as I can send them. Acronyms are a
368
CHAPTER 14. ASSORTED
great way to cohere a plural into a singular.
• The 360,000 casualties mentioned above come from #5: the question of
whether the U.S.A. are or the U.S.A. is is the difference between a Confederacy
and a Federation, and was basically resolved by a civil war. People fought and died
over the question of whether a set of elements should be taken as separate elements
or a unit, just a box of parts or a coherent whole.
More mundane examples still reveal different points of view. Both the flock
of birds are flying and the flock of birds is flying are correct, but one or the other
probably sounds off to you. Maybe you flinched when I wrote agendum/agenda
has at the first bullet point above. Here, grammar is a window to the soul. I think
that some people generally lean toward seeing the parts and some generally lean
toward seeing the whole. [Linguist readers are welcome to leave citations regarding my claim
in the comments.] In one case this difference in thinking led to a war, but in most cases
it seems to just lead to people correcting other folks’ grammar when the grammar
really just reflects a difference in perception.
[ Oh, and hair is an interesting case: there’s a form your hairs for a set of items that is not to
be taken as a whole, and your hair referring to the whole mop on your head. It’d be great if we’d
evolved more pairs like that, like maybe datums and data.]
The math section Let’s get back to data, which is in the mathematical realm.
Precision matters in math, and grammar needs to follow along. The sentence that
set of numbers is even is incoherent: only the individual numbers can be even; a
set can’t be even. The sentence that set of numbers are dense1 is incoherent: only
the set as a whole can be dense; individual numbers are not dense. We need both
the set is and the set are in our grammar.
Similarly with data: sometimes we are looking at the gestalt, such as statistic like the estimates of a regression parameter; sometimes we are looking at the
individual elements, such as when we point out that all the numbers are positive.
The data are a matrix is incoherent: on the left-hand side of the are, we refer to a
plural, while on the right-hand side, we’re stating a singular; the sentence reduces
to plural = singular. It’s a perfect demonstration that the left-hand side is meant to
be taken as a collective singular, as expressed perfectly by the data is a matrix.
Efforts have been made to base the entirety of mathematics on sets of objects;
in a world where collections are central, we desperately need both the set of items
is and the set of items are to function; the data is/the data are is just a synonym.
1
Dense: between any two elements of a set, there is another element of a set. E.g., between the
real number 1.1 and the real number 1.2, there is 1.15.
14.5. MICROPAYMENTS
369
Why the new exception? [Disclaimer to Ms. LDWH of Princeton, PA: the following paragraph does not apply to you. I know you’re just following the darn style guide.]
So why are the agenda is and the set of elements is OK, while the data is is
now considered to be wrong? I can’t put this politely, but I get the vibe that the
people who correct the data is are just trying to indicate smartness—and failing.
The process is perfect for the person working too hard at smart: (1) Identify trivia:
data is actually a plural, and has a Latin-sounding singular. (2) Payoff: feel smarter
for knowing trivia. (3) Find somebody who seems to not seem to know your fact.
(4) Big payoff: correct them!
[Another of my pet peeves, which I’ve mentioned before, fits the same form: the use of methodology (the study of methods) as a synonym for method. Look at me! I used a five-syllable word! I
think it’s a synonym for a two syllable word, but I chose to use the longer word anyway!]
But, as above, there are times when data is a pile of parts, and times when it
has meaning only as a whole. In all sorts of situations, our brains are wired to
sometimes see the parts and sometimes the whole, and there’s no point starting
wars with people who see things differently.
14.5
Micropayments
2 March 2004
I think the real measure of a country’s opulence should be in how much free
stuff you can get.
In London, there’s many a place that will charge you for packets of ketchup.
Oh, it’s just five p, they’ll tell you, and you’ll nod and hand over a coin that you
wouldn’t bend over to pick up if you’d dropped it, not wanting to look like a skinflint or anything. But it’s not just five p: the cost of that ketchup packet transaction
is the sense that things are OK and stable with the world. Suddenly, your mind is
filled with doubt: is this restaurant 5p away from going out of business? If there
weren’t a fee, would people come in here and take thousands of ketchup packets
and then squeeze them into bottles and sell the bottles on the black ketchup market?
Are humans so supremely savage?
Now, I know that there are people who always take too many napkins. They
get in the cafeteria line, buy the pizza in the gigantic cardboard box instead of on
a plate, on the off chance that they don’t finish the pizza while sitting there at the
table, which they always do because the pizzas are tiny, and then they grab a giant
wad of napkins, just in case, then after sitting down to eat the poor little pizza,
they finally throw out about half a kilo of paper products. Just like visiting Las
Vegas made me feel dumb for turning out the lights when I leave a room, lunch
370
CHAPTER 14. ASSORTED
with people like this makes about eighty percent of my life feel futile.
I sometimes think that it’d be better if the napkin dispenser were at the table,
but then I wind up having soup with these people at the dispenser-on-the-table
place and they get a dab of soup on their chin after every spoonful and use a new,
fresh napkin to dab off the dab of soup after every spoonful, until the bowl is
entirely hidden behind a pile of fluffy napkins that are so fluffy because they’re
ninety percent unused.
So I don’t know.
Restaurants that charge for rice are especially insidious. I feel as if the prices
are a lie: if you know that every last person who orders the curry for $6 will also
get the rice for $1.20, why not just admit that having curry is gonna cost $7.20?
Are people really fooled, and if so, how often?
In most parts of the world, courtesy dictates that the host offers any guests food
or drink. The gas may have been shut off due to lapsed payments, and you may
be getting all your calories from sucking on dust bunnies, but darn it, if there’s
tea in the house, the guests are gonna have some. I’m not entirely sure where the
U.S.A. stands on the tea scale. My intuition was always that, like guys who are
very confident in their masculinity will wear pink, places that are confident in their
ability to make money wouldn’t mind giving the little stuff away. But instead of
this, we often find successful people so interested in the bottom line that they forget
that the whole purpose of all that cash is to make people comfortable.
14.6
Unsolicited investment advice
24 April 2008
Dear reader, I have no idea who you are or what your financial situation may
be, but let me share some simplified points of financial planning, that you may find
useful on the off chance that you find yourself with a few bucks to invest.
The market I have to have easy investment advice on hand because I am sometimes introduced at parties as an economist, and people really do ask me where to
put their money. Telling them that I wrote my dissertation on non-Bayesian information aggregation schemes doesn’t really stop them. Nor are they satisfied when
I give them the most simple investment strategy possible: put it all on red!
If that advice is too simple for ya, let me kick it up a level of complexity: put
your expendable income into the S&P 500. It’s a decent proxy for the entire stock
market, and many a study has shown that on average, attempts to beat the market
14.6. UNSOLICITED INVESTMENT ADVICE
371
fall behind the market. That’s because the sum of all these specialized strategies
are the market—minus management bonuses and fees.
A pal beat my don’t-think-about-it strategy via an “emerging markets” fund
that leaves the USA entirely and invested in China and India. So bear in mind that
when I say the S&P is the market, I mean one market in particular, and you may
decide to instead put your cash in a worldwide fund or a fund focusing on one
not-USA market. But unless you really know what you’re doing, you’re better off
investing in a market-wide investment rather than one company.
How does investing in the S&P 500 compare with putting it all on red? Here’s
a list of numbers that I cut and pasted from Wikipedia:
Year
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
avg
Annual Return
1.32
37.58
22.96
33.36
28.58
21.04
-9.11
-11.89
-22.10
28.68
10.88
4.91
15.80
5.49
11.96
So during this period, the S& P 500’s annual returns averaged 12%, with large
variance, and some years of loss.
You can buy the S&P 500 in a few ways. Lots of companies provide a mutual
fund keyed to it, or keyed to some similarly broad list of stocks. There is a corporation, stock symbol SPY (pronounced ‘spiders’), whose sole purpose is to track
the S&P 500 as closely as possible, and thus act as a single-stock equivalent of the
S&P 500.
Debt But that 12% long-term average return may not seem very enticing if you
have been reading the pundits’ predictions of recession and woe for the near-term.
If you are expecting that the stock markets of the world are going to fail you in
the near future, then a better alternative is to pay down your debts.
372
CHAPTER 14. ASSORTED
It’s safe to assume that you, as a member of society, have some sort of debt.
[A regular reader, Ms BCOH of Baltimore, MD, would like you to know that she has no debt of
U.S. consumer credit (every type of loan that isn’t a mortgage, including
credit cards, student loans, cars) totals about $2.5 trillion2 . For comparison, the
total of global wealth is $97.9 trillion3 . [I almost wrote an entire blog post on the question
any sort.]
of what a total global wealth statistic means, and the implications for our concept of value and its
change over time. But I scrapped it and leave it as an exercise for the reader.]
From an accounting perspective, paying a debt has exactly the same effect as
investing in a fixed-rate investment. If you have a loan for $x that bills you 5%
interest, then every year you’re flushing $x × 5% down the toilet. By paying off
some portion of that, then you’re holding on to a few dollars instead of sending
them out to the ocean.
I get the impression that people generally understand this with credit card debt,
and are very clear that paying off any balance will save them money. For other
types of loans, including student loans and mortgages, many folks seem to take the
monthly amount flushed as fixed. It ain’t.
For student loans, if it’s federally-backed—and most of them still are—then
there can be no prepayment penalty. For mortgages, the general standard is that
you can pay off the mortgage principal early (with no fees); relatively shady dealers
may charge you for the privilege.
Interest is always charged on the remaining principal for the loan, whatever
that may be. So if you pay off D dollars on a loan with n% interest, then you will
definitely be flushing D × n% less interest down the toilet every year, but how
that looks depends on the type of loan. An amortized payment scheme has a fixed
monthly payment, but the percentage that repays the loan and the percentage that’s
flushed down the interest toilet changes every month; if you make an early payment
then the percentage that you don’t lose goes down accordingly. Other payment
schemes may also find ways to keep your payments constant, like just reducing the
number of payments. But in all cases, when you sit down to do the math, you’ll
find that your overall interest payments are reducing by D × n% dollars a year.
[I wrote a mortgage calculator to test the change given all sorts of odd strategies. This was fun
because it always came out to a savings of D × n% dollars a year, no matter what trickery I tried in
the payment scheme. Those situations where ten different things all turn out to be identical have to
be the funnest part of mathematics.]
So the payment is very much an investment in the sense that it will pay off
whatever percent every year, but you may not actually receive (or fail to lose) that
2
http://www.federalreserve.gov/RELEASES/g19/current/
http://www.bcg.com/about_bcg/media_center/press_releases.jsp?
id=2423
3
14.7. ROCK!
373
money until the mortgage comes to an end. As with any long-term investment, that
means you’re long-term better off, but your payments and cash on hand today may
not change.
You have to read the fine print on your own debt (or give your loan sharks a
call), but it’s the norm that you can make an early payment of principal and save the
corresponding interest. If you have money to invest and believe the stock market
will be rickety in the near future, then that’s an eminently sensible option.
If you think the stock market will have returns greater than 12%, and your debt
has an interest rate under 12%, then the advice is the opposite of the above: don’t
pay your debt. Say you’ve got $100 to invest, a debt at 7%, and you believe the
S&P 500 will return 12% in the near future. Then your options are to pay your debt,
which means you don’t lose $7 and are thus $7 up from the do-nothing option of
just carrying debt and stuffing the money in your bra; or to invest the money, which
means you lose $7 in interest, but make $12 from stocks, so you’re $12 up from
the do-nothing option.
Carrying debt to invest it elsewhere requires the businesslike attitude that you’ve
gotta spend money to make money, and that there’s nothing wrong with debt.
There’s just a bunch of accounts, some of which have negative balances and some
of which have positive. In fact, if a business isn’t in debt, then its accountants are
probably doing something wrong.
We humans are uncomfortable with debt, and most of us feel awkward paying
to borrow money so we can invest it elsewhere. I wrote this whole piece because
many of you won’t do the rational accountant’s debt-cost versus alternative-return
comparison—your student loan is oppressive, and you want it dead. Emotions
are worth something, and for many, passing on a few hundred bucks a year from
playing the market is worth an early freedom from debt. And hey, if you think
most of the equity alternatives are going to tank in the near future, then you’re not
forgoing anything at all.
14.7
Rock!
28 July 2004
Went rock climbing last weekend with Ms DH of Ann Arbor, MI. It wasn’t at
all what I’d expected based on what I’d seen on the X Games.
The main surprise is that the entire structure of the process is built around the
safety equipment. We start with the bolts. Times used to be, you’d have to find a
crag in the rock somewhere, and then stick a cam or screw or something in there
to hold up a clip. This was damaging to the more popular rocks, and I imagine
374
CHAPTER 14. ASSORTED
there was a good risk that if your cam placement isn’t great, you could go falling to
your doom. So instead, concerned climbers have drilled permanent bolts into the
rock, at about two meter intervals. So already, as you approach the rock [climbers
use the term ‘approach’ instead of ‘hike to’] you see the human interpretation (a
climbing route) superimposed on the natural, meaningless formation.
It’s sort of a two-person sport, since the climber has a harness around his/her
ass, which is connected to a rope which is connected at the other end to the harness
around the ass of the assistant on the ground, known as the belayer [I’m told it’s
French, but that’s the preferred Anglicized spelling there]. The pair-ness of the
thing makes it a supremely heterosexual sport, and there were many a girl, a boy,
and their dog at the climber hangout. It is often the case that the girl is the better
climber, by the way, since the sport is not very upper-body intensive and being light
is an asset.
The plot from there is as follows: the lead person climbs to the first bolt and
reaches up to attach a rope. The belayer takes up any slack, so the furthest the
climber could fall at this point is a couple of decimeters below the clip. Climber
then goes a meter or two over the bolt; if she falls here, then she’ll sail a meter
or two before the rope catches her, so it’s a little nerve-wracking. But then, she
clips in to the next bolt, and the tension is resolved. Repeat until the anchors at the
top of the rock which indicate the end of the climb. At this point, the climber can
remove all the intermediate clips on the way down, leaving a rope hanging from
the rock. Then the weaker climbers (such as myself) can haul themselves up the
rock knowing that there’s zero risk of hitting the ground.
More cuteness: the belayer attaches the rope to his harness using an ATC: air
traffic control. Get it, the person falling from the rock is air traffic. Ha ha. Ha.
Now, the rope never touches the bolts or the anchors, since this would wear
down the bolts due to rope friction, so there’s always a piece of hardware connecting the rope to the bolts. When everybody’s had their fun, somebody has to climb
back up to the top to get back the clips left at the top. This involves climbing the
rock, clipping the harness directly to the anchors, removing the rope, attaching to
her ATC, and then letting herself down slowly. The rope doesn’t move, so no rope
friction on the anchors, and then the rope can be pulled down nice ’n’ easy (again,
no weight so no friction).
With four or five teams climbing the face of a rock, it feels a bit like a military
operation, with equipment everywhere and the sound of aluminum clips filling the
air. There’s a presumption that the equipment is there just in case, and the whole
thing could theoretically be done with none of it, but it’s clear that the equipment
defines the climb, both in terms of marking the route and defining what exactly
needs to be done. Those who climb on top rope don’t have much to do: they get
to the top, touch the anchors, and then come down. Without placing pieces or
14.7. ROCK!
375
engaging in some operation up top, it’s almost anticlimactic.
You can also see that it’s not truly an extreme sport. The only time you can
possibly hit the ground is placing the first clip, before the rope is on the wall, and
for that, you can even get a clip stick, which is basically a curtain rod with a clamp
at the end, to eliminate even that risk. When on the wall, you spend most of your
time planning the best route and checking your body placement to put weight in
just the right places. It’s much further on the cerebral end than the grunty strength
and speed end. I’m told that it thus attracts a lot of geeks. As an added bonus
for the geeks, there are little call-and-responses that need to be made all the way
along, so you’re set for conversation. Awkwardness is also minimized because,
since screwing up the easy stuff could kill somebody, you’re allowed to state the
obvious. No need to worry about the whole ‘did she remember to take her ATC, and
should I remind her, or would that be redundant?’ sort of calculations. Everything
gets double-checked.
So there are my thoughts about rock climbing. As for me, by the way, I did
OK, and managed to pull myself up most of the rock, with a whole lot of help from
my belayer. When my arms totally gave out, we just pulled me up by the rope.
The roller-coasteresque part of the ride was also pretty good. There’s a saying
or something that the approach is the most dangerous part of the climb, which fast
turns into a joke like ‘the post-climb swim is the most dangerous part of climbing’
or ‘operating the camp stove is the most dangerous part of climbing’ and I do
believe that all those activities really do give you a higher risk of winding up dead
than a properly-done climb. But, like when riding a roller-coaster, our brains are
not trained to rely on machinery, ropes, and harnesses to keep us safe. When sitting
on the harness (‘taking’), my brain was significantly more at rest when I still had a
pinkie against the rock. ‘Look, brain, I’m clearly safe because I’m holding myself
up by this pinkie!’ Hanging by the rope definitely made me sweat and feel like I
was involved in something truly x-treme, even though the system is well-designed
to guarantee a safe return.
Reader comment: Ms. DH of Ann Arbor writes: That was a nice summary.
However, I think you might mention that the non-extremeness is pretty much just
the way we climb. A one pitch sport route is the safest thing out there. Some
people climb “trad” (where you put little things into the cracks in the wall and
attach your rope to those little things.) Those people can create their own route
and the little things in the rock might really come out, sending you plummeting to
you death. Then there’s “multi pitch,” where people go up higher than 1/2 a rope
length (ideally to the summit). We were only doing “single pitch.” I think that your
experience might speak more to my wimpy climbing style than to the entire sport
376
CHAPTER 14. ASSORTED
itself. Plus, overall boys are still better at the sport. However, I do like the idea of
thinking about the space between each placement as its own story, moving towards
a tense climax of risk, resolved when you clip. Cute.
14.8
The Pitchfork t-shirt festival
4 August 2006
The Great American Novel
The best starting point for a discussion of hipsterwear would be Lolita, by Vladimir
Nabokov. For those who haven’t read it, the book is a road trip story, about a man
and the 12-year old girl to whom he is a guardian. To research it, Nabokov traveled
across America, collecting butterflies along the way. He himself is a Russian of
the old world tradition of reading obscure literature and oozing erudition. Literary
scholars can take the book as a puzzle, what with all those obscure references to
obscure literature. The rest of us can take it as a catalog of Americana:
We inspected the world’s largest stalagmite in a cave where three
southeastern states have a family reunion ... A granite obelisk commemorating the Battle of Blue Licks, with old bones and Indian pottery in the museum nearby ... The present log cabin boldly simulating
the past log cabin where Lincoln was born ... a collection of European
hotel picture post cards in a museum devoted to hobbies at a Mississippi resort ... Collections of frontier lore. ... and Abilene, Kansas, the
home of the Wild Bill Something Rodeo. ... Always the same three
old men, in hats and suspenders, idling away the summer afternoon
under the trees near the public fountain. ... Indian ceremonial dances,
strictly commercial. ART: American Refrigerator Transit Company.
... A winery in California, with a church built in the shape of a wine
barrel. ... A man having a lavish epileptic fit on the ground in Russian
Gulch State Park. ... A chateau built by a French marquess in N.D.
The Corn Palace in S.D.; and the huge heads of presidents carved in
towering granite. ... A zoo in Indiana where a large troop of monkeys
lived on concrete replica of Christopher Columbus’ flagship. ... Lincoln’s home, largely spurious, with parlor books and period furniture
that most visitors reverently accepted as personal belongings.
[from Lolita, part two, chapter two]
14.8. THE PITCHFORK T-SHIRT FESTIVAL
377
So picture Vladimir Nabokov standing before the Corn Palace. Is he merely
admiring the architecture with innocent awe? Does he approach it as a hick attempt
at splendor, with a touch of disdain and superiority? Is it merely an intellectual
curiosity to be cataloged for future use? Is this his form of expressing admiration
at a world filled with quirks?
T-shirts
Anyway, on to the the Pitchfork Music Festival. It was great: the bands were all
pretty good, I got to see Wilco’s drummer do a drum kit interpretation of the Balinese epic of the monkey, the non-music parts of the festival (nonprofit booths, food,
trees) were all pleasant, and the people-watching was amazing. After all, indie rock
kids have the highest proportion of tattoos and amusing t-shirts per capita.
Hipster t-shirts are typically billed as ‘ironic’. I put that in what are called
‘irony quotes’ because they are frequently not actually ironic like an O. Henry
story, but just sarcastic. These folks are all collegiate, and generally an urbanoriented bunch, so we can ask the same question we asked for Nabokov, without
the literary genius part: how do these well-educated individuals relate to workingclass and rural institutions?
From here, I hoped to get a little more quantitative. How many people really
were wearing such sarcastic shirts? Can I determine sentiment from the shirt? I
wrote down as many shirts as I could recognize, probably about 150 total. Since a
great number of people were in blank t-shirts or other non-t-shirt apparel, this was
a less-than-trivial sample of the audience’s messages. [Interested parties may inquire
about the full inventory.]
Sports jerseys These are the t-shirts with a big number on the back and a team
name on the front, and were by far the most common category of shirt. It is likely
that many of these were ‘ironic’, in that the bearer wasn’t really on the St. Vincent
softball team.
The big winner among recognizable national teams was Brazil’s futbol team,
which scored four supporters, beating out the Irish for coolest nationality status.
This may partly be because Os Mutantes, a Brazilian band from the 70s, was the
headliner on the bill. [Incidentally, they rocked.]
Band shirts The next most common category. We can divide these into worldfamous bands (Pink Floyd (4) and Rolling Stones (2)), indie-famous bands (Wilco
(4), Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! (2), Ben Folds Five), and the wearer’s personal
faves (Flow Suicide Stimulus, Black Keys, Futureheads, Inferno, Red Five (which
is also a Star Wars reference)).
378
CHAPTER 14. ASSORTED
Location markers Like sports jerseys, the thrift store is full of these. They are
almost certainly worn ‘ironically’. The Colorado flag. Washington, DC (3). Ten
Mile Lake. Great Lakes (with an abstract mountain and sunset theme). Mississippi
(picture of fish). Virginia is for Lovers. Nabokov could have done his research just
wandering the average hipster hangout.
Abstract designs Two categories had a strong showing, the first being girls’
shirts which were mostly blank with an abstract design at the wearer’s lower left.
I was amused that there was such consistency, which gave me the impression of
a fashionista conference that voted on it. The other category were silhouettes of
animals, mostly birds and deer. As a category, this was the overall winner with ten
or so, but they were diverse designers and critters.
Local shirts Few as well. I believe the Chicago Reader was handing out shirts
and bandannas, so it scored well. I spotted one TMLMTBGB (Too Much Light
Makes the Baby Go Blind, local neofuturist theatre) shirt, but that’s as much a
hipper-than-thou thing as it is a local organization. Goose Island Brewery, also hip
and local (2). If there were local Chicago bands, I’d have trouble recognizing them.
Political shirts
weak showing.
I counted three. Maybe it’s just outrage fatigue, but Dubya had a
Attempts at humor Actual attempts to be funny are not hip. Too Hot Topic.
But let me repeat a few for you so you can get the quarter-chuckle these shirts are
worth:
Ninja, Please!
Vote for Jesus
Shakespeare got to get paid, son
A trompe l’oeil shirt of a pocket holding a banana.
Better are the semi-weird vaguely humorous one, such as:
Plate of spaghetti, cowboy sitting on top, using a strand as a lasso
Computers are fun and useful
A Mexican wrestler yelling “Escuche”
‘Ironic’ shirts Finally, we get to the kitsch, irony, or sarcasm. The winner in this
category, with an amazing four shirts, was the worn shirt with an airbrushed cat or
tiger. Other kitsch items included shirts for the St Louis Girl Scout Council (on a
boy), United States savings bonds, and Westerville Parks and Recreation.
14.9. APARTMENT HUNTING IN MADRID
379
Shirts directly referencing solidarity with the laboring class (a pose originated
by Bertold Brecht, I am told) were barely to be found: I counted one Teamster’s
local shirt, and that’s about it unless you want to count the Pabst Blue Ribbon and
the Old Style shirts. So for almost all cases, the class warfare story often given
with regards to trucker’s caps doesn’t work.
So I’m stuck again about what message these shirts, and some of the above
categories like the tourist locale shirts, are attempting to send. Perhaps the main
message is merely ‘I bought this at a thrift store’, which translates to ‘I buck the
fashion mainstream—in exactly the same manner as everybody else’. Perhaps it is
merely an aggregation of quirks.
But in some cases, I don’t see a love of quirk, but something more negative.
Consider how an interaction between a hipster guy wearing an airbrushed cat shirt
and a woman wearing her crisp new airbrushed cat would play out. The girl would
probably be offended, and the boy would probably not want to continue the conversation. There’s no innocent admiration of simple fun as Nabokov may or may not
have had, no wannabe attempts to be a working-class Joe like Brecht, but simple
mocking. Fortunately, shirts with an obvious mocking tone were a minority.
Findings
The t-shirt world is delightfully fragmented. The dominance of ‘ironic’ shirts a
few years ago has diminished, I like to think because they are mean-spirited and
ham-fisted, but who knows. Things look a little more like the t-shirts of old, when
people just wore whatever they happened to get from the kickball team (2) or logos
for things that they actually like. I personally like the animal silhouettes as well,
harking back to our simple associations with deer and birds.
Personal PS: On day one of the festival, I wore a t-shirt for the Valois Cafeteria,
a place on the South Side of Chicago that is famous for its motto: See Your Food.
The second day, I wore a shirt with the logo for Hair: The American Tribal Love
Rock Musical. I’ve been a happy consumer of both, and willingly endorse them
both for their own sakes. I have a long story behind both of them, and both started
brief conversations at the show. Of course, we can only guess at the personal stories
behind the t-shirts listed above.
14.9
Apartment hunting in Madrid
24 March 2005
I’ve had something like two years of college Spanish and have a friend who has a
friend in Madrid, so I wasn’t in a completely hopeless position when I awoke on a
train going through Spain.
380
CHAPTER 14. ASSORTED
David picked me up at the train station, shoved everything I own into his car,
and took me back to his place in Delicias, just south of central Madrid. His apartment was incredibly nice, with modern interiors and a view for miles. It served as
a reminder of the apartment I wouldn’t be renting. By David’s suggestion, I went
to the City University to pick up some postings on the bulletin boards. I got seven,
most of which were a bust.
Calling about the place was by far the most difficult part, since you have no
hand gestures or familiar courtesy to help you along. People were very curt with
me, and a lot of people hung up without waiting for me to say adios (not that I
expect them to hold my hand through it all). I can speak better than I can listen, so
I learned to not give people a chance to say things that involve a vocabulary greater
than 100 words. ‘I want to see your apartment. What is the address? Is 7:30 OK?’
I went to see 7 apartments, during which I took the grand walking tour of central
Madrid.
• The first was from an agent. She was unhelpful on the phone, but I got the
address. It’s on a long highway along the Manzanares river. It’s an emaciated
green river, and the occasional dams are probably the only thing keeping the river
from being completely dry. I had to stop now and then to make sure the tiny waves
were actually moving, ’cause they seemed to just stand still like the surface of
a thick stew. The apartments between the river and the highway were strongly
reminiscent of the apartments I lived in as a kid: three or four story brick things
with an exposed stairwell for each column of apartments and loads of parking and
a few trees. I walked for about 45 minutes without finding the right address. Since
I had another appointment, and I was feeling oppressed, I never actually saw the
place.
• The next place, in the Embajadores neighborhood of south central Madrid,
is evidently what they were thinking when they told me Madrid is the asshole of
Spain. It was built in the 60’s, for the most part, and it is like the last neighborhood
but without the trees, river, and sky. Just big brick buildings. I passed through
a large courtyard (a giant concrete slab with some benches), and there were all
ages of people running around and having a pleasant time. Here and there I’d pass
through a side street which the concrete sprayers missed, which looked like a nice
residential street, like a residential street in Chicago but for older buildings and
the shops on the first floor (there ain’t a building in all of Western Europe that
doesn’t have a shop on the first floor.), with the playground noises carrying from
the concrete courtyards. I found the street after asking many, many people, but the
number I had didn’t exist (somebody told me as much.) I called the girl again from
a payphone (it cost me US$2. But now I know how they work. The phones display
the time when you pick up the receiver, which is very convenient when you don’t
speak the language.) So I think girlfriend tells me that she rented the place out
14.9. APARTMENT HUNTING IN MADRID
381
since I last called. Whatever.
At this point, I was strongly in the mood to assume the fœtal position and die.
It is physically possible that she found a new roommate in the last two hours, but
the likely story is that she didn’t like my accent. I would class being the brunt of
discrimination, especially in life & death matters such as house or job hunting, as
unpleasant. It should be illegal.
When I got home, I had missed David, who left to see a movie while I was
getting screwed, so I just peeled off my socks, watched Los Expedientes X with a
pathetically dubbed Moulder & Sculley, and went to bed. By the way, they even
overdub stuff like grunting & screaming, and watching a badly dubbed shriek has
to be the funniest thing on TV, even above lip-reading expletives on sporting events.
The next day, I went to the other university to get more fliers. It was massively
discouraging, because it all gave me a massive sense of not belonging. Here were
all these beautiful people, talking amongst themselves in their beautiful language,
and there’s me, looking lost. I came back with nothing at all. Though earlier in
the day I had bought a Segundomano. You buy the paper, but people place the ads
for free, so you have loads of crap worth next to nothing for sale in it. It had three
pages of roommates wanted.
• The first apartment that I called had a guy with an incomprehensible accent.
Some folks are just easier than others, and this guy was near impossible. He handed
me off to a girl who spoke a few words of English, and she told me to come over
in an hour. I left shortly thereafter, and arrived in about 40 minutes.
The neighborhood was extremely busy. It was a prime shopping strip, with
loads of expensive shops and grandiose movie palaces and a Pizza Hut. The apartment was on a tiny street by the Gran Via, and it was ug-ly. However, as soon as
you got off the main street, it got really quiet. It seems true throughout Madrid
that if you don’t like a street, you just have to go a block down to find something
different. I rang the buzzer, and I guessed that they told me the apartment wasn’t
ready, so I kept walking around.
The neighborhood north of Gran Via is relatively poor, though it seemed OK to
me. There were a lot of sex shops, which should have been a tip-off. A whore who
was the closest thing I’d ever seen to a man in drag without being a man was standing outside of one shop (I know it was a woman because she was displaying more
than enough breast to confirm their reality). A block down I was propositioned by
another. She was skinny and stoned, and I just felt really sorry for her. ‘Quieres
pasar la noche conmigo?’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak Spanish’
‘Oh. Would you like to spend the night with me?’
‘I’m sorry, but no.’
‘Would you like to go for a drink?’
382
CHAPTER 14. ASSORTED
‘Thanks, but I have to find myself an apartment. Do you know who’s renting
this one?’ [I point to a nice-looking apartment with a For Rent sign]
‘No, I don’t. Just one drink?’
‘I’m sorry, but I have to find an apartment. Good bye.’
Poor thing. I pass by the shop which offers services including ‘transmission
sexual’ and ring the apartment buzzer again. The girl who speaks less English than
the whore answers and tells me something I don’t understand but which obviously
meant ‘thanks for coming, sucker, but I don’t want to rent you the place.’
• I called the next place, and she was nicer—she let me in. I walked from Gran
Via to this place, and it was more of the same small shops and old-style buildings all
the way. ‘I could live here,’ I thought to myself. I was looking for the right number,
and looking at the stunning architecture all along the street, trying to decide which
house I wanted to live in more. Mine was apparently at the back of a courtyard,
behind one lovely throwback to the 1800s. I turned the corner, and there was my
brick box.
Menchu was nice enough, and I know it can be hard for a single mom trying
to send her kid to a private school. She sells tanning beds from her home, and I
later found out that she also ran a liquor store. We talked, and she was very patient,
and the concrete hollow that was my room was very spacious, and the balcony
over the courtyard had a certain charm, knowing I could spit down on the people
in the outdoor cafe below, and it’s nice that I wouldn’t have to shop for my own
knick-knacks for the TV room. I took her number and promised to give her a call.
• The next guy recognized my accent and immediately started speaking English
on the phone. He told me to come right over, so I hopped the Metro to the Opera
stop.
Indeed, you walk out of the subway onto the plaza in front of the National
Opera. So this neighborhood is a step up. Next door is a large sculpture-filled
park, and then the Palacio Real, where the King of Spain used to live (now he
just entertains guests there). I found the address and was overjoyed that it was not
poured from a single block of concrete. I’m told that the building was built in 1844,
which would make it older than nearly every building in Chicago. It sort of looks
it. Going up to the first floor (those crazy Europeans don’t count the ground floor),
the wooden steps had lost all their paint and were badly warped from years’ worth
of feet and each step had a slight downward slope. There’s always a switch to turn
on the light in apartment hallways, but unless you live there, you never know where
it is. I stumbled my way up to the first floor.
Dave, the professional harpsichordist, let me in. He was quick in showing
the apartment. I was flabbergasted by the parlor. The fifteen foot ceiling, the old
piano, the shelves filled with books, the view from the two small balconies outside
the window, all gave off an ambiance that was somehow missing from Menchu’s
14.9. APARTMENT HUNTING IN MADRID
383
TV room, even if this place didn’t have a La-z-boy. The hallway to what would
be my bedroom was long and windy, and it felt like I could easily get lost. The
kitchen looked a lot like a kitchen should, as did the bedroom. Dave and Rob
the Brit and I talked a lot; they seemed more interested in chatting than showing
off the apartment, though I guess you have to screen out the assholes among the
applicants. Over the course of the fifteen minutes we talked, Dave offered to set
me up twice.
• I finally got out of there to see some other apartments. The next one is in
Bilbao, which is the party center of Madrid. It was too early to see the throngs of
clubbers, though you had a couple of younger ones just coming out. I think the
drinking age in Madrid is 16 or so, and there are always clubbers maybe two years
younger who got themselves a passable ID. The pedophiles of Madrid must have
a swell time, surrounded by clueless 14 year old boys & girls trying to look sexy
(subtlety, guys, subtlety!).
Anyway, the apartment itself consisted of two large bedrooms, a kitchen and
bathroom. Though the guy spoke English and had even spent time in Chicago,
he didn’t seem as enthusiastic about conversing as the last fellows. ‘This is the
kitchen. That’s a clothes washer, not a microwave. The bathroom is over here.’
I didn’t have much to say either. Seeing an empty bedroom is a lot like visiting
the art museum with a friend: you want to talk about it, but it’s a purely wordless
emotional response, and you’re left to say things like, ‘I like this shade of beige.’
The guy put my name down on his notepad and said he’d call me if he wanted to
live with me.
• The next apartment was just south of Gran Via, on Calle Montera, which at
that time of night seemed to be entirely casinos with names like iowa 42. I later
garnered from the bug-eyed responses of everyone I mentioned this apartment to
that this is whore & dealer central, and I must be some kind of moron to have
missed it. [El Pais, which is to Spain what the NY Times is to the States, has
several pages of whores listed in the entertainment section. The prices listed are as
low as US$21, or two for $35.] The first floor was a photography studio, and the
door had pictures of beautifully displayed food on it. I buzzed, gave my one fluent
phrase of Spanish (I want to see your apartment), took the elevator to the fourth
floor and the stairs to the fifth.
This was the most modern apartment I had seen, right down to the space-age
plastic kitchen sink. But the real draw, which I all but ran to see, was the terrace.
See, my studio apartment in Chicago had two windows, which faced a brick wall.
From 11:45 to 12:10 every day, my apartment was sunny and warm. More than
anything, I think I came to Madrid so I could sit on a terrace overlooking the city.
It was a bit disappointing. It was chilly, what with night coming on, and despite
the reputation, I knew it’d be like this most of the year [Chicago: 41.8 degrees N;
384
CHAPTER 14. ASSORTED
Madrid: 40.4 degrees N]. The terrace was pretty closed off, by three walls and a
thick layer of ivy on a grid of cables, and since this was one of the shorter buildings
on the block, it didn’t have the beautiful vista I was hoping for. I sat and chatted
with the renter for a while. She was French, and foreigners always speak more
slowly, with a smaller vocabulary and more mime. Spanish classes also had me
very prepared for the ‘Where are you from What do you do’ conversation. But
this wasn’t quite as I had fantasized relaxing on the Spanish terrace to be. I should
know to leave my fantasies as fantasies (see The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Niel).
I was out of phone numbers who would speak to me, so I walked back to
the grand old house by the Opera. No terrace, but there’s a giant garden next
door. Chatty roommates may get on your nerves, but you can always just get lost
down the hall somewhere. I’m not quite sure why I picked the place. Perhaps the
mystique of living on a spot which has been a part of Madrid since it was just a
fortress a millennium ago, though I don’t quite know how that’d affect my day-today existence. I’ll never know if I made the right choice; later, I would regret living
with English speakers who would never challenge my Spanish, and the disrepair
of everything in the apartment, and the roommates who continued to chat my ear
off no matter how clearly I tried to indicate that I couldn’t talk right now. But at
the time, walking through El Centro, along streets where the cars had somehow
disappeared, surrounded by people drinking and laughing, I was pretty happy with
the place.
14.10
Sharing a kitchen
18 November 2004
OK, so I have this 195 m2 house, and I only use the kitchen, front room, and
sometimes one of the three bedrooms. Sometimes I feel silly having two 100%
unoccupied bedrooms, so I’ve been sporadically looking for a roommate.
My worst roommate experience was in Madrid. There was Asshole Roommate,
who would yell a lot and sometimes scared my friends, and the Evil Roommate,
who made a hefty profit off of us, and always found new ways in which I owed him
money. I got most of my deposit back, but he withheld a big chunk because of a
long distance tech support call I made while trying to fix his computer.
The problem was that there was really no way to avoid them. Evil Roommate
would track me down for debts, of course, and Asshole Roommate, a tenth-year
graduate student in Political Science, was always chillin’ in the kitchen. If I wanted
to make tea, I would always get caught in a one-hour conversation about Schelling’s
theories (which are frankly surface-evident enough that they’re not worth several
14.10. SHARING A KITCHEN
385
hours’ discussion unless you want to add empirical detail, which Asshole Roommate wasn’t up for.) Even in my room, I could still hear his wife sobbing in their
bedroom. Wife was Polish, and I can not remember a single conversation I had
with her that was not about how things are different there.
I’ve had good roommate experiences too. Have lived with two friends, with
whom I went out all the time, and never really had any arguments. As for strangers
off the street, my optimum was Ms AL of LA, California. Ms AL was really smart
and good conversation, but was always busy so she’d always cut off conversations
at the appropriate point. Living with these people made me feel like I wasn’t an
asshole.
Had a pal in a comedy group, and I suggested doing a sketch about searching
for roommates. Over the course of the conversation, we realized that we wouldn’t
have to change anything to make the sketch funny (in a pathos-laden kind of way).
There was the guy who was very persistent in leaving truly stoned-sounding
messages, and finally got through around the fifth call. We were around the house,
ordering Thai food, and he was nearby, so he came over. He told us that he and
his girlfriend left Seattle because their roommate was a heroin addict and kept
stealing things. Also, they found out that she was pregnant. So she’s with her mom
in Nevada while he searches for a job and a place to stay in LA. He applied for
a manager position at Barnes and Noble and is feeling pretty optimistic about it.
After the interview was sort of over and we all went back to doing stuff, he just
hung around, staring at the Thai food until we gave him some.
There was the woman who thought the place was messy and gave me a lecture
that if she moved in it would have to be much neater. She didn’t move in.
There was the one who was generally pleasant, but apparently had the crappiest ex-roommate ever. E.g., they lived by a Chili’s and people would park in his
space when the Chili’s lot was full. He’d leave a note on their windshield telling
them to come up to the apartment, and then when they inexplicably show up, he’d
yell at them about how they owe him $50/hour for using his space. Police would
sometimes be called. Pissed off over dishwashing disputes, he would throw things.
When his favorite team wasn’t doing so well, he would yell at the TV full throttle.
I asked her how long she lived with this guy, and she said “Three years.” and then
began sobbing.
This round in Baltimore has been even more on the depressing side. Three of
my applicants were guys who had recently broken up or divorced. One was just
sort of dull and not there, the next made frequent reference to progress he’s been
making with his therapist, and the last gave the impression that he really wanted to
talk about his newfound life as a single unemployed guy.
I acknowledge that rejecting these people makes me a bad person. Almost
every roommate interview I do feels like somebody asking for a friend and support
386
CHAPTER 14. ASSORTED
as they sincerely endeavor to build a better life, and then I fail to help them. But,
as my yoga teacher explains4 , some people will suck the energy from you if you
give them the chance. They’re down on their luck not because of luck but inherent
personality problems that will make themselves very well known to you if you
share a kitchen with them.
So that’s the state I’m in. To some extent I’m asking for a contradiction, looking for somebody to share my house and my space and maybe dinner from time to
time, but not to burden me with their deep emotional issues. And on top of that,
that they are preferably vegetarian with no pets.
14.11
How to shave
16 August 2005
Really now, have you thought about this much in the last decade? Admit it: you
learned to shave when the time came, and then never thought about it again. But I
overintellectualize everything, and my parents divorced when I was an infant, so I
had no manly father figure to teach me these things, and had to derive the following
after years of different attempted methods with which I won’t bore you. [Mostly a
Braun electric razor which wasn’t so effective.]
Equipment:
Soap (a nickel)
a tea cup (a nickel from the Salvation Army)
a shaving brush (about twenty bucks)
a cardboard box ($4, cereal included)
a straight razor ($50, perhaps more but no less)
witch hazel ($4/bottle)
attractive pal in evening wear (market rates)
Cream So we’ll begin with the production of shaving cream, which, even if
you’re not a straight razor person, is still useful. In the old days, you’d shave
some soap into a cup, mash it around with a touch of water, and there you’d have
it. Here in the modern day, you get it in a can, which simulates foaminess, but for
no actual purpose. Save yourself another can in the landfill.
Unlike much of the below, this is a quality-vs-cheapness thing: apparently
twenty bucks worth of shaving cream will last you twenty years. However, anyone
4
http://dclagniappe.blogspot.com/2004/11/stay-away-from-energy-vampires.
html
14.11. HOW TO SHAVE
387
I could find who has tried both insists that the can of foam is just a hollow imitation
of the real thing.
Most brushes are made from either badger hair or bison hair. “Look, that badger is already dead,” the salesman informed me, but I’m still walking away. The
only synthetic shaving brush I could find was $50 from the creepily named Men-ü,
but if you check very carefully, you can find ‘natural bristle’ brushes, which are
plant-derived. Here’s one now.
Once you’ve got the brush and the tea cup, you’re set for shaving cream forever
more. If you’re like me and make your own soap as well, you’ll want to include
a lot of coconut oil in the soap (get it from an Indian food market), which causes
better lather. Tea tree oil may also be a good idea. I’ve found that the lather itself is
best kept to a minimum anyway, since if it’s too thick you can’t see where you’re
going.
Somebody gave me shaving cream in a tub—no faux foaming action, just a
little pump to get a daub in the tea cup. It produces much thicker lather and smells
pleasant, but my internal jury is out as to whether it’s giving me a better shave
than plain soap. Many people online also swear by hair conditioner, which is also
supposed to soften human hairs. Conditioner didn’t work well for me, but you may
find that it works for you.
The razor I’m surprised by how safe a straight razor actually is. You can press it
into yourself with rather forceful vigor, and it won’t cut; the only thing you can do
to actually cut yourself is to move it in a slicing motion. That’s easily avoidable,
and if you actually do this with a good razor, the cut is the cleanest, most perfect
cut your skin will ever suffer, and will heal quickly.
A lot of folks like the Mach 3 disposable-head Razor. Let’s see: two f.ing
dollars per blade, useful for about four shaves, so if you’re shaving daily, that’s
about $180/year. Or, crappy single-use disposables, 30 cents per and chuck ‘em
out: $110/year. A straight razor will cost you at least fifty dollars (I bought a
Dovo; there are about two other brands which one could trust to shave with), but
you can see it pays for itself pretty quickly. Only problem is that you’ll need a few
spare safety razors in case you travel via airplane.
Then there’s the precision. That little hair between your nostril and that, um,
blemish on your upper lip—you wanna try getting it with one (and only one) of
the three blades on your disposable cartridge? Are you sure you know where the
plastic housing ends and the blades begin? Given that the head does that little
wiggly thing, how hard will you have to press to get the hair but not your lip? In
short, with a disposable razor, that hair ain’t going away, and with a straight razor,
it’s trivial.
388
CHAPTER 14. ASSORTED
Stropping I found a lot of web sites which advise that you should buy a shaving strop made from fine-grade Russian horsehide, preferably tanned by trappist
monks. Then I found another site which suggests using back-of-notepad cardboard. Although many rate luxury by how many exotic animals were killed for the
experience, I’m perfectly happy with my cereal box strop. I’ve been using it for
the better part of a year and my razor is staying mighty sharp. Maybe you could
draw little cows on it.
Any blade you’ll see is double-hollowed, which means that the both sides of
the blade are curved such that if you lay the back and edge of the blade against
the strop, then you’re at the perfect stropping angle. Just shows how the stropping
is really an essential part of the blade use process. By the way, even with the
cardboard strop, a good blade will still make those movie-effect noises that the
Foley artists always put in when anybody draws a knife.
Method
I have nothing to say about method that hasn’t already been said before. Just search
Google for straight razor how to. One note which makes itself very apparent when
dealing with a supremely sharp blade: shaving down is an easy, safe process which
gives you no chance of ingrown hairs and which leaves a quarter millimeter of fuzz
on your skin no matter how deft you are, while shaving up raises the chance of
nicks and other misery exponentially but leaves you totally hairless. It’s up to you
and the attractive pal who comes in and caresses your hairless parts after you shave
as to the risk/reward level you’re willing to take; though if you’ve just bought the
straight razor, spend a week or two just going down before trying anything riskier.
Using a straight razor actually requires some modicum of manual dexterity.
Perhaps this is why safety razors have won out in the market: there’s no learning
curve. It’s been interesting to see the progress on my own hairs, as each shave
brought me a tenth of a millimeter closer along, until I was able to do the upward
shave without drawing blood. I didn’t learn much of anything in a ‘here’s a fact I
didn’t know before’ way, but my hands got better. That’s an experience which is
somewhat lacking in a world where everything is mouse and keyboard operated.
Post-shave
Witch hazel works great, and after-shave is sort of an old person thing anyway.
Witch hazel is typically in an alcohol solution (like most after-shaves), so you get
the sterilization for the cuts, too. Lately I’ve been using the shaving brush (after
rinsing off the soap) to brush on the witch hazel. Dumps a good amount on your
face and keeps the brush perky-smelling.
14.12. STRUCTURE AND PLAY
389
[[The OED traces the name back to 1541, referring to the shrub from which the astringent is
derived, thus the hazel half of the name; it has a few quotes from a little later which indicate that its
branches were used for divining, which may be where the witch half came from. (1778 J. CARVER
Trav. N. Amer. xix. 508: “The Witch Hazle... It has been said, that it is possessed of the power
of attracting gold or silver, and that twigs of it are made use of to discover where the veins of these
metals lie hid.”)]]
As for the attractive pal in evening wear who caresses your face after you’re
done shaving, can I point out how completely unsexy a safety razor is? Its entire design, be it entirely disposable plastic or durable plastic with a disposable
head, just screams of practical necessity. The fact that they are sold as x-treme
and sexy is an amazing feat of image over reality. Simply put, disposable is never
sexy. Non-disposable—and therefore cheaper but more reliable—alternatives exist, which we’ve been sold into forgetting.
14.12
Structure and play
28 December 2005
One of my fave hobbies is writing personal ads.
A good short story is typically more about good characters than good plot, and
even the plot-driven stories are more about what characters do to respond to the
situation. Even programmers will tell you that well-developed objects are more
important than involved procedures .
So writing a personal ad cuts to the chase: here is how a character describes
him/herself, and here is what that character is looking for. If it hasn’t been done
already, one could readily write a short story in personal-ad format.
My favorite character was one who was writing from prison. In my bedroom,
you’ll find: A cot, a toilet, bars. Best (or worst) lie I’ve ever told: Not guilty. Fill in
the blanks: [ ] is sexy; [ ] is sexier: erotic asphyxiation when she recovers is sexy;
erotic asphyxiation is sexier. Who I’m looking for: You’re trusting. You’ve been
hurt a few times before, but are still out there looking. Also, you like to warm up to
a relationship with four to eight years of correspondence before meeting in person.
I got a good number of responses in the way of “That was hilarious! Will you
be my pal?” and one that totally didn’t get it: “So you’re into metal stamping? Tell
me about that.”
So my advice to those of you writing personal ads: think outside the darn box
already. Everybody is already trying to stand out with half-baked witticisms veiled
over a core of raw earnestness. Give me something so over-the-top that I can’t help
but read you. [[Notice, by the way, that all of this is aiming for colorful, blatant play that not-dumb
people will recognize as such, or to which readers will at least say ’really, is he serious? Really?’ a
390
CHAPTER 14. ASSORTED
few times. Embellishing and otherwise lying is something entirely different, which some are in to
but I’m not so sure about. And while I’m disclaimer text, I don’t mean to disparage those who use
these systems with full heart-on-sleeve earnestness; that’s just not the form of play I’m looking for
here.]]
A pal of mine put up two linked ads: the first was from her nice underwear,
complaining about how its owner never had a chance to wear it, and the second
was from plain cotton, bragging about all the fun things it got to do. She got
tons of responses and wound up with a nice Macedonian boy she’d met via her
underwear.
Some reviews
Or, to put it another way, the structure of a web text entry box allows for an incredibly wide range of forms of play—but some systems discourage or strictly prohibit
play.
FastCupid This is what absorbed Spring Street Networks after SSN went out of
business, and began as a paragon of strictly structured play. First, each user can
have one and only one profile, so our pal’s pairs of underwear are already out. I’d
had more than ten profiles on SSN, mostly short essays like Section
The system also earnestly tries to provide features—in the context here, structures for structured play. The oddest is the “network”, that lets you see who is
connected to you, Friendster-style. For a dating site, this seems supremely odd:
do I really want people I’m dating to meet other people I’m dating? Perhaps this
feature was sponsored by the CDC.
More generally, we don’t really want that many features. Getting back to the
rule for writing a good novel, we come to a site like this to see faces and characters,
not to click buttons and watch Flash animations. There are other web sites for that.
There are two drives toward over-structured content. The first is common
among all programming, known affectionately as creeping featurism. It is a tendency for the coders to say “we could spend our time making what we have perfect—
or we can branch it out in entirely cool ways!”, and jump on the second choice with
the full vigor of doing something new. The coders tell management how Friendster
has a network feature and is very popular, so this site should clearly have one too.
The second driving force is that many users have no idea of what to do with a
blank page. Thus, the leading questions about your favorite books. But there is a
balance to be struck here, and I have never learned anything about anybody from
check boxes.
Text and photos. Everything else gets in the way of the character. [Hey, here’s a
thought: why not leading questions for photos: ask users to upload one photo of them with pals, one
14.12. STRUCTURE AND PLAY
391
of them underwater, one of their favorite landscape, et cetera. I expect non-novelists could do some
pretty novel things with this. It may also discourage people uploading fifteen photos of them at the
bar with their eight best friends.]
Oh, and you have to be a member to view profiles, which means that if you’re
doing something fun that you want to show off to your pals, you can’t. That’s right:
there are still people who disallow linking to their web sites.
Overall verdict: despite a terrible overstructured start that basically vacated the
network of interesting people, FastCupid has tried to reform, and is still the most
flexible venue for unstructured, character-driven play. Just get yourself a lot of
email addresses from gmail, forward them all to the same account, and get writing.
Friendster Here’s somebody who shares my sentiment that more fun can be
had through fictional characters. Too bad, she continues, that Friendster deletes
fakesters for not being in the spirit of the site. Apparently, the founder of Friendster
is kind of an unfun guy.
I have an a/c on Orkut (I was invited within two days of its opening, thank you
very much) and myspace, but never really bothered. If you’ve used them, leave
comments about their play value below.
OKCupid This is a project by some misanthropists who went to Harvard. It is
primarily built upon a series of algorithms to match people and rate them on various personality scales; internally they track such scales as desperation and Radcliffyness. You won’t appear on anybody’s radar unless you’ve answered about
a hundred questions, so there’s a serious investment in check-boxing before your
character is relevant. I’ve seen one or two profiles that I’m convinced are fake, but
maybe those people were really just like that. Overall evaluation: the structure is
great if you’re primarily looking to be matched, but it generally attracts the sort of
people who like to fill out personality tests.
LavaLife I could barely get a membership to this one, because the censors are
so harsh. There’s a 2000 character limit, so I had to cut the story to begin with, but
here’s the first two paragraphs that I could fit into the text box; LavaLife’s censors
rejected even this much:
When I woke up in the morning, I wasn’t quite sure what to do. Early
in the night, I worked out that she was a heavy sleeper. You know how
it works: you start off trying to cuddle, and she puts her head on your
shoulder and you negotiate something with your knees, and that lasts
for about three minutes and then she tilts over in the other direction,
and then you try spooning for a few minutes, but then one of you gets
392
CHAPTER 14. ASSORTED
too warm and you give up on that, and then you spend the rest of the
night alternating between being passed out but not in contact and being
in contact but not quite passed out. You nudge them and they nudge
back, and in the morning you don’t remember anything but a bit of
warmth.
She spent most of her time in the passed out part, snoring. Which I
don’t mind at all; I certainly can’t hold her accountable for things she
does while unconscious, and it’s probably the price I pay for sleeping
with somebody with a cute nose. But once it was morning, I wasn’t
entirely sure what to do.
So that didn’t fly. Final verdict: they don’t want my kind there.
Jdate A font of earnestness. Also, you have to pay to see who has written to you,
which I found offensive. [Remember, dear vendors, that I’m not just a customer:
I’m also a content provider whose writing other customers are paying to read. The
hundred or so responses I got on SSN was a hundred bucks in the SSN bank.] I’ve
basically abandoned my profile there. Another friend who did actually subscribe
to it says that it is overwhelmingly “very clean-cut, straight and narrow types who
may have once been in a Jewish fraternity at UPenn or some place like that.” So
if you’re looking for an earnest mainstream Jewish beau, there’s your spot. [Pal
also notes that the boys seeking boys and girls seeking girls sections on Jdate are
completely unpopulated. So add hetero to that too.]
Match Never tried it. My impression is that their marketing shoots for quantity
over quality, and most of its members wouldn’t get Huizinga references. I’m probably just being an elitist and somebody should put something in the comment box
about how their experiences there were great.
Of course, there are other media. ebay is always a favorite. One guy sold the
shirt that he was wearing when he was stabbed; the description was much more
about the mugging than about the shirt itself. I once tried to sell a box of Sominex,
gently used, but got no takers. [Yes, people really do earnestly sell Sominex on
ebay.] If you don’t like sleeping pills, you can try a book about the history of
jstor.org; check out the customer reviews on Amazon
Oh, and there’s the missed connections section of Craigslist, but that’s no fun
because you know exactly what you’ll get. If there’s a big sign that says “think
outside the box here, in this box”, it kills the buzz, no?
There’s a constant conflict between those who put a web form online for a
very specific purpose, and those who want to engage in new and creative play with
14.13. LIKE THE BOSSA NOVA, LOVE SHOULD SWING.
393
that web form. The English term for ’comprehending and accepting forms of play
different from one’s own’ is a sense of humor, and we find that some web vendors
have a much better-developed sense of humor than others. Fortunately, the World
Wide Web is a big place, and we can be confident that people will continue to
create new venues for our unstructured enjoyment.
PS: If your PDF reader allows you to click through to links, check out this
profile. Indeed, that’s how it’s done.
14.13
Like the Bossa Nova, love should swing.
16 October 2003
I’ve written a lot of personal ads on Spring Street Networks, the people you log
in to when you peruse the personals at Nerve.com, TheOnion.com, LA Weekly,
TelevisionWithoutPity.com, et cetera. My ads were premised on the fact that the
personal ads are an ideal medium for fun, yet people just wind up talking about
how they’re good in bed. Here’s a blogworthy one entitled: ‘bossa nova’:
Song or album that puts me in the mood Arto Lindsay – O Corpo Sutil (the
subtle body)
Joao Gilberto – The legendary Joao Gilberto
Verve’s Antonio Carlos Jobim Songbook
Why you should get to know me I always hate it when somebody I’ve just met
asks me what kind of music I like. As David Byrne points out, ‘Everybody says
they like music’, but I’ve found that everybody who asks me such a question has
no interest in the answer and just thinks it’s somehow better than asking me what I
do for a living. So I tell them I like bossa nova. This always stops them cold and
lets me change the subject to something more interesting, like the increase in the
death rate of illegal migrants crossing the Arizona/Mexico border or something.
But I do like the bossa nova, and I think it gets a bad rap among the musically
ignorant. So let me tell you why it’s a wonderful thing.
First, bossa nova is Portugese for ‘new beat’. Yes, there’s a beat, and it’s the
crux of the music. It’s subtle, but listen for it in the guitar, or in the cymbals the
drummer is nonchalantly brushing. Wedding bands and lounge pianists miss it all
the frigging time, and of all the covers of ‘the Girl From Ipanema’ I’ve heard, only
about two weren’t in 4/4 time. So you’ve got this beat that’s pretty darn danceable,
not too far from samba, but it’s subdued and doesn’t hit you over the head, leaving
half of you wanting to dance and half of you wanting to kick back and go ‘aaah’.
394
CHAPTER 14. ASSORTED
Portugese has a word missing from English: ‘saudade’, meaning ‘an enjoyable
sadness’ [No, not ‘nostalgia’, which a Portugese/English dictionary or two have
claimed; and not ‘melancholy’, which we often use in this respect, but which the
OED tells us is not enjoyable.] That’s what the Bossa Nova really gets at, by being
quiet but not maudlin. Not to get all Whorfian, but the fact that the word is missing
is closely related to the fact that English music just doesn’t aim for such a state,
and rarely stumbles upon it.
More about what I am looking for Then there are the lyrics. Fortunately, I
don’t need to wax all descriptive about the lyrics; instead, I’ll just give you some
opening lines:
‘How insensitive/ I must have seemed/ when she told me that she loves me.’
‘The samba from my land is a beautiful thing./ He who does not love the samba
is a bad person,/ who is fucked in the head,/ fucked in the feet,/ or both.’
‘Dawn has broken./ Soon you will abandon me.’
‘Recall your first look at the sea./ Let the music tell you who you are.’
Really, how can you not love this stuff. I acknowledge that the Bossa has a
dark side, usually found in elevators and airports, populated by flutes and syrupy
strings, often omitting the lyrics and most of the beat entirely. But the good stuff
so stands out that it’s often worth the price of the album for those tracks that hit the
beat and the lyrics just right (e.g., Bebel Gilberto’s Tanto Tiempo is saved by her
cover of Samba da Bencao.)
That’s the most of it. The rest, like the genealogy, the link to Jazz (“I wasn’t
influenced by American Jazz, I influenced it.” –Jobim), and so forth, I’ll save for
the annoying people at the party.
14.14
Floating in midair
30 March 2004
We bought the hammock on the street in Manaus, Brazil. Manaus doesn’t get
many tourists, and not many folks in the U.S.A. can place it on a map (toward
the Northwest there). Its only real tourist site, O Palacio Rio Negro—The Palace
of the Black River—only rises out of the humid mists of the jungle river to take
solid form during a full moon. Items bought at the gift shop often prove to be a
disappointment when taken home.
So I imagine the hammock vendors by Manaus’s central square, near A Igreja
da Matriz (the Church of the Matrix), were selling for locals. You see the hammocks in the houses. Most of Manaus’s building were built in the late 1800s, and
everybody keeps their big French doors open all night long, so you can look inside
14.14. FLOATING IN MIDAIR
395
to the front parlor. There’d be a tall ceiling, exquisite molding in some disrepair,
and nothing else in the room but a hammock stretched from one corner to the other.
People at the dumb little hotel in Santa Elena (Venezuela, on the border) told
us that the original intent of the hammock was to let people sleep among trees so
they wouldn’t get eaten by jaguars in their sleep. I’m more inclined to believe
that it’s just so you can get a cool breeze under you. They were happy to show
us how to string up the hammock and sleep in it properly. The trick is to sleep
cross-wise, so that any one part of your body is equidistant from the two support
points (remember that definition of a line from your Geometry class?). Sometimes,
when I was feeling paranoid, I thought this funny position was all a joke played on
the tourists, but it makes a lot of sense.
I was especially skeptical because I was sleeping in a travel hammock: a nylon
thing that winds down to well within a bread box, which you have to carry with you
if you want the cheap rate at the hotel. Their main use, after the bohemian tourists,
is for children, so they’re appropriately not quite big enough. Most of them have
themes familiar from the sheets we all know and love: little stars and fire trucks
and Hello Kitties. Mine had a green paisley pattern that in retrospect probably
looked grandfatherly. Kept the thing for almost a year, until it started tearing here
and there, and then I threw it out, thinking it’d be better that way. I later forgot that
I’d thrown it out and searched everywhere for weeks.
But the hammock I now use is much more robust. We’d bought a half-dozen
hammocks for pals, thinking everybody would want one. They were also incredibly
cheap, about ten US bucks (but then shipping was twice as much). Then we got
back to the States and found out that not a single person had actually put up the
hammock we’d bought for them. I somehow got back the one I’d given to my
roommates, and here it is, in my little brick house, by the doors I’d leave wide
open all night but for the mosquitos and the winter.
I’m glad I have the thing, because it’s an awful lot cheaper to ship from California than a bed would be. That and a few Therm-a-rest mattresses and the place
is furnished. [OK, maybe I made a trip to Ikea too.] Since all of my past mattresses
have always wound up on the floor, this is also the highest off the ground I’ve ever
slept, which is great for an asthmatic geek like myself.
The height gets me anxious from time to time, but I take medication for that.
On the more fitful nights, I can hear absolutely everything in the apartment, and it
all sounds like either snapping string or slipping mortar. So I try to keep something
soft underneath me, and make sure the Ikea endtable is out of the path my head
would take on the way down. The design is pretty fault-tolerant, though: breaking
a few threads won’t make a real difference, and the white nylon strings at either
end are designed to slowly unravel should something go wrong, gently laying you
down instead of dropping you. Unless the hook just comes out of the wall, of
396
CHAPTER 14. ASSORTED
Figure 14.5: The bed
course.
The hammock conforms very well to your body, and there’s a lot of fine-tuning
that you can do: shifting your arm a little bit up or down can entirely change the
feel. So yes, there’s a learning curve to my bed. I didn’t sleep very well the first few
days, but now I know exactly where to put my legs so that my hip is perfectly in
line with my spine, where to shove a pillow so that my kidneys feel well-supported,
et cetera. You can even do finer calibrations by pulling the nylon strings to shift
tension around—so yes, my bed has options and settings. I used to try to do these
sorts of things with my flat beds, using complex arrays of pillows under my belly
and around my head and such, but that never quite worked, and I had to make
up for not sleeping well during the night by sleeping in all morning. Now, with
the hammock, I sleep wonderfully—so wonderfully that I choose to sleep in all
morning because it feels so good.
B IBLIOGRAPHY
Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 1963.
Edwin Black. IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and Americas Most Powerful Corporation. Crown, 2001.
Andrei Broder, Ravi Kumar, Farzin Maghoul, Prabhakar Raghavan, Sridhar Rajagopalan, Raymie Stata, Andrew Tomkins, and Janet Wiener. Graph structure
in the web. Computer Networks, 33:309–320, 2000.
Stephanie L. Brown and Brian P. Lewis. Relational dominance and mate-selection
criteria: Evidence that males attend to female dominance. Evolution and Human
Behavior, 25(6):406–415, November 2004.
David Card and Alan B Krueger. Myth and Measurement. Princeton University
Press, 1997.
Steven M Cherry. The patent profiteers. IEEE Spectrum, June 2004.
Donald S Chisum. The future of software protection: The patentability of algorithms. U Pitt Law Rev, 47:959–961, 1986.
Jennifer M. Connolly, Virginia Slaughter, and Linda Mealey. The development
of preferences for specific body shapes. Journal of Sex Research, 41(1):5–15,
February 2004.
Ithiel de Sola Pool and Manfred Kochen. Contacts and influence. Social Networks,
1(1):5–51, 1978/79.
Richard Dedekind. Essays on the Theory of Numbers. Open Court Publishing,
1901.
Fan, Lu, Wu, and Dai. ”Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B:
Containing papers of a Biological Character”, 271(1537):347–352, February
2004.
397
398
BIBLIOGRAPHY
B Fink, N Neave, and JT Manning. Second to fourth digit ratio, body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio, and waist-to-chest ratio: Their relationships in heterosexual men and women. Annals of Human Biology, 30(6):728–738, NovemberDecember 2003.
Robert H Frank, Thomas D. Gilovich, and Dennis T. Regan. Do economists make
bad citizens? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 10(1):187–192, 1996.
John I. Gilderbloom and John P. Markham. The impact of homeownership on
political beliefs. Social Forces, 73(4):1589–1607, 1995.
Edward L Glaeser, Bruce Sacerdote, and Jose A Scheinkman. Crime and social
interactions. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 111(2):507–48, May 1996.
Daniel S Hammermesh and Jeff E Biddle. Beauty and the labor market. American
Economic Review, 84(5):1174–1194, 1994.
Suzette Heald. Mafias in Africa: The rise of drinking companies and vigilante
groups in Bugisu district, Uganda. Africa: Journal of the International African
Institute, 56(4):446–467, 1986.
Barry T Jones, Ben C Jones, Andy P Thomas, and Jessica Piper. Addiction, 98(8):
1069–1075, August 2003.
Matthijs Kalmijn. Intermarriage and homogamy: Causes, patterns, trends. Annual
Review of Sociology, 24:395–421, 1998.
Rachel Karniol. A conceptual analysis of immanent justice responses in children.
Child Development, 51(1):118–130, 1980.
PT Katzmarzyk and C Davis. Thinness and body shape of playboy centerfolds from
1978 to 1998. International Journal Of Obesity, 25(4):590–592, April 2001.
Morris Kline. Mathematics: the Loss of Certainty. Oxford University Press, 1980.
Michael Kremer. How much does sorting increase inequality?
Journal of Economics, 112(1):115–139, February 1997.
The Quarterly
Fredrik Lijeros, Christofer R Edling, Lus A Nunes Amaral, H Eugene Stanley, and
Yvonne Åberg. The web of human sexual contacts. Nature, 411, June 2001.
Charles E Lindblom. The market as prison. The Journal of Politics, 44(2):324–336,
May 1982.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
399
RA Lippa. Are 2d : 4d finger-length ratios related to sexual orientation? yes for
men, no for women. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(1):179–
188, July 2003.
Caroline Mansfield, Suellen Hopfer, and Theresa M Marteau. Termination rates after prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome, spina bifida, anencephaly, and Turner
and Klinefelter syndromes: A systematic literature review. Prenatal diagnosis,
19(9):808–812.
Robert D Mare. Five decades of educational assortative mating. American Sociological Review, 56(1):15–32, 1991.
Judith Martin. Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior.
Atheneum, 1982.
Douglas S Massey, Jorge Durand, and Nolan J Malone. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration. Russel Sage
Foundation, 2002.
Daphne Maurer and Maria Barrera. Infants’ perception of natural and distorted
arrangements of a schematic face. Child Development, 52(1):196–202, March
1981.
Edward J McCaffery. Fair not Flat: How to Make the Tax System Better and
Simpler. University of Chicago Press, 2002.
F Noor and DC Evans. The effect of facial symmetry on perceptions of personality
and attractiveness. Journal of Research in Personality, 37(4):339–347, August
2003.
President’s Advisory Panel on Tax Reform. Simple, Fair, and Pro-Growth: Proposals to Fix America’s Tax System. Government Printing Office, November
2005.
Judea Pearl. Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference. Cambridge University
Press, 2000.
Judea Perl. Causality. Cambridge University Press, March 2000.
Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal. US presidential elections 1968-1980: A spatial
analysis. American Journal of Political Science, 28:283–312, 1984.
Cynthia S Rand and Judith A Hall. Social Psychology Quarterly, 46(4):359–363,
December 1983.
400
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anatol Rapoport and Albert M Chammah. Sex differences in factors contributing
to the level of cooperation in a prisoner’s dilemma game. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, pages 2831–2838, 1965.
Donald A Redelmeier, Joel Katz, and Daniel Kahneman.
Memories of
colonoscopy: A randomized trial. Pain, 104(1-2):187–94, July 2003.
Elaina Rose. Education and hypergamy, and the “success gap”. Technical report,
2003. University of Washington Department of Economics, working paper #53.
Harvey S. Rosen and Kenneth T. Rosen. Federal taxes and homeownership: Evidence from time series. The Journal of Political Economy, 88(1):59–75, 1980.
Harvey S. Rosen, Kenneth T. Rosen, and Douglas Holtz-Eakin. Housing tenure,
uncertainty, and taxation. The Review of Economics and Statistics, (3):405–416.
Bertrand Russel. Portraits from Memory, and Other Essays. Simon and Schuster,
1956.
C A Samuels, G Butterworth, T Roberts, L Graupner, and G Hole. Facial aesthetics: Babies prefer attractiveness to symmetry. Perception, 23(7):823–831,
1994.
JT Manning SJ Robinson. The ratio of 2nd to 4th digit length and male homosexuality. Evolution and Human Behavior, 21(5):333–345, September 2000.
Igor Stravinsky. Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons: The Charles Eliot
Norton Lectures. Harvard University Press, 1942.
Lawrence S Sugiyama. Is beauty in the context-sensitive adaptations of the beholder? Shiwiar use of waist-to-hip ratio in assessments of female mate value.
Evolution and Human Behavior, 25(1):51–62, 2004.
John Sutton. Gibrat’s legacy. Journal of Economic Literature, 35(1):40–59, March
1997.
G D L Travis and H M Collins. New light on old boys: Cognitive and institutional
particularism in the peer review system. Science, Technology, & Human Values,
16(3):322–341, 1991.
John W Tukey. Exploratory Data Analysis. Addison-Wesley, 1977.
Ronald Wintrobe. The Political Economy of Dictatorship. Cambridge University
Press, 1998.