The Late Enlightenment

Newt Gingrich: Moral Relativist

2012-01-28T10:23:00.000-08:00

In the 1980s Newt wrote a letter to the AMA advocating the legalization of marijuana. Later he tells the Wall Street Journal that he smoked pot when he was younger, but then morality changed and now it's wrong to do so, which I guess is why he wants to execute people for possessing it, apparently in accordance with Shari'a law.

So either morality changes dramatically over time and there are no objective moral truths, or Newt Gingrich is inconstant. Guess where the smart money's going on that one!

Colonial Japan: Alternate History #5

2012-01-21T20:10:00.000-08:00

For the previous installment, check out Alternate History #4, Colonial Megafauna.

The Pieties, 2012.

Why does anyone care about alternative history? Why does it matter? Of course it's fun to be an imaginary tourist, and see what Buddhist Africa would look like. But more importantly, we care because the world is a small enough place that coincidences have consequences, and world history is always local history somewhere. There is a quiet little town in the Greek countryside that used to be called Sparta; there is a field in Shropshire where a boy named Charles developed his love of nature by collecting beetles; and furthermore reading biographies, it's most rewarding to find out everyone who came before us was just a mortal mammal. Can you be sure that there won't be people or events where you're sitting right now with macrohistorical echoes? If someone in the future came back to alter history, would a meteor hitting your town have more or less impact than one in the New Guinea Highlands, or downtown Seoul? There are places around the world that haven't yet mattered that much to everyone else. Japan is not one of them or I wouldn't have written a post about it.

So we care because coincidences have consequences - but to care, those consequences have to effect a world that we recognize - unlike much of the last post, where the description of the change's consequences are abbreviated for this very reason. And that's a second problem in alternative history, that if the change is far enough back, it would necessarily create a planet so bizarre it might as well be made from whole cloth. (Hence the framing of the Homo erectus nation in this post as isolated on Australia - sorry Aussies.) If I were to pick a novel where this problem was best demonstrated it would be Lion's Blood (and its sequel Zulu Heart) by Stephen Barnes, where the the change began with Socrates, twenty-five centuries ago. And still we get Christianity and Islam! (The same people with the same names would still be getting born a thousand years after the change? What, fate doesn't apply to historical events but somehow still applies to which sperm and eggs meet each other?) Having never asked Stephen Barnes, I can't say the following for sure, but I wager he would say that yes he knows things would have been a lot more different than that, but then people would be less invested in the stories.

Alexander the Great's conquest is another favorite place to change history. In S.M. Stirling's Conquistador, Alexandros o Megas survives his fever in Babylon and lives to a ripe old age, becoming a god-king and binding together east and west Eurasia "before their time"; apparently this religio-political cult retards progress so that when people from our timeline enter "modern-day" California in the other timeline, it's still populated solely by Native Americans. Expanding on Alexandrian divergences, I've always wanted a story where a time traveler with a poor grasp of history travels to early 3rd century B.C. China, not noticing anything amiss - until he is granted an audience with the emperor and finds himself before an old white man with thinning blonde hair - because Alexander rallies his troops at the Indus and then passes through Bengal and Burma to strike at the heart of China - right in the middle of the Warring States period, just like wPizarro wandered into Peru at exactly the right time in Inca history, after a protracted civil war. I wager Alexander would have taken one look at Chinese culture and "gone native" far more than he ever did in Egypt or Babylon.

You'll notice a pattern in the last two versions of "What if things had gone differently in relations between Europeans and the rest of the world?" The most common way this question is put in alterntive histories is what-ifs about the Mongol invasions of Eurasia. The Mongols were just the last of what were many pulses out of the central Eurasian steppes, which are called either migrations or invasions depending on whether your ancestors were already settled in when then next one came. Those migrations began earlier with several waves of Indo-Europeans (Celts, then the centum-speaking Mediterranean settlers, and then the Germans, and then the Slavs), followed by waves of Altaic-speakers (Huns, the Turks and Mongols; the first Altaics beat the last Indo-Europeans into Europe.) As time went on the nomads had to become successively better organized to defeat the agriculturalists they encountered, and the Mongols were the last hurrah. The economics (and technology, and population numbers)) of non-nomadism finally favored the cities by the Middle Ages. Hence Poles and Chinese don't have to worry about waking up tomorrow with Kazakh armies ravaging their cities.

Which finally brings us to the alternative history in the title. Focusing on Alexander or the Mongols (or even the spread of the Plague as Kim Stanely Robinson did in the outstanding Years of Rice and Salt) assumes that the important contacts between East and West Eurasia was mediated over land - and beginning in the age of discovery, this was no longer the case. When European ships began pushing trade routes up coastal East Asia, Japan was in the process of civil wars that ended up unifying it under the Tokugawa shoguns at the beginning of the seventeeth century. Interestingly, the Western export of which Japanese rulers were wary was not guns or printed books, but Christianity. Having seen what was happening in the Philippines - that the Spanish used the conversion of locals to Catholicism to advance their political interests - local daimyos became increasingly hostile to Christians, beginning in earnest with a massacre in Nagasaki at the end of the sixteenth century. Without accurate records it is difficult to estimate today how many converts had been made and how many were killed in the persecutions that followed but many estimates run into the hundreds of thousands; Christianity was formally outlawed in 1632.

The first Shogun unified Japan in 1603, and a few years later the second sent a Spanish-style galleon to make the daunting voyage across the Pacific, to Mexico. (Yes, that already seems like alternative history! More on this here, in the list of links.) Mystifyingly to modern minds, the Japanese government chose not to continue its new naval activities. The second shogun, Hidetada, began limiting contact with the West but it was the third, Iemitsu, who not only formally outlawed Christianity, but closed Japan to the outside world. Again, to modern classical liberal minds this seems stupid and/or cruel, but from the standpoint of a rationally self-interested dictator, there are two things you don't want: contact with the outside world, and the opportunity for subjects to enrich themselves. Foreign trade necessarily meant both, and though he didn't realize it, Iemitsu's point was already proven by European history: in the late Middle Ages foreign trade after the Crusades ultimately brought an end to the Church's monopoly on power in the northern half of Europe. Economic growth is an unquestioned end in a democracy but seems positively dangerous to a tyrant who thinks only in terms of self-preservation, and in those days no one yet grasped the link between advancing economies and advancing military technology. One thing that is inescapably obvious about the Tokugawas is their extremely clear-thinking and unsentimental focus on preserving their power.

Bolstering Iemitsu's case from the standpoint of colonialism, Asia provides excellent arguments against colonization. What were the two countries in Asia that were not colonized? Japan and Thailand, both of which have been very successful relative to neighbors. Interestingly, Thailand had a similar dalliance with European influence in the seventeeth century, until a king threw them out of his court.

What if the Third Tokugawa Had Not Been So Suspicious?

What might have happened if the third Tokugawa had been less paranoid, and remained open to foreign influence? Catholic and Spanish influence would have continued unabated, and it's difficult to argue that Iemitsu's fears were not justified; Japan would likely have become a colony like the Philippines, although with a centralized government this would eventually have led to large war between colonizers and the central government. In actual history, the Japanese permitted the Dutch (the Dutch East India Company) limited contact from an island near Nagasaki, although if the Spanish had still been present in the same numbers it's unlikely such an arrangement would have continued. The Dutch even tried to militarily dislodge the Spanish elsewhere in the Pacific, from Manila, but failed; maybe they would have tried and succeeded in Japan?

Here's how we might read history if things went differently. Major events of macrohistorical importance? Because Japan remained isolated, I think we'd see the biggest impact in three areas: 1) those having to do with early-to-mid 20th century China, 2) most obviously, with World War II (there would only have been one real Axis power) and 3) with the development of technology in the twentieth century. Of course the Japonisme influence in art in the nineteenth century would not have happened, because Japanese civilization would not have had the good fortune to touch European civilization at a time when Europeans put any value on the exotic, non-Christian world.

1613 - the Pietish galleon San Buena Ventura returns from Mexico with Spanish priests to minister to the growing Japanese Christian population, and a military escort with several garrisons-worth of Spanish troops for "protection" of the Pietish military chief (the "chogan"); persecution of Pietish Catholics in Cuchu ceases.

1623 - the Dutch East India Company begins building forts along the bay near what the natives called Edo; this would later become New Rotterdam. The following year a small Spanish fleet attempts to enter the bay and is repulsed by the Dutch. Spanish appeals to the Pietish chief are ignored.

1630 - the Dutch found the New Hague on the site of old Zendij in the north. The Spanish found colonies on the west coast of Greater Piety; by this point there are Spanish towns throughout the two Minor Pieties (there is a campaign to restore the native names, Cuchu and Chicocu).

1644 - attempted rebellion by now-majority-Christian Nacasaqui chief against the central chief in New Rotterdam, with surrepetitious Spanish help. The revolt is crushed with Dutch help.

A traditional Pietish dancer. (Here's who it is really, and guess why I picked her.)

1670-1677 - the Spanish conquest of the Pieties (named after previous Spanish king Philip the Pious). With Spanish help boats and warriors from the Lesser Pieties revolt against the central chiefs, and in three years have taken most of the west coast of Greater Piety and the east coast up to the Chubu region. The native chief in Kyoto is killed and the military chief in New Rotterdam is exiled. Spain now administers all but the northeast quarter of the Pieties.

The Virgin of Sasebo. A native in the hills of Cuchu claimed to have found it on the paper wall of his hut after a flash of light at dawn on New Years Day.

1787 - Vladimir Tartarov maps Alexander Island, to the north of Great Piety, and returns two years later to build the fort that would become Alexandrograd. This was the first of three, the first two of which were destroyed by the Emitchee natives.

River mouth, Alexander Island. The island became very popular with British hunters and since the detente tourism from Americans has increased. (Really, Sakhalin.)

1799 - the brief Battle of Black Strait between a British survey ship and two Russian vessels. This was the ship that later brought George Granville to in Olivertown in British Columbia.

1879 - French-educated Jesuit priest Carlos Nacallama begins the "Cherry Blossom" revolt against Spanish colonial authorities. He is eventually captured and executed, but revolts continue in springtime for two decades.

Carlos Nacallama, ca. 1883. Really, philosopher Kitaro Nishida.

1867 - Alexander Island almost becomes American territory, along with Russian America (between the Yukon and the Bering Strait) in a purchase transaction between American Secretary of State Seward and the Russian Empire. Discussions called off; President Fremont decides territories would be undefendable from British.

1898 - The Spanish Pieties come into American possession along with the Philippines at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War. The underdeveloped northeast ("Free Piety") remains officially not part of the territory; the Dutch only retain official claim to New Rotterdam and New Hague.

1926 - The Soviet invasion of Korea begins the Russo-Korean War.

1938 - Taking advantage of the Chinese Civil War, Soviet forces invade China.

1939 - Germany invades Poland. The USSR declares war on Germany. The nominally neutral U.S. begins to sell weapons to Germany to distract the Soviets from their campaigns in the Orient.

1941 - U.S. takes Free Piety, pays Netherlands a nominal fee. This is condemned by non-German Europe but war is not declared.

1943 - The end of the German War in Europe means that Soviet forces can focus fully on East Asia. The British-Soviet alliance divides China into north and south, and quickly ends American ambitions elsewhere in Asia or the Pacific.

The Old Dutch Church in New Rotterdam.

1977 - Sustainable nuclear fission developed by Esteban Curosaqui, a Pietish physicist working in England.

1988 - After a decade of detente between the U.S. and the Commonwealth-Soviet Alliance, the U.S. grants official home-rule in the Pieties, but U.S. military bases remain in Santa Fausta and Nacasaqui despite protests. Still-developing Pietish economy based on agriculture and tourism; some Pietish scientists trained in the U.S.

1992 - First semiconductors developed.

2012 - economic outlook for Pietish economy considered positive. U.S., Korea and China are moving unskilled manufacturing to the Pieties, especially printing, textiles and heavy industry.

Thanks to Motoo for corrections and further insights.

Colonial Megafauna: Alternative History #4

2012-01-21T20:06:00.000-08:00

For the previous installment, check out Alternate History #3, American Invasions of Canada.

Mexican colonial history is striking to me for two reasons. First, the Spanish settlement of the Americas begin in earnest in the early 1500s, well over a century before the English did the same to the north. In a sense, these were medieval knights meeting Aztecs. Second, the initial Spanish explorers and colonists in Mexico found a harsher, more alien environment much closer to the coast, and much sooner. It wasn't until the mid-1800s that the now-independent English speakers to the north were trying to cross and tame the dry mountainous wastes in the interior; but try making the four hour drive from coastal Veracruz to Mexico City, and in the first hour you go from pleasant tropical coastal plains to rugged high desert. Those medieval knights were catapulted straight into the Wild West. English speaking civilization had some time to acclimatize on the somewhat Europe-like East Coast.

Alternative geography can be just as fun as alternative history. This is why the pope of alternative history Harry Turtledove has played interesting games with geography - in Down in the Bottomlands, he imagines the climate and politics of a world where not only did the Mediterranean never re-flood, but Neanderthal nations exist alongside those of Homo sapiens. In Opening Atlantis he imagines the East Coast of North America as if it had broken away from the rest of the continent, like North America's Japan or New Zealand; it would be closer to Europe and therefore discovered earlier.

A tylosaur skull found in the early twentieth century in Kansas. Tylosaurs were open-ocean predators.

At one time there was in fact a sea coast along what is now the western U.S. - the Western Interior Seaway during the creataceous. (This is different from what Turtledove imagined, which was essentially an East Coast broken off at the Appalachians and moved east.) The cretaceous seaway is why we find marine fossils in Kansas and Montana. Of course at that point there were no people to colonize North America yet. In fact there may not even have been any primates yet.

Imagine that not only the geography of that western continent stayed the same to the present day, but that there was no eastern continent at all. The experience of English speakers would have been more similar to the Spaniards, encountering high mountains and deserts and alien environments a day's ride from the coast. Agricultural land would have been more valuable; on the Western continent there couldn't have been the same real estate crash that happened shortly after the Revolution, during our expansion over the Appalachians, that drove Thomas Jefferson into relative poverty. The coasts that turned into ports and market places would have been more valuable as plantations, as remained the case in Virginia and the Carolinas (where the mountains were indeed higher) and of course in Veracruz. From north to south, Missoula, Idaho Falls, Salt Lake City, and Gallup would have been port cities with their backs immediately to the Rockies. (Note too that in the real world, this was almost all Spanish territory first.) They would have been greener and less continental in their climates, but the interior encountered by John Smith would have been a place of mountains and deserts unlike anything he'd seen in Europe. The settlers of Jamestown would've had to become King James's first cowboy.

What If Europeans Really Did Discover America?

There's another surprise in store for the pseudo-cretaceous John Smith: in this world, Europeans really are discovering the Americas. There was no land bridge; they're really the first ones there. Excellent! No need to steal anyone's land or oppress native cultures! Good news, right? Wrong.

About the time that the first Native Americans were colonizing the interior of North America, 10,000 years ago, there was a megafauna extinction. We're not yet certain that it was the paleolithic Native Americans who did it, but that's the best so far: humans are pretty good at disrupting ecosystems, through some combination of hunting to extinction, altering landscapes with fire, and maybe even bringing a few non-native organisms with them. My bet is that they did it.

And that's lucky for the real John Smith, and non-Native Americans: not so lucky for when pseudo-cretaceous John Smith goes up into the mountains that begin twenty miles from the port of Gallup, because it's going to be a regular Land of the Lost up there. He's going to meet mammoths, and sabretooth tigers, and dire wolves. Sabretooths are bad enough, but dire wolves move in packs and weigh about 150 lbs. (If you're in Los Angeles check them out at the tar pits.) Sure there will be tortoises and sloths for him to eat when he's out in the bush, assuming he remains at the top of the food chain. I'm imagining a battle during the pseudo-cretaceous American Revolution, when the British regulars are charging the American lines, only to have the battle end in a panic when a herd of mammoths emerges from the Rocky Mountain forest, scared by the cannon, charging the field and scattering the soldiers of both sides. Or maybe Cortez's party turned back to the coast when a pack of dire wolves comes out of the brush near Texcala, not slowed by their primitive guns, and kills dozens of men in full armor and sends the rest running in terror back to the coast wetting their pantaloons in terror, cursing their leader for burning their ship and trapping them in this hellish land.

Hey Lewis and Clark: how far do you seriously think you'll get in this place? By yourselves, with no native guides? The only other continent with comparable megafauna to this is Africa, and it's right next to Europe, and in the middle of the nineteenth century Europeans were still exploring the interior.

There have been alternative history/borderline fantasy books written imagining an America with dinosaurs still running around - in particular, Kurt Giambastiani's The Year the Cloud Fell, which features Custer's much more evenly matched war against the Cheyenne Alliance, interrupted by T. rex attacks (In this world's Dakotas, Sue is still alive and well.) The dinosaurs in the American West with Native Americans meme is over a century old so I'll send you here for more.

It's hard to say how different a pseudo-cretaceous North America would look and how it would effect the world. Assuming initial Spanish settlement, it's possible that Spain would have dominated the entire New World, without allowing any of the other powers to get a foothold. The land would have been more mountainous and drier on average and much less productive; and the dangerous wildlife would have dramatically slowed development of the interior. Without a native population to enslave, the riches that Spain extracted from the New World would have been much slower to come. This may have meant a faster decline of Spain, and a quicker rise and larger relative role in European history for the Netherlands, whose trade empire was only partly dependent on the Americas. The Netherlands may have ended up playing a role in the Age of Discovery in the rest of the world more similar to Britain. Home rule of the Americas would have been much slower in coming.

For the next installment, check out Alternate History #5, Colonial Japan.

A Pundit Database

2012-01-16T13:29:00.000-08:00

Make pundits accountable: blog.punddittracker.com. Not everyone will look at their accuracy over time or care, but the knowledge that such a database exists will count for something.

Interestingly, the good folks who are making the effort to do this have noticed that pundits are hard to track, because they rarely make clear, testable, measurable predictions.

This is interesting because of the possible explanations. One is that whatever utility we get from consuming pundit opinion, we make our punditry consumption decisions irrationally, so they're rewarded by shrouding. Merchants typically do this for prices where there is little difference in quality between products, to avoid consumers being able to easily compare cost - it's a very easy thing to decide on - so airlines and car salespeople, among many other businesses, are desperate to keep you from knowing how much something really costs. The pundits may be inverse-shrouding - shrouding the their product, so to speak (or even colluding in doing so), similar to politicians refusing to give clear answers to position-tracking websites. Frustratingly, In the 2010 California elections it was basically all the major candidates who refused to do so.)

Another possibility is that pundits don't make clear predictions because people aren't listening to them for information, but for entertainment. My money's on this explanation. At least Pundittracker will make this reality more obvious to some people.

A Possible Mechanism and Model For Producing a Mischelian World

2012-01-13T15:16:00.000-08:00

John Rawls had a famous thought experiment about social justice and the distribution of wealth, which was answered by Nozick. Mischel did his famous marshmallow experiment, showing that there is a distribution of ability to delay gratification in children, and that this corresponds with life outcomes.

There would seem to be an implication from Mischel's work for Rawls and Nozick. This is summarized here. The point to take from Mischel is that the individual players in the game differ in important ways, and any concern about the effects of wealth distribution must take this into account, or such efforts are doomed to be quickly erased. However in a global economy, if delayed gratification differs not just between individuals but entire countries, we might expect to see economic differences. There is a gated paper on this here and a writeup on Discovery blog here with more data.) Here's the average delayed gratification by country, when participants were asked whether they would take $3400 now or $3800 a month from now. (I don't know if or how they controlled for age, education, etc. for each countries.)

Because I couldn't get the numbers that made that graph, I eyeballed the graph and made this scatterplot of delayed gratification against per capita income by country (per capita data is 2011 IMF).

For what it's worth an exponential function fit the curve better (0.3852 vs this one).

If we're interested in these numbers to measure the impact of human intelligence on economic outcomes, there are some adjustments that we might like to make. (and by we, I mean a grad student with better data and more time). For example, if a rogue comet hits Canada tomorrow, their economy will suffer, but it's not because they weren't smart. So instead of per capita income, let's make the outcome the percent increase in per capita income since, say, 1961 (i.e. South Korea and the Czech Republic started off way behind and they're doing pretty well considering). Adjust that figure downward for each country by taking out their last fifty years of mineral wealth, especially oil - it's what you do with the real estate you have once you have it (i.e. happening to be sitting on oil and gold reserves is luck, not industry, and Norway's reported income is $96,951, a huge chunk of which is oil; are they really that much better than Japan?). Also adjust that number upward by estimating the the cost of wars, including civil. (Where would Vietnam and Colombia be otherwise?) Finally, adjust downward for foreign aid received during that period - for some developing countries this is a substantial portion of GDP. My prediction is that the relationship between wealth and cognitive measures, like this one, would become much clearer.

Another troubling suggestion is that, if the players in the game differ individually, if any of these differences are heritable and people of the same economic level mate based on that fact, then such heritability might declare. But over what time period? So imagine a 100% efficient economy dependent on trait X (doesn't have to be delayed gratification), and not at all dependent on family relationships (outside of those you'd expect if trait X were heritable; i.e. no nepotism, and the CEO's son doesn't get the job unless he's actually as good as his dad and deserves it). You can call trait X "merit", whatever it is that's merit-worthy in this economy. Assuming that merit is equally heritable as we know intelligence to be, i.e. conservatively about 60%, here you can see here an anthropologist's simple model for how in just 100 years if merit is at all heritable, even a true non-nepotistic meritocracy would begin to produce two genetically distinct groups. That is to say: in any society where humans vary genetically in the trait that is being selected on - which is every society - there will be separation into groups by the "selectand".

Possible solutions would seem to include: tolerance of this separation (less likely by claiming it's not a problem, more likely by pretending it isn't there and refusing to discuss it openly); forced intermarriage between groups; or changing the selectand. This latter has certainly happened during the industrial revolution as the economy changed radically and different traits became important for success. Delay of gratification is likely one such trait. As profit-generating enterprises become more complex and longer, it's reasonable to project that delay of gratification will become more important in the future.

It seems non-controversial to say that since ability to delay gratification differs between countries, it must be a result of nature and/or nurture. If it's entirely heritable, that would be bad for the impact of a global economy on those countries that currently show a high time preference (i.e. don't delay gratification), because we can't do anything about that. Being optimistic and assuming that this trait is entirely a result of nurture - that is, culture - then it seems even more uncontroversial to say that culture matters to economics and therefore to human well-being, which is the whole reason anyone worries about all this. Otherwise culture is irrelevant noise.

Marijuana Safer Than Tobacco

2012-01-10T15:06:00.001-08:00

Marijuana is safer than tobacco, according to this study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), one of the premier peer-reviewed publciations of medical science in the country and world.

Remind me again why we're all paying tax money not only to continue, but intensify strong-arm tactics to put state-legalized entrepreneurs out of business? And where is the party of the free market when we need them? It would be one thing to just be too lazy to repeal the laws and move marijuana off the list of DEA Schedule 1 substances; that would be a sin of omission. But to waste more of everyone's money and attention, when there's more and more information showing this is all a fraud?

Paul Cezanne, Bay of Marseilles, 1885

2011-12-23T01:57:00.000-08:00

Calculating Generosity and Old Refrigerators

2011-12-22T02:31:00.000-08:00

Generous People Are Just Being Smart

In economics there are a number of thresholds beyond which the behavior of rationally self-interested agents changes, based on subsistence or biological set-points of humans. For example, there are diminishing returns in happiness to increasing wealth, once basic needs are met (although this point has become contentious of late).

We would also expect cultural values to change in wealthy societies. In a poor and unpredictable society, possessions are few, frequently used, and critical for economic survival. Consequently people are highly risk averse and discount the future, and don't let their few things out of their sight. In a wealthy and predictable society, there may be more value to be had from your possessions; specifically, social capital from allowing others to use them. That is, generous people are really just smart. (That doesn't diminish their niceness at all.)

A qualitative equation for sharing possession would look like this:

NET UTILITY GAINED =

social capital for the future,
+ pleasure from seeing friends benefit,
+ status from interacting with more powerful person or signaling wealth by helping a lesser person

- utility lost while possession is loaned out,
- value of possession relative to overall wealth,
- chance of the item getting damaged, lost or stolen (if an object is changing hands)

Ergo:
- If you have powerful, rich friends or people who have access to goods and services you don't, the ROI is big, and this favors your being generous with them. Note that social capital is not just directly an IOU, but a relationship that's been built or reinforced. (See Benjamin Franklin's anecdotal trick to turn an enemy into a friend this way.)

- If you're a nice person and gain utility from seeing people happy, that favors your being generous.

- The more people know about your generosity, the better (if you gain status based on the person you loaned something to, or by helping those less fortunate.)

- If you use the item a lot, that counts against being generous with it.

- If the item is valuable, and/or if there's a significant chance of its not coming back in one piece, or you have poor information to evaluate those chances (i.e. you don't know the person well), that counts against being generous. As the value of the item increases relative to the value of your wealth, that counts against being generous.

The social capital built by economic interactions has been a major part of trade transactions for most of our history; most people who traded knew each other over the long-term until the last century or two. This may explain why in disparate places in the developing world, refusal to barter is taken by merchants as an insult - which would be very, very strange if they were only maximizing money. The bartering process extends the social contact. In my anecdotal experience, marketeers in these places in the world have caught on and realize that bartering is a tradition they don't mind parting with.

A Theory of Refrigerators In Front Yards

Conversely, hoarders may be irrational or stupid, believing they can gain value from objects that they store, often with the intent to fix or restore them. The type of hoarder I'm talking about here is a hoarder of things (machines, tools and objects, rather than paper records or sentimental objects). The hoarding of machines is much more often seen in males, especially those which plan to fix or amend them eventually.

Why do object-hoarders keep their objects for so long? We might assume that their economic "problem-solving" is intact but their estimations of some of the variables plugged into the decision process are off:

NET UTILITY GAINED =

estimation of mark-up you can get, i.e. value added to purchase price by labor

minus (inconvenience of storing it)*(belief how fast it will move)

That is to say:

- The clutter doesn't motivate them sufficiently (this is more likely the case on a large plot of rural land than in a city apartment)
- They have an unrealistic idea of how soon a buyer might appear
- They have an unrealistic valuation of the objects, in part because of an unrealistic valuation of their own skills and attention to repair them in the future

Gift-Giving; and In New York and Asia

2011-12-22T01:55:00.000-08:00

Matt Yglesias writes about the irrational economics of gift-giving; for example, on average, gifts are worth less to the recipient than they are the market (Yglesias cites estimates from 10 to 33%). This apparently stupid custom makes us wonder what else is being maximized here. Thorstein Veblen wrote about conspicuous consumption (and gift-giving) as a form of status signalling, and used the pre-Columbian Pacific Northwest tradition of potlatch as an extreme example. Orgies of mutually ruinous gift-giving make perfect sense only if you're trying to impress people with your wealth. Asymmetric gift-giving can also make sense if it's an emotional experience you're trying to create, and it's starting or reinforcing a social relationship that will hopefully be of value to both parties; of if you're just looking for status from the giving of the gift.

Many of us explicitly tell family members that if there is anything to be given at the holidays, it's cold hard cash. Unlike that sweater you'll never wear, there's no loss there - it has the same value in your pocket as on the market. And indeed, direct cash gifts are the norm in some places in the world and even one region in the United States. New Yorkers give money at weddings; most Americans outside New York consider this crass. East Asians are more likely than Westerners to give money on holidays.

What is interesting here is that East Asian cultures have a rich tradition of gift-giving to reinforce relationships, but among family and close friends cash is acceptable or even expected. And it's worth asking whether we think of East Asians as better or worse rational optimizers (on average) than other groups of people, and whether New Yorkers as better or worse rational optimizers than other Americans. These folks might be on to something. So to your boss, take the time to think of something nice, but send your sister a cash card.

The Revolting Syrian

2011-12-17T19:40:00.001-08:00

Coverage of the Syrian uprising. In the links at right also.

What Fraction of Chinese Economic Success Is From Stolen Data?

2011-12-15T12:57:00.000-08:00

A report in Business Week covers China's cyber-warfare, and links to McAfee's report, which doesn't mention China by name but might as well. (Oddly, only a single article on Xinhua's English edition mentions the McAfee investigation and comes to the opposite conclusion, that no single nation is thought to be behind the attacks. The Chinese edition's front page today has not a single mention of it.)

Much is made of China's rise, but is there something to be learned here? Is there a way to estimate the value of the stolen data, and its impact on that growth? It's often thought that shame is a better tool than guilt to influence our frenemies across the Pacific; maybe a casual mention by the Obama administration of this interesting form of foreign aid might provoke an actual discussion.

One of the vulnerabilities of an advanced and open society is that China has no trade secrets we'd like to steal - but it would be good if all the cleverness we applied to Stuxnet, and all the enthusiasm of Wikileaks activists were being turned to infiltrating the government systems of the most powerful dictatorship in the world.

Things You May Not Have Known About James Earl Ray

2011-12-13T09:56:00.000-08:00

First and most mind-blowing to me, some members of the King family don't think Ray was MLK's assassin.

Second was that he lived in Los Angeles in 1967-68 and got a nose job while he was there. Prior to that he tried to become a porn director in Mexico. Very twenty-first century of him. While he was in L.A. he volunteered for George Wallace. For all the fetishizing of 1960s California history that goes on, I've never once heard of this connection; I guess it doesn't fit the narrative.

And finally, the aforementioned deeds were all committed while he was a prison escapee. Ray was already a convicted violent criminal with multiple crimes in several states to his name. He managed to escape again after he was imprisoned for King's assassination, in 1977.

I've just pulled out what were to me the most surprising facts but I just got these from the James Earl Ray Wikipedia page.

Asian Students Not Checking "Asian"

2011-12-05T00:52:00.000-08:00

Asian and part-Asian students, aware of the well-studied bias against high-performing Asian students in college admissions, are now avoiding checking Asian on their applications. Things are only going to get worse for Asian applicants: the Obama administration has recently relaxed restrictions on the use of race in college admissions, and in California specifically, Jerry Brown wants to go further. Of course, many of these students have ambivalent feelings about this.

Ambivalent Asian students: I'm going to solve this for you. Don't check Asian. Why is it okay for you to do this?

- First and foremost, because you're dealing with a badly immoral system. Let the admissions offices squeal all they want - the day they stop discriminating against you based on your race is the day you'll stop not checking your true background. If you woke up two centuries in the past, and the house you were in was harboring escaped slaves, would you lie to the police who came looking for them? Of course you would. Just like you're going to lie to the people who are treating groups of people differently today based on ethnic background.

- One concern seems to be that somehow students are "selling out", "selling their soul", or "turning their back on their community". Seriously? A mark on one piece of paper has that much effect on the identity you'll project in your life? Either don't complete that section, or say "not Asian", and forget about it. If your surname gives you away, then, and I mean this seriously, do a legal name change. Then change it back once you're in. Again, seriously. You have to weigh the annoying paperwork against the 250 SAT point advantage you'll get.

- From a purely selfish standpoint, I as an American adult want you to get into a good school where your potential is realized, based on your actual academic performance. Do it for me, and do it for yourself, for your country and future economy.

SCOTUS: Bone Marrow Donors Can Be Compensated

2011-12-02T17:45:00.000-08:00

Reported by Alex Tabarrok here. Egg donors might be next, then kidneys? There are coercive kidney donations going on already in East Asia; clearly this exchange does occur already elsewhere and is not morally optimal.

Centrality of State Capitals Doesn't Matter

2011-12-01T17:20:00.000-08:00

The center of population of the United States over time, migrating progressively west from Washington D.C. Does this matter?

Political entities try to locate their capital cities centrally, assuming that this facilitates administration of the entire territory. Consequently, we would expect to see that development indicators would correlate with centrality of capitals. I looked at data from American states, which are more standardized culturally and otherwise than the full set of world capitals would be. Using U.S. state data, the central capital assumption is false.

I compared per capita income, well-being, and Gini data for each U.S. state against the distance between from the geographic center of each state to the capital of each state, both in absolute terms and adjusted for the size of the state (against the square root of the total area including water).

As seen below, the R-squareds for linear correlations are very weak. If not, then what correlations there are, are almost invariably the opposite of what the central capital assumption would predict. (Correlations are shown by + or - in the tables.) That is, the further the capital is from the center of the state, the higher the well-being and per capita income, and the lower the income inequality. I'm not going to take up space with the noisy scatter plots so here's a table of the correlation strengths:

Measure	R squared, Absolute	Adjusted
Well-being	+, 0.0751	+, 0.0651
Per cap income	+, 0.0099	+, 0.0773
Gini	-, 0.066	-, 0.0266

Because geographic center in this case is really a proxy for center of population - does it really matter if the capital is equally near an empty quarter as to an urban area? - I also compared these metrics to capital-to-population center distance, with similar lack of correlation.

Measure	R squared, Absolute	Adjusted
Well-being	+, 0.0311	+, 0.0004
Per cap income	+, 0.0131	+, 0.0738
Gini	-, 0.0126	+, 0.0086

(Data can be provided upon request.)
See here for a map of population centers.

Of course there are outliers on the scatter-plots in terms of distance from capital to population or geographic center (especially Florida and Alaska) but removing them never resulted in significant changes and often actually lowered the already near-zero R-squared. Sometimes taking out the outliers reversed the correlation, but again the R-squared didn’t change much (biggest R-squared improvement with outliers where the correlation reversed was 0.0385 for Gini relating to capital distance from population center as opposed to 0.0126 with outliers, and the correlation went from negative to positive; still no signal.)

What are the implications or explanations here?

- The obvious one: that access to the capital doesn't matter for human development.

- That there are confounding factors; especially since the size of states varies non-randomly with their location and date of entry into the Union, which in turn non-randomly varies with their population density and types of economies.

- That in fact there has been sufficient wealth redistribution by the central national government to erase differences introduced by differing access to the capital (i.e. that having non-central capitals might have indeed hurt some states, but they get support from the Federal government that conceals this.)

- That geographic centrality is only a proxy for proximity to population that's being served, which is rarely distributed exactly evenly throughout a territory; perhaps doing this same analysis and taking into account center of population would give different and/or stronger correlations.

At the national level, I've often wondered what if any harm has been done in leaving the American capital in the original center of the U.S. (along the central East Coast) rather than moving it to Kansas City. Barring scale effects, based on this data, it's more likely that the answer is none at all.

Obama's Victory in East Asia

2011-11-25T13:17:00.000-08:00

It's time to celebrate a very big and very smart win, and give credit where credit is due.

The greatest long-term political threat in the world - narrowly, to American interests, and broadly, to human well-being in general - is China. China's economic ascendance is emphatically a good thing for its own people's happiness. China's continued existence as an oligarchy is not good for anyone's happiness. This is why the continuing foreign policy focus of many in the U.S. political establishment on the Middle East is so worrying. The future is in the relationship between East Asia and the Europhone world, and especially between the U.S. and China.

That's why I feel like the last two months of foreign policy moves by the Whitehouse have single-handedly justified my own vote in 2008. I'm thrilled with the attention that's being paid to East Asia, let alone with what this administration has pulled off, and saddened that it's such a back page item inside the U.S., not just to the general public but to the GOP - a GOP that would have us believe it's still a defense-and-foreign policy party. I wish it were - but when Republican voters can countenance someone like Herman Cain who didn't even know China had nuclear weapons, that credibility is badly damaged.

The following passage has been bouncing around the blogosphere, and I hope it keeps bouncing:

The US is moving forces to Australia, Australia is selling uranium to India, Japan is stepping up military actions and coordinating more closely with the Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea, Myanmar is slipping out of China's column and seeking to reintegrate itself into the region, Indonesia and the Philippines are deepening military ties with the the US: and all that in just one week. If that wasn't enough, a critical mass of the region's countries have agreed to work out a new trade group that does not include China, while the US, to applause, has proposed that China's territorial disputes with its neighbors be settled at a forum like the East Asia Summit — rather than in the bilateral talks with its smaller, weaker neighbors that China prefers...The diplomatic blitzkrieg moved so fast and on so many fronts, with the strokes falling so hard and in such rapid succession, that China was unable to develop an organized and coherent response...the US has reasserted its primacy in a convincing way. The US acted, received strikingly widespread support, and China backed down.
That is in fact what happened, and it was as decisive a diplomatic victory as anyone is likely to see. Congratulations should go to President Obama and his national security team. (Full piece here at the American Interest.)

Finally, it's dawned on people in Washington that our continually-rising creditor-cum-military competitor is important!

From a foreign policy standpoint China and East Asia can only be America's top priority. Even neocon intellectuals like Frank Fukushima have openly stated the Middle East's throwback's represent a bump in the road, a desperate last self-immolation in the face of inevitable modernity. I just hope the American public realizes how much more the CCP merits our attention than a scattering of illiterate death-cult members.

Is That Gravy...or ANTHRAX?

2011-11-25T13:02:00.000-08:00

"...when markets respond to the demands of Muslim consumers, freedom dies."

- Adam Serwer at Mother Jones, on Pamela Geller's Islamic turkey warnings

Kinetic Sculpture, George Rhoads (Boston Children's Hospital)

2011-11-22T13:56:00.000-08:00

I'm a sucker for these. The one in the Terminal C baggage carousel at the Philly Airport (along with others presumably) has mechanisms that behave out of phase with respect to the rest of the device, and are themselves altered by their interactions with the balls in the sculpture. Watch one of these for very long and you're likely to meditate on questions of determinism, digital vs. analog information, and irrational numbers. Here's Mr. Rhoads's website.

Surfing as Signalling

2011-11-13T00:32:00.000-08:00

Recently I learned to surf. And I'll tell you what, I was pretty pissed at how many kooks there were at my break yesterday. (Just kidding.) But seriously, it was pretty flat, which left me with plenty of time to wonder why people surf. I haven't seen a rigorous quantitative survey, but from my own discussions, it seems to be some combination of it's fun, and the "lifestyle". This raises questions, most of which have obvious answers, but which people in the surf community nonetheless don't usually seem to address directly:

1) If it's really just for fun and lifestyle, then why do such things as surf competitions exist? Why would anyone care to enter them, unless status was involved? (An unrefined reader might also be tempted to ask why someone would blog about the experience. But you're not such a philistine as to ask such an uninteresting question.)

2) Heterosexual women seem often to be attracted to heterosexual males who surf. This would seem to be a benefit of the lifestyle. So why are males who surf so coy about explicitly citing this reason? (Yes, there are female surfers but they're in the minority, although that I'm aware of there's no taboo or pressure against women who would otherwise be interested in surfing. In the lineup I would estimate it was less than 10% and this seems ballpark for what I've noticed before. If males are using surfing to signal fitness to females, then the gender disparity makes more sense.)

3) It seems strange that, for the combined total of less than 1 minute per hour you're likely to be standing on their board, people are willing to take hours out of their day, secure the equipment to the car before and after, clean off the wetsuit, etc. There are other forms of recreation where the activity itself is less than half the time doing it, but even (for example) the most crowded East Coast ski resort features a better activity-to-prep time ratio. It could be that just relaxing on the board in the water is part of the reward, or (referring to #2) being seen going back and forth with the equipment, to signal you surf.

There is certainly an opportunity to do some North San Diego County cultural anthropology here. Every time I'm in Encinitas I can't help but think there must be a PhD thesis waiting.

Presidential Party Transitions and Incumbents

2011-11-13T00:18:00.000-08:00

Among others, Nate Silver has been putting a Romney-Obama match-up at nearly even odds. This surprises me, but apparently not InTrade, which as of this writing has a similar valuation (51.7% in favor of Obama). Then again Romney tends to poll the same right now as a generic Republican, and maybe as people differentiate him from that, these numbers will change.

The upcoming election makes it interesting to look at incumbents and changes of the guard. Since the start of the twentieth century, there have been 19 elections where an incumbent ran. Of those, the incumbent won 14 times (74%). Of the 5 that lost, 3 had clearly extraordinary circumstances. Taft lost when he faced not only the Democrat Wilson but also TR's Bull Moose party, which split off a large chunk of the Republican vote; Hoover lost after the Depression began; Ford lost after Watergate. (The remaining two were Carter and Bush 1.)

For presidents of >1 term it's different. Since 1900, if you've been in more than 1 term (which counts partial terms), 2-to-1 at the end of your last eligible term, you're replaced by someone from the other party. This happened to Wilson, Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Clinton, and Bush 2; whereas for >1 term presidents replaced by someone from the same party (3 presidents), all 3 were Republicans, and 2 of 3 VPs succeeding presidents - TR to Taft and Reagan to Bush 1. Hoover was the third, and was not Coolidge's VP.

The "Marriage Light" From Sex and the City

2011-11-06T21:01:00.000-08:00

The characters from Sex and the City once discussed the "marriage light": their observation that men inexplicably seem to marry lower-quality women than the ones they dated, and this is best explained by something internal to the man's decision-making process rather than any observable characteristics of the woman who've dated him. It's as if, like a taxi, his marriage light goes on, and he walks down the aisle with the next one.

It's possible that it's not really a marriage light, but that there is something completely internal to the man's decision process that influences it; what looks like a marriage light is an interaction between the women he's dating, and his own internal state. A quick-and-dirty Explanation might be as follows. (Of course it generalizes about both genders, but about the calculation that men are making, based on what we seem to be maximizing; woman are free to chime in with their guess as to the variables underlying their own decision process.) Heterosexual men value sex with multiple partners, but they also want stability and children. Most women will not remain in a relationship with a man who has sex with other partners. At the same time, men do want a high-quality mate when they do commit. Therefore, to a man, the decision to marry is a trade-off: he gains a stable mate who will bear and help raise his children, but he will lose sex with multiple partners. He must balance the quality of the current sexual partner one one hand, against the prospect of number and quality of future sexual partners. As he gets older, and that future gets shorter, and the potential mates decrease in number and quality, his commitment threshold will drop. His current sexual partners' quality will be somewhat stochastic, but his own threshold will change (probably decrease) much more predictably over time. This is how a low-quality mate at 35 can receive a marriage proposal when the same or even higher-quality mate would not have received one at 25.

Graphically, it would look like this, with marriage occuring where the two functions are equal:

The straight line is his more-or-less predictable commitment threshold. At the start, Angelina Jolie could fling herself at him but he would hold out because his future is wide open. At the end, he knows time is running out. (It can be more complicated than this; more later.)

The curvy line is the women who've actually been available and mutually interested in him. Maybe the first peak is his senior year in college when he's big man on campus; then suddenly he graduates and drifts for a little while. The second peak came when he moved to a new city and got a real job, but then found that he hated his job, got run down and grouchy and generally not pleasant. Finally he hits his personal global maximum. He has a new job that he loves, he finally figured out how to dress like a grown-up, he's a gym-rat in better shape than he was in college, and he meets a fantastic girl who, friends whisper, might be The One. But he's still looking for something more, and Seinfeld-like he focuses on her minor flaws. He lets her get away, focuses on the new business. Next thing he knows, he's 39 and overweight, and the game of musical chairs that took place while he was working has left him with few choices. At his wedding, his female friends wonder what he sees in this one versus the ex from his global max period, who hiked across the Kamchatka Peninsula with him and was a well-known local artist and was beautiful. But hey - his friends are nice so they avoid mentioning her to his new wife. Sound familiar?

It's likely that divorce is not merely the reverse of commitment. Men tell their wives they'd marry them all over again. It's doubtful that this is always true. The social pressure and administrative and emotional baggage that comes with marriage may have the effect of lowering the threshold to which the wife's quality has to drop to reverse the commitment. If she drops below the thick black line, he wouldn't have married her in the first place but he won't divorce her. But if she drops below the gray line it's over.

While I've written this as a heterosexual male, from the standpoint of a heterosexual male, it's interesting that professional women in large cities in the developed world have become more explicit about having a commitment threshold curve. (The idea is meaningless for women in cultures that force them to sit on the sidelines pining to be chosen, and their value almost entirely determined by a quality they have no control over developing like fertility.) While the commitment threshold in women is also determined by age and quality, differences remain; namely, the importance that members of each gender assign on average to earning power, sex and fertility in their own priorities and their effect on quality in potential mates.

There are variations on the shape of the commitment threshold line for men, as follow:

- It might not start out at maximum as I have depicted here. That is, an 18 year-old might actually settle down with Angelina Jolie because he might not really believe that he does have future prospects; he doesn't know what else is out there. As he gets a little older, and so does she, he might realize this; his commitment threshold climbs far enough above his wife's quality that even that social-pressure cushion of marriage can't close the gap, and he dumps her.

- If a man's future prospects change dramatically - he gets in shape, he gets a great job - then if his commitment threshold curve is a reflection of his future prospects, it will jump as well. (The American philosopher Christopher Rock reminds us that a man is only as faithful as his options.) On the other hand, if the commitment curve were at some constant set point, we should expect that (for example) an actor in a surprise hit film who can suddenly date a much higher quality woman would marry the first high quality woman right away. This is not what happens.

- The commitment threshold line might not reflect reality. If the man's estimation of future amount and quality of sex partners is unrealistically high (unbelievable, I know), he will inexplicably hold out even though his current partner might be, as his exasperated friends try to convince him, "the best thing that ever happened to you". In my experience, this is resolved in one of two ways: the male remains uncommitted for life to avoid the injury to his inflated self-image, or the slope of his commitment threshold gets very steeply negative later in life as his estimate of his prospects comes crashing back to Earth. (A game theory note: if all males in a dating community collude to hold out, either from unrealistic self-assessment or another reason, females who are interested in an earlier marriage will have to bargain more aggressively. Kate Bolick's outstanding Atlantic article might make one think that men in New York are doing exactly this.)

Maxx Moses, Concrete Alchemy

2011-10-28T08:47:00.000-07:00

Maxx Moses, El Cajon, California

Maxx Moses, JamJar, Dubai, UAE

More of his concrete alchemy here.

Marijuana Showdown: The Feds vs. California

2011-10-06T15:33:00.000-07:00

[Final addition: the Iranian government is implicated in an assassination attempt. Bad; but what's worse is they were outsourcing the actual labor to the Zetas on the ground in North America, one of several large, paramilitar criminal organizations that have been assassinating public figures in Mexico for over a decade. A failed state on our southern border is at least as big a problem as Iranian regional ambitions, but oil politics ensure we care more about the safety of Saudi officials more than Americans living in border states. The Zetas would have nothing without the revenues given to them by our big-government marijuana laws, and they wouldn't be getting hired by the Iranians to do hits in Washington D.C. Somehow that's getting lost in this story.]

[Added later: much scarier than the coming dispensary raids and shutdowns is the IRS ruling described in this article that will cripple the marijuana industry, and drive it entirely back underground. Because it's essentially an accounting law change it's much less mediagenic than the specter of jack-booted DEA agents busting down doors, but it's actually a much bigger threat. This is the cheapest trick the Obama adminsitration has used so far because it's not apparently a law enforcement effort but it will be no less effective for that.]

Above: a small business that Obama's thugs are trying to shut down. Not a joke. If you call yourself pro-small-government and you aren't outraged by that, you have to stop calling yourself pro-small-government.

Medical marijuana is legal in California, but still illegal under Federal law. Despite Obama's promises to the contrary, he's continuing to waste your money pursuing marijuana dispensaries that are legal in their own states. There's about to be a showdown in California. Jerry Brown, here's your chance to show voters what you're made of, and if you're really serious about defending civil liberties.

Having sub-national entities with their own governments is a good idea because as they experiment locally, the rest of us can benefit from what works, and avoid what doesn't. Of course that's only the case if those sub-national entities are allowed to continue the experiment. It's also worth asking what the results of the experiment have been. What's happened in California since these dispensaries proliferate that's been so bad? By the way, here's the SoCal map.

If your rallying cries are "small government" and "states' rights", now would be a great time to come to California's defense. Somehow I'm not holding my breath for any collective outrage from the Tea Party. The Tea Party and the right wing in general only seem to worry about keeping government small in those cases where it intrudes on Southern cultural values.

The Key to Happiness (and Less Violence): Multiple Status Hierarchies

2011-10-05T10:59:00.000-07:00

Stephen Pinker has been making the rounds talking about the decline of violence, and in his Edge talk he gets a great question from Jaron Lanier. It's a well-studied phenomenon that being part of more social circles means lower stress, which accords well with the Robert Frank observation that status is a zero-sum game. That is to say, if you play status games (which if you're human, you do) then the best way to avoid stress is to play multiple ones at a time, because people will always try to climb, which in zero-sum games necessarily means they're trying to take status away from you. So if you lose, at least you only lose points in one of the several games you're playing. In contrast, if your whole social world is your job, or your family, or your sports team, etc., then there's a lot more pressure on your status within that team, and if something happens to expel you from grace within that circle you're screwed - and you know it, which is why you're more stressed. Segueing back to Pinker's talk, such unipolar social stress can translate to violence:

JARON LANIER: I'd like to hypothesize one civilizing force, which is the perception of multiple overlapping hierarchies of status. I've observed this to be helpful in work dealing with rehabilitating gang members in Oakland. When there are multiple overlapping hierarchies of status there is more of a chance of people not fighting their superior within the status chain. And the more severe the imposition of the single hierarchy in people's lives, the more likely they are to engage in conflict with one another. Part of America's success is the confusion factor of understanding how to assess somebody's status.

STEVEN PINKER: That's a profound observation. There are studies showing that violence is more common when people are confined to one pecking order, and all of their social worth depends on where they are in that hierarchy, whereas if they belong to multiple overlapping groups, they can always seek affirmations of worth elsewhere. For example, if I do something stupid when I'm driving, and someone gives me the finger and calls me an asshole, it's not the end of the world: I think to myself, I’m a tenured professor at Harvard. On the other hand, if status among men in the street was my only source of worth in life, I might have road rage and pull out a gun.

Every time we read about a workplace shooting, it's difficult to imagine that these men (almost invariably) are well-connected socially outside their office or plant, in sports or family or civic service groups. Pinker's full discussion here; he also points out the decline in autocracies, which also bodes well for decreased violence.

The Problems of Animals Governing Ourselves: Paleo-Diets and Paleo-Politics

2011-10-02T12:38:00.000-07:00

"A color-coded map of American personal indebtedness could be laid on top of the Centers for Disease Control's color-coded map that illustrates the fantastic rise in rates of obesity across the United States since 1985 without disturbing the general pattern."

-Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair, November 2011

The idea behind the paleo diet is simple: many health problems (especially obesity) are linked to the consumption of foods which were not available, or not available in unlimited quantity, to our distant ancestors. Our bodies greedily store salt, because it was in limiting supply until the last few centuries, but evolution didn't anticipate McDonalds. Our bodies drive us to constantly seek sweets because for thousands of centuries, our ancestors would be thrilled to find one ripe fruit per week, as opposed to a rack of candy bars at every gas station. There was no reason to develop discipline, because nature did that for us. Salt and sugar weren't "bad stuff" because there wasn't very much of it around, so it was good to constantly crave it. Now that we've solved these scarcities and it's everywhere, our lack of an off-switch for these things damages us, and to avoid this, some people have consciously chosen a return to hunter-gatherer food sources.

But think about this for very long, and you quickly realize that our diet and diet-related health are just one example of the neurological mismatch that we Westerners, and in particular we Americans, have developed with our man-made environment. It generalizes to other aspects of our behavior, and so it may be that several challenges in modern American culture have a unifying diagnosis. Culture and economics are results of the aggregate activity of human nervous systems. It shouldn't be surprising that an animal which wandered out of its home continent fifty thousand years ago has not suddenly become uber-rational and infinitely malleable in its behavior, although many of these animals have assumed themselves to have achieved this. This is to say, our behavior has limited plasticity. The irony is that our cultural environment has so rapidly changed the physical environment we now inhabit - we've truly remade our world in our image - that it's not just diet where we're mismatched with the terrarium we've built for ourselves. Potato chips may actually be the least of our worries.

The dramatic change which is also the best candidate for unifying diagnosis is instant gratification, made most commonplace in the most consumer-driven society so far in history. What consumerism really means is that of any civilization in history, ours is most specialized in giving each other what we want right now, and this has not surprisingly changed our behavior. (If you've ever seen the sad spectacle at the zoo of lions, one of the most fearsome apex predators the planet has produced, patiently and docilely waiting to be fed, you start to understand this concern.) The obstacle-free rewards-for-nothing to which we've become accustomed have damaged us in at least three realms: diet and all the attendant health problems of obesity and heart disease; belief systems and epistemological closure; and the politics of taxation.

The problem with the politics of taxation need little exposition; people demand more services and refuse to pay for them, and somehow avoid seeing the disconnect; a certain unattributed quote about people in democracies voting themselves the contents of the treasuries comes to mind, all the more frightening because it's hard to make an argument as to why it's not correct. As for consumerism's role in epistemological closure: although confirmation bias is certainly not new, that so many of us maintain patently false beliefs despite a crush of information does seem to be something new - because we know what it makes us feel good to believe, and it hurts a little to change your mind, so nothing else matters. (It may be no mistake that dopamine, our main reward-anticipation compound, is elevated in psychotic people who often have delusional beliefs; you connect everything you see to the conspiracy you believe in, because you already thought it was true and feels good.)

Having been discussing this with people for a while, it was with understandable interest that I read the Vanity Fair article about municipal budget woes and California in particular, in which the journalist interviews a UCLA neuroscientist. This lengthy excerpt will end the post, because there's nothing more to say.

Dr. Peter Whybrow, a British neuroscientist at U.C.L.A. with a theory about American life. He thinks the dysfunction in America's society is a by-product of America's success. In academic papers and a popular book, American Mania, Whybrow argues, in effect, that human beings are neurologically ill-designed to be modern Americans. The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in an environment defined by scarcity. It was not designed, at least originally, for an environment of extreme abundance. "Human beings are wandering around with brains that are fabulously limited," he says cheerfully. "We've got the core of the average lizard." Wrapped around this reptilian core, he explains, is a mammalian layer (associated with maternal concern and social interaction), and around that is wrapped a third layer, which enables feats of memory and the capacity for abstract thought. "The only problem," he says, "is our passions are still driven by the lizard core. We are set up to acquire as much as we can of things we perceive as scarce, particularly sex, safety, and food." Even a person on a diet who sensibly avoids coming face-to-face with a piece of chocolate cake will find it hard to control himself if the chocolate cake somehow finds him. Every pastry chef in America understands this, and now neuroscience does, too. "When faced with abundance, the brain's ancient reward pathways are difficult to suppress," says Whybrow. "In that moment the value of eating the chocolate cake exceeds the value of the diet. We cannot think down the road when we are faced with the chocolate cake."

The richest society the world has ever seen has grown rich by devising better and better ways to give people what they want. The effect on the brain of lots of instant gratification is something like the effect on the right hand of cutting off the left: the more the lizard core is used the more dominant it becomes. "What we're doing is minimizing the use of the part of the brain that lizards don't have," says Whybrow. "We've created physiological dysfunction. We have lost the ability to self-regulate, at all levels of the society. The $5 million you get paid at Goldman Sachs if you do whatever they ask you to do—that is the chocolate cake upgraded."

...It's a problem of people taking what they can, just because they can, without regard to the larger social consequences. It's not just a coincidence that the debts of cities and states spun out of control at the same time as the debts of individual Americans. Alone in a dark room with a pile of money, Americans knew exactly what they wanted to do, from the top of the society to the bottom. They'd been conditioned to grab as much as they could, without thinking about the long-term consequences. Afterward, the people on Wall Street would privately bemoan the low morals of the American people who walked away from their subprime loans, and the American people would express outrage at the Wall Street people who paid themselves a fortune to design the bad loans.

The Drought in East Africa is Bad; You Can Help

2011-09-28T14:42:00.000-07:00

They need our help in Somalia and the refugee camps in Kenya. You can be a good guy. Every bit counts. Best of all, Operation USA is a reputable charity that makes sure "it gets there".

From Reuters.

Being completely pragmatic from a foreign policy standpoint, Kenya and Ethiopia are regional allies who both border Somalia, and in addition, bordering Ethiopia there's a brand-new country nearby (South Sudan) that doesn't need this stress early in its life, and would certainly draw closer to the communities around the world that helped it in its infancy. (In fact here's their Cassava beer.)

A New Resource for Drug Violence: Wikinarco

2011-09-28T14:07:00.000-07:00

The cartels in northern Mexico are determined to prevent Arab-Spring-inducing technology from reaching their part of the world. Here is WikiNarco (in Spanish).

If you measure "news blackouts" in terms of low news-stories-per-death regions, northern Mexico has to be #1. There on our border and we hardly ever read about this alarming approach to state failure. More Americans should post these things, because one thing the narcos seem to be afraid of is the possibility of international attention from U.S. law enforcement.

The tried-and-true best and fastest way to rob these gangs of their revenue? Legalize.

Tech Incubator Eviction from San Francisco's Pier 38

2011-09-09T01:58:00.000-07:00

Some San Francisco startups are losing their space because the Port of San Francisco is throwing them out. I have nothing to add to the story, and the quite-possibly-biasd narrative in Xconomy has holes in it you could drive a truck through. But it's worth comparing this story to another loss to the Bay Area, which was the eviction of the Pound, the awesomest metal venue that ever was, from another Port of SF structure. I post this only because I wonder how many people who frequented the Pound are also readers of Xconomy (actually, in San Francisco, probably more than you or I would guess). And the story was very much the same: the port throwing out a well-loved and characterful business from a space it had been renting.

This seems to be a pattern. The Port of San Francisco seems unusually heavy-handed and unfriendly to businesses that have productively repurposed their facilities, and voters (and the mayor's office) should be attention to this.

The Capitalist Values of Burning Man

2011-09-05T14:44:00.000-07:00

Burners: I promise this post will really not pick on Burning Man or social progressive values in general. Based on the kind of writing that begins this way, I can't blame you if that's your expectation. I'm a one-time Burning Man attendee (2000, eons ago) and would go again if I had the time. I highly recommend it. I have only experienced culture shock once in my life, and it was on returning to "normalcy" after Burning Man. (If I'm a one-hit-wonder I don't think I should call myself a "Burner".) Lots of people I know are repeat customers; lots of people I know are on their way back from it at this very moment.

Open-mindedness is valuable, as are critiques of factions who self-identify as such. The reason that criticism is so important in this case is that when open-mindedness is institutionalized as a moral value - as it actually can and should be - there is a tendency to use self-perceived open-mindedness to insulate one's faction and one's own opinions from self-criticism with the following narrative: "My group/city/party/etc. prize ourselves on being open-minded and inclusive. Therefore, if an opinion differs from the prevailing wisdom in my group, it can only be the result of ignorance and close-mindedness. I'm right, you're wrong, shut up." Confirmation bias is like electricity; it finds the path of least resistance. That usually means straight through our most cherished values.

Maybe I've thought about this because I'm a very proud and patriotic (albeit currently exiled) San Francisco immigrant who also frequently finds myself in the role of apologist. I love that damn city, but the aforementioned "open-mindedness necessarily produces opinions that happen to agree with mine" reflex is all-too-often the subject of justified complaints. And one of the reasons I find Burning Man so interesting is observing the emergence of a common set of non-neutral values - "non-neutral" meaning judging some other values as mutually exclusive and rejecting them - which is something that it seems many Burning Man attendees and San Franciscans would deny they do, at least in the abstract. (But mention specific values and of course, if those values are not the right ones you'll quickly discover that indeed some values are rejected, leading in turn to an uncomfortable denial that they're rejecting values, or just to a statement that you're being unreasonable.)

So what's the connection between San Francisco and Burning Man? I will fully claim Burning Man as a cultural product that could only have come from that place, and a huge portion of its attendees every year hail from there. You're welcome, rest of world. (If you disagree with that, it's because you're ignorant and close-minded.)

The art was the main surprise for me. In innovation from just one year was easily the equal or superior of any museum I've ever been to anywhere in the world. From Rhino Beats.

But there's a counter-reflex toward the self-identified open-minded types, and this counter-reflex comes from people who love to stir things up - here I'm looking in the direction of otherwise smart and a little bit too self-satisfied young fiscal conservatives and libertarians. That counter-reflex is to smugly point out the existence of certain dogmatic, non-neutral values among self-described open-minded progressive types; or inconsistencies in their worldviews; or that they're more capitalist/carnivorous/consumerist/etc. than they will care to admit, ha ha ha! (Insert "We are not so different, you and I!" villain line here.) And as an aside to my fellow libertarians, these kinds of gotchas don't help the discussion, especially if we want to convince a group of very smart people that maybe rational agents acting individually to optimize their material self-interest is actually a good way to organize society. It's more of a terminology problem. "Material self-determination? Sign me up!", versus "Capitalism? No thanks!"

Hence it was with some dread that I clicked on a Big Government blog article about Burning Man. (H/T Patricia Iniguez of San Diego Skeptics in the Pub). While not completely without its whiffs of condescension and erstwhile-villainy, it's mostly devoid of this trouble-stirring nonsense and instead points out the free market underpinnings of Burning Man. Which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. In point of fact, Burning Man is what turned me from a somewhat vanilla social moderate Northeast Republican into a full-on libertarian. It was the revelation that here were thousands of people, who'd taken the trouble to go many miles from anywhere to use recreational drugs together where they weren't bothering anybody, and there were still law enforcement arrests in the camp. That's right: not only are our tax dollars still being spent on arresting them, but people get arrested for making choices about what to do with their own bodies. What a waste, what a misprioritization and a distortion of justice in a free society! If the state doesn't let you own yourself, then what can you own? This frightened me in a way it's hard to verbalize, and probably contributed to my culture shock, on leaving Burning Man and going back to the real world, upon seeing people who showed no sign of appreciating the flimsiness of this shared hallucination we call culture and civilization, standing in orderly lines at the airport as I was about to fly to Pittsburgh on business. But here's the kicker: what I didn't appreciate at the time is how much I was placing people in a binary opposition with myself in the more "open-minded" slot; and how normal people look once they wash the playa dust off and go back to the rest of their lives, to positively influence the rest of the world in gradual ways as a result of experiences like Burning Man. No doubt after I showered and changed, other Burning Man attendees saw me standing in line and had the same thoughts about me.

Adam Smith made clear that capitalism was a form of meta-selection: it's the system to find the best system. You need the most degrees of freedom possible to do that effectively. Burning Man, and the people who attend it, are living up to this promise, and it seems from this article that many of us understand this.

Quote of the Day

2011-09-05T11:51:00.000-07:00

"They develop a set of oblique social norms to sustain their preferred equilibrium when threatened by intrusions of high quality."

From an Oxford sociology paper, via Mungowitz at Kids Prefer Cheese. While Mungowitz seems to think it's funny that an academic finds this novel, framing it this way will allow us to generalize this observation to the behavior of low-value-contributors in large institutions (public, private, wherever) and develop non-top-down strategies to disrupt it.

Not an Alternate History Map

2011-08-29T16:16:00.000-07:00

That's China's actual territorial waters claim. From this article. Much better and more thorough analysis of Chinese naval ambitions here.

PSA: Bow Ties

2011-08-29T16:12:00.000-07:00

A colleague was kind enough to volunteer for his friends' bow-tie instructional video:

How to Tie a Bow Tie from Keith Paugh on Vimeo.

I think this guy missed his calling.

Apparition, Peter Louis Bonfitto

2011-08-29T14:58:00.000-07:00

Apparition, Peter Louis Bonfitto. More here.

Two Conspiracy Theories About Two Internet Companies

2011-08-27T17:33:00.000-07:00

1) Is surrepetitious plausible deniability built into Facebook? Facebook is notoriously buggy. In particular sometimes users inexplicably can't see friends, or get error messages when they try to send friend requests to other users (this particular problem is affecting me right now). Of course, actual bugginess in a massive network is the simplest explanation. But Facebook isn't run by morons, and it's interesting that those errors which occur most seem to be exactly those which facilitate the kind of social "plausible deniability" that can lubricate complex group relationships. "Oh, I didn't know that you had dated X..." (when you did) or "I would have sent you a friend invite, but for some reason the system wouldn't let me" (when you had no intention of sending one). For this to work most effectively, it would have to be on the down low, or everyone would suspsect that this is what was going on, because they would be able to more effectively use the trick themselves.

2) Is Bitcoin bolstering its bubble by encouraging negative press? There's no shortage of (probably reasonable) scare stories comparing Bitcoin to various extraordinary popular delusions. The question at this point is: after this deluge of negative predictions from some very heavy hitters, what would it take to convince Bitcoin investors that there will eventually be a collapse? It seems that the Bitcoin bubble has already endured worse pricks than the 1920s stock market or the aughts housing market, and still the craze continues. (I retrodict that there are far more negative bitcoin articles for July 2011 than for the U.S. housing market in July 2006, and the Bitcoin market is much smaller.) Is it possible that right from the start, Bitcoin's most interested parties were good students of history in the sense that they actively pumped the internet with negative publicity? That way the bubble will build for much longer, because buyers-in will have been hearing panicked shouts to sell the whole time.

Why Is Romney Living in San Diego?

2011-08-26T22:19:00.000-07:00

Mitt Romney bought a beachside house in San Diego last year. It's about 5 miles from where I'm sitting right now. I figured out which one was his based on a HuffPo article and 5 minutes with Google Maps.

Of course the Romney team must know that during the primaries, any connection to godless gay hippie elitist California is points off, especially for someone who already has enough trouble attracting social conservatives. But they're not stupid. What are they trading those votes for?

Imagine it's January 2012, and you're a reporter in Washington D.C., and you're going to get on a plane and fly either to Minneapolis, or to San Diego. In January. Where are you happier to go? And which candidate is going to get a more favorable write-up? The one you write after your run on the beach and your phone call to tell your relatives you're in La Jolla, or your dash from the airport to the rental car to the conference room and hope your eyelashes don't freeze from breath-condensation?

Rick Perry and the Confederacy

2011-08-26T22:13:00.000-07:00

In a discussion which included Rick Perry's enthusiasm for the Confederacy:

The Confederacy was not a bunch of generally well-meaning dudes who went a little too far, it was a gang of racist traitors who launched a bloody war to defend a monstrously unjust institution [and tried to destroy the Union in the process - MC]. Having neo-Confederate sympathies in America should be equivalent to supporting the reconstituted Fascist party in Italy, or worse.

It's hard to think of an argument that could square keeping goverment out of our lives on one side, and the government encouraging ownership of human beings on the other. When you think "small government" I bet you don't next think "hellz yeah, slavery!"

Quote of the Day

2011-08-26T22:01:00.000-07:00

"How about a [holi]day named after a generic old person? They vote too, and this could be done while limiting the "doc fix" to trick them into submission before preparing the ice floes. But how to make it polite? "Oldies Day" won't cut it..."

-Tyler Cowen on who will get the next U.S. national holiday

See? No one's using any of those.

Ridiculous Moral Arguments in Business

2011-08-25T09:34:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, a business with a government-backed monopoly on an activity thought to be morally dubious will make funny arguments against the start-up of similar businesses. Here you can read about American states with state-controlled liquor distribution, and the state stores saying as vaguely as possible that we shouldn't have more liquor stores, because they're evil.

The same silliness occurs with casinos and gambling, and especially lotteries. (This particular story reminds me of the hypocrisy around injuries in high school sports, vs. other high school activities). If we're going to rule that there are goods and services too dangerous for the free market, or dangerous enough that they should only exist as government-backed monopolies, we should have a transparent, automated rule for determining which goods and services those are. Otherwise, these decisions will always be made by exactly those parties that have conflicts of interest, and shouldn't be involved in the process.

El Niño and Wars

2011-08-25T09:07:00.000-07:00

El Niño events increase the tendency to go to war. Compare with other work on the rainfall theory of democracy, and the tendency of centralized states to first emerge in marginal rainfall environments.

Ur, in the "Fertile" Crescent. It was a little greener 10,000 years ago, but certainly even then there were better places to start civilization. The relationship between city-states and soil fertility is inverted-U-shaped.

Expansion of Administration vs. Faculty at UCSD

2011-08-24T10:23:00.000-07:00

A topic of immediate local relevance. The graphic speaks for itself. (Updated from earlier today; click here for the full size version. Suffice it to say the dotted line on top is senior management expanding.)

You like? Upvote at Reddit.

Source and explanation: "student fee" is full student fee. State Funding is CA funding to the UC General Fund. Both are adjusted for inflation to CPI-U. Student Fee and State Funding to the General Fund from UC Budget Operations. Number of faculty is full-time-hours equivalent of regular ladder-based faculty (most common type of faculty). Number of senior management is full SMG (Senior Management Group) & MSP (Manager and Senior Professional) count. Headcounts from stats summary data. Credit to James Wu of UCSD Young Americans for Liberty for putting together.

City Journal also ran an article about UC recently, Heather Macdonald: Less Academics, More Narcissism.

Toward a Physical Measure of Utility

2011-07-21T08:58:00.000-07:00

"Electroencephalographic Topography Measurements of Experienced Utility", emphasis on experienced. Pedroni A. et al, The Journal of Neuroscience, 20 July 2011, 31(29): 10474-10480. The response they measured unexpectedly increased disproportionately increasing reward, i.e. it did not demonstrate diminishing returns but rather the opposite.

A measure of the mismatch between decision and reward utility, and understanding its biological basis and how it differs between individuals, would be excellent for psychology as well.

If There Were a DEA and FDA For the Software Industry

2011-07-06T10:43:00.000-07:00

[Note: Aaron Agostini responded critically to this post at his blog, A Polite Gunfight.]

Imagine if, long ago, we established not only an FDA for drugs, but also a parallel agency for software. The software industry's FDA would exist in order to protect computer users from bad programs - harmful, or low quality - and would require central approval of every single program writter. Of course this would produce grumbling for software engineers who just want to make a living, but the arrangement would indeed allow software-FDA to stop nasty malware before it made it onto the market.

Unfortunately, software-FDA then becomes inconsistent and over-conservative - always more reasons to say no than yes - and hurts computer users in the long run by decreasing the number and quality of programs available to them. For example: programs released back in the 1980s, even if they slowed your computer down and crashed all the time, would be allowed to remain by an unspoken grandfather agreement (too messy to recall them or investigate them now!) The old-school software makers would certainly not rock this boat, and the newer software companies wouldn't speak out for fear that they would be punished by software-FDA. The rules that you had to follow when developing software would be so byzantine that software companies would have to hire their own legal experts, who are expensive and say "No" a lot to developers' plans. Needless to say, it would be very hard for small software companies to survive, and software would cost more for consumers.

Above: A well-meaning officer from software-FDA confiscates a computer running Linux. Consumers don't understand it well enough and may harm themselves. Software-FDA also needs to protect the public from possible QC problems with open source software.

Meanwhile, new programs would be scrutinized even for infrequent damage, i.e. to one out of a thousand computers, and if the programmers couldn't explain exactly how the programs worked in every situation, they wouldn't be allowed to sell them. (Nobody knows how the old programs work, but they're still allowed to be sold; and certainly nobody is allowed to make an informed choice about the acceptable risk to them. The software consuming public doesn't understand enough to make these decisions.) Investors in new software companies are scared off by any program that shows real innovation, and the number of programs released per year starts to drop. Finally, the software-FDA does allow computer technicians to sell programs to consumers for uses other than for what the programs are specifically approved to do - even though software-FDA clearly doesn't trust these same technicians to evaluate whether the programs should be on the market in the first place. But people get used to this crazy inconsistency, so hardly anyone says anything.

And there would be a whole other government agency (the software-DEA), for the worst programs of all. There are certain programs, software-DEA says, that are SO BAD that they don't trust ANYBODY to use them responsibly - consumers OR computer technicians - so they put people in jail for buying and using them. Software-DEA even puts people in jail when these programs harm only the consumers' own computers, by their own consent. In fact software-DEA keeps putting people in jail even when some of the programs have been conclusively shown by computer scientists NOT to harm their computers. Not surprisingly, a black market will form around these programs, some of which are fun to use and pretty safe, and software-DEA will say, completely bass-ackwards, this proves these programs are bad, and must be kept illegal.

Refine Your Taste, Pay the Price

2011-07-03T18:46:00.001-07:00

I argued previously that the main benefit of drinking wine is the ability it confers on you to signal your cultural refinement. At the end of the post I stated the reasons for intentionally destroying one's taste in wine:

I apply the same dismissal to wine as I do to sake. I've come to the conclusion that intentionally refining one's palate is a form of masochism that any self-respecting hedonist should reject. Why the hell would I ever deliberately make my palate more difficult to please? By developing your taste, you're intentionally making your marginal unit of pleasure more expensive - you're making yourself more difficult to please. If you have a bad case of wine signal-itis and you enjoy announcing to dining compatriots all the flaws you've found in the wine on the table in front of you, you might put it in perspective this way...That's why I'm intentionally letting what little refinement I've achieved go fallow, and I automatically order the cheapest table wine on the menu. Or I don't, and get a Coke.

Of course the counterargument is that if your ability to signal results in increased attraction of mates, business partners, or some other benefit, it may offset the greater expense of achieving the same hedonic experience.

So it was with some amusement that today I read about how Seth Roberts did the opposite - he inadvertently destroyed his enjoyment of sake by greatly refining his taste - all in a single day.

American Invasions of Canada: Alternative History #3

2011-07-03T14:04:00.000-07:00

We're fortunate that today the land border between the U.S. and Canada is the longest undefended border on the planet. But there was an actual U.S. invasion plan for Canada for the 1920s and 30s, in anticipation of U.S. and U.K. interests' running afoul. (H/T Luke Muehlhauser.)

[Added later: guest-blogging at the Daily Dish, Alex Massie shares my rather pessimistic view of American military's chances against the British in the first half of the nineteenth century, specifically discussing the War of 1812.]

Keeping in the military mindset of the previous century, the U.S. planned to capitalize on its proximity and its access to the interior of the continent. The same considerations were likely what brought a reasonable end to the War of 1812. The British knew the U.S. couldn't match them on the seas, and demonstrated this by burning selected targets in Washington after sailing right up the Potomac, in retaliation for the American burning of Toronto. But they also knew that a military campaign to conquer the American interior was hopeless, and this is what the later War Plan Red capitalized on. Of course, fortunately (in the most perverse possible sense) World War II occurred and stopped a second War of 1812, and suddenly the idea of invading Canada – or the idea of worrying about British troops more than Japanese troops – seemed absurd. Britain was fighting for its life and there were friends of Britain's enemies bombing American territories.

There are actually several interesting but terrible ways that the U.S.-Canadian (and –British) relationship could have turned out much worse than it did as a result of war. The first is the possibility of a nineteenth century Canadian war. Immediately following the War of 1812 some admirably cool heads prevailed in London and Washington, and an agreement was made to co-develop the Pacific Northwest. (You will look a long time in world history for agreements between competing powers as rational as this one.) Then of course came the end of the agreement, with the 1845 slogan "54'40" or fight". (54'40" is the southern border of the Alaska panhandle. The U.S. was essentially demanding all of BC, and the southern half of the prairie provinces to boot.) Had this led to war, it is very likely that it would've meant a sound naval defeat for the U.S. that had major territorial implications, since most settlement and trade in the Oregon Country at that point moved by river. Oregon Country was far enough from Washington that it would effectively have been a foreign war for both countries along the coast and rivers; in those circumstances you'd be a fool to bet against the nineteenth century British Navy. A worst case scenario would have meant the Americans losing the entire Oregon Territories, all the way back to what are today the American northern Rockies. The U.S. would certainly not have held the coast, and would not have held the Columbia. (Don't even try tell me they could have held the Fraser.) As a result the northern Rockies could well have become an international boundary, just like the Andes on the other American continent. Yellowstone would have been on a hostile tripartite border.

Also keep in mind that, in actual history, the U.S. was scheduled to fight Mexico the following year, gaining such familiar territories as California and Texas. With a military demoralized and battered by the British, and likely a new administration elected that was far less interested in expansion, it's hard to argue we would have started the Mexican War when we did, or at the very least had fewer gains. Our border with Mexico after the earlier Florida purchase was the Arkansas River, which cuts through Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado, so substantial chunks of the southwestern Midwest would also not have been gained. It's also less much less likely under these circumstances that the Alaska purchase would have occurred; it almost didn't as it was. Sadly New Kamchatka would not have been able to produce beloved governors and Vice Presidential nominees for the far-away American capital. Consequently, Going to war over 54'50" could very likely have meant the U.S. lost its entire Pacific Coast. Worst case scenario map below, with international boundaries darkened and changed sub-national territories named.

In alternative histories, the best-known rendering of a U.S.-Canadian war was in Harry Turtledove's Southern Victory series, where in 1914 the Confederacy allies with England and the Allies, and the North comes in with Germany and the Central powers. The Central powers win, the U.S. pushes the U.K. completely out of Canada, and sets up an independent Quebec as a client state.

As an aside, my favorite part of the War Plan Red article: "The best practicable route to Vancouver is via Route 99." I hope no one got paid for that. That's not war planning, that's buying a map at a gas station. Or being a Seattle commuter.

Previous entries:
What if Homo erectus never went extinct?
Alternate vs. actual history test
Counterfactuals in fiction

Alternate vs Actual History Test: Which Really Happened (Alternative History #2)

2011-06-11T00:20:00.000-07:00

No Googling now. If you don't know, guess which of these really happened, THEN click through. No mousing over to look where the links go either, smart guy. In chronological order of when they occurred or would have occurred:

- The U.S. military investigated LSD as a potential chemical warfare agent in the 1960s - but the first intentional use of biological or chemical warfare was in the seventh century B.C., when the Assyrians deliberately poisoned wells with ergot, a fungus which produces LSD-like compounds.

- A lost phalanx of Alexander the Great entered China and crushed the Qin outpost they encountered

- People living along the Mediterranean in ancient Greek times travelled to central Africa and had a hostile skirmish with pygmies controlling an oasis in the Sahara

- A purge of Buddhists from the Imperial Court in Japan

- The Moorish conquest of a Swiss village

- A Norse Kingdom in Sicily

- An Islamic khanate in Siberia which included Uralic-speaking subjects? (i.e. related to Finnish and Estonian)

- A Tibetan Buddhist republic in recent European Russia

- A Tokugawa naval expedition to Mexico

- Sacagawea's son moved to Europe as a young man with his German prince buddy, touring Europe and North Africa

- A United States of Central America

- Monterey, California "accidentally" taken over by American naval forces when it was still part of Mexico, several years before any war broke out, then given back

- A civil war between Mormons and the rest of the U.S., when Mormons considered everything out to California to be part of the state of Deseret

- A Scottish Colony in Panama

- U.S. and Germany fighting each other after being drawn into the Samoan Civil War on opposite sides

- A serious twentieth century effort to overthrow the U.S. government funded by major corporations, which resulted in criminal prosections

Did you click through? Here's a hint: only one of these was made up. The rest are true. The world is strange.

Previous alternate history post: What if Homo erectus still existed today?

Film Quality vs. Profit: Is There Any Connection, and Does Talent Matter?

2011-06-09T15:49:00.000-07:00

Bottom line: film studios are profit-making entities. Film quality as assessed by critics does not seem to closely correlate with profits. So do studios care about quality, and if so, why? To what extent do directors and actors affect critical evaluation and profit, and how is such an effect mediated? At times the film industry behaves inconsistently and seems to make decisions in terms of things other than profit. There are clear analogies to be made with the sports business, in terms of apparent paradoxes that can be resolved by being reminded that profit and winning games are not the same thing.

An article on Slate contains a Rotten Tomatoes-based gadget that tracks the performance, as measured by critical reception, of directors and actors over the last 25 years. (This choice of metric is important. The first question should be more obvious than it is: why should they use critical reception your yardstick? Would studios rather work with a Michael Bay, a director who reliably produces top-selling shiny shoot-em-ups, or a Terry Gilliam, who makes movies which are a tremendous joy to watch, and well-received critically - and which are tremendously expensive and run over budget and schedule? Now you see what I'm getting at. Most industries don't have the opportunity to lose focus on profit after getting confused by the artistic value of their products.) In the same way, a sports franchise with loyal fans can afford to have losing seasons, at least for a while, as long as the team can keep those fans filling seats, glued to TV sets to see commercials, and buying branded jerseys.

Reading through the Slate article about this new career-tracker gadget, you will note that John Ratzenberger (Cliff from Cheers) is the "winning" American actor. That is to say, he is the American actor who has made 10 or more films since 1986 whose films' average ratings were rated the highest by critics, at 76.1%. Compare to Chuck Norris, the worst actor, for whom the same statistic 18.4%.

"It's over, Mr. Anderson...I mean Prime." You'll get it in a second.

This might seem strange because Chuck Norris would seem to have more name recognition than John Ratzenberger, and (at a guess) I bet commands a higher quote. Also interesting is that in terms of total gross of films-appeared-in, the top actor in the United States is - wait for it - Frank Welker! You know, Frank Welker, the original voice of Megatron? In 2006 he passed Samuel L. Jackson with a career gross of US$4.9 billion. Of course in the U.S. we don't regard seiyuu as a separate career, as they do in Japan.

Why Would Studios, or Directors, or Actors Care About Ratings?

If you assume that critical ratings (i.e. quality) and profits are the same thing, then even the few statistics above present a real puzzle. Of course if commercial culture has taught is anything, it's that the just-stated assumption is a very false one, hence the existence of movies like Star Crash and Transmorphers (see point #3 here), which have little delusion about themselves as art but are safe bets as business propositions. At the very least there is likely to be a diminishing return on profits by improving critical perception of quality; a dollar you spend on a movie budget to raise it from just-okay to not bad might bring back more sales than a dollar that raises it from pretty good to critically stellar. Even if the critics care enough to spend a dollar more, the broader film-consuming public might not. As in sports, the film industry's product has a cultural value separate from its sales value, and because the cultural value is more salient to the public, film consumers confuse the two - just as sports consumers are puzzled about bowls and college ratings. But the film industry usually has its head screwed on straight and is focused on the real prize; they're (presumably) composed of materially self-interested agents and is not confused by this. Right?

Not necessarily. On its face the film industry would seem to be maximizing something besides profit, at least some of the time. Assuming Frank Welker's career-film-gross indicates a real contribution to films, and because as a voice actor you could probably get him to work for less than a big screen actor, then it would seem to be a no-brainer to keep using Welker in the Transformers franchise - as opposed to, say, Hugo Weaving, who will undoubtedly cost more and cut into the bottom line. But they still went with Weaving. (Now you get the little joke in the caption above.) What's the justification in cases like this? Did Weaving really want the part, and got his agent to call in a big favor to the studio to get him? Is the studio afraid of looking cheap by keeping the old-series voice actor, and signaling financial weakness to the rest of the industry? Did they actually project how many more tickets and rentals they would get from people who liked the Matrix, to prove that he would pay for himself? Or is it even less rational than that, and people at the studio and film crew just insist on having more prestigious people to associate with (like Weaving) and they're effectively willing to trade away profits to bask in his company? I have nothing against Weaving or his performance in Transformers, but decisions like these are curious from a financial standpoint, and they raise question about what's really being maximized.

Smart, i.e. rationally self-interested studios that win best picture would always auction these off, or melt them down for scrap. Imagine the rational, curmudgeonly studio exec. "Who cares if the academy liked it. I just want to make sure winning this thing doesn't hurt sales."

Going further, you wonder why a studio ever bothers at all with trying to get good critical reception. Yes, the Pixar movies that Ratzenberger is in have done well financially and tend to be highly rated by critics, but Chuck Norris's movies have been financially successful - but only financially successful. If you can sell tickets when Roger Ebert is bashing you, who cares? It's reasonable to think there's some negative impact on sales if the media hates you, but it would be interesting to see the actual relationship. How to measure? Movies are made for different amounts and intended to bring in different amounts; so perhaps compare on one hand each film's profits as a percentage of the film's budget, versus its Rotten Tomatoes average on the other. Either there will be some relationship between the two - or there will be none, or it will be too noisy to care about the correlation. If there's not a clear relationship between critical opinion and sales (or there's one that's grossly non-linear) it's worth asking what the value of the critics is, to the industry and to the public. To make sure we know what their film school wants us to like?

Frank Welker's take-earned-by-films-I've-been-in statistic raises another question. What's the average per film, and more crucially, to what degree was that Welker's influence? There's probably an 82 year-old key grip somewhere with a spreadsheet showing how his own takes are higher than Welker's. But even if you're looking at the average takes as opposed to absolute, what do you compare to? We don't know how much the movie would have made had X been in it instead of Y, and doing an average % take relative to budget wouldn't give us a comparison. That is, even if Welker has a good average %, how do we know that's higher than what the movies would have made otherwise? What counterpart would we use? (Even if we solved that, this is only correlation; the actor might just pick good-selling movies, as opposed to making them good-selling.) If there are measurable effects, do actors or directors on average have more impact on quality and/or take? Analogously, analyze NBA teams, and you'll find that on average their records from year to year are more closely related to who's coaching than who's playing; when I did this, I didn't investigate whether this is from recruiting skill or on-the-court coaching.

Finally, and I have no proposal for how to measure this, even if there are measurable effects from a certain actor appearing in the film, what mediates that? Is the public going because they think they'll get a good performance, or do they just like the actor because they're familiar with him or her? The fact that studios are willing to pay a premium for well-known actors instead of just using unknowns that can act just as well as the people who had a break (which comprise a large portion of the LA population) suggests that the studios believe familiarity is at least part of the effect.

Of course we might assume big studios investing tens or hundreds of millions in projects aren't stupid; they're businesses looking for an ROI, and they must already doing something like these analyses. Then again that assumes that their decision-making process is profit-maximizing, when the choice of actors as discussed above strongly suggests otherwise (status signaling? ego-stroking by association with celebrities vs. unknown actors? quality, among LA's artistic idealists?)

Depressed by how all description of how much the creation of art is dictated by eonomic considerations? Then move to a much less capital-intensive endeavor with smaller teams, like writing. One person risking only their solo time at a keyboard can and does usually produce more innovation.

In conclusion: I'm not the curmudgeon about the value of film quality that you might assume from this post. In fact I'm a huge Darren Aronofsky fan and I'm very much looking forward to his next film Human Nature, which will star George Clooney. But with The Fountain (easily my favorite film of the last decade) Aronofsky came perilously close to Gilliam territory in terms of his production stopping and starting again. I'm glad that he's able to keep making high-quality films but I recognize that he's no doubt compromising what would have been an even better film, all the time, for business purposes. But the mystery remains about why studios care to invest in films like his at all. Whatever un-focused fuzzy calculations distract them from profit for long enough to fund projects like this, I'm glad.

Find the Rotten Tomatoes career-tracker here.

Economic Freedom and Happiness

2011-06-05T21:18:00.000-07:00

I was recently looking at the economic freedom numbers for countries around the world and I wanted to know what the connection to actual outcomes was; in particular, the happiness of the people in those countries. All the rest are surrogates. Political and economic debates sometimes lose focus on this fact.

I looked at the following data, for all countries that had them (evident in the datasets); for each, it was always a clear majority of countries on the planet.

- The Heritage Foundation's Economic Freedom Index for 2011

- White's Life Satisfaction Index

- GDP per capita (IMF data, supplemented by CIA for small countries, non-reporting countries, or inaccurately reporting countries)

- Gini index (from the U.N., or for some countries in the midst of conflict the Global Peace Index statistic)

- Economic growth for countries 1990-2007 (data from United Nations Statistics Division)

As I've done previously, rather than show a bunch of scatter-plots, I'll give you the statistical highlights. I'm happy to share the spreadsheet if anyone is interested, although this is not quite graduate-study-level QC'd data.

Map of White's life satisfaction index in 2006. This is what counts.

Highlights:

1. Interestingly, economic freedom correlates more closely with life satisfaction than with economic growth (R^2=0.239 vs 0.1075). This suggests that economic freedom adds to utility other than through direct material gain. Freedom does correlate better with per capita GDP than with growth (more below).

2. Economic freedom is associated (albeit weakly) with a decrease in Gini, that is with a more equitable income distribution.

3. There were a number of outliers in the plot of economic growth vs. life satisfaction. Most of these were very high Gini countries.

4. In the "unsurprising" cateogry: there were two R^2 that rose above 0.3 were the correlation between per capita GDP and life satisfaction (0.3106, stronger without outliers). The correlation between economic freedom and per capita GDP was even stronger at 0.3873. The curve appears to flatten at the high end of per capita GDP (removing three outliers raised the R^2 to 0.4665) reinforcing the conclusion that once basic needs are met there is a diminishing return. It bears emphasizing that this is a correlation, not a cause; economic growth may CAUSE economic freedom, or they may both be caused in parallel by the same thing.

Correlation	R^2	Relationship Means?
Econ free & PCI	0.3873	Every point increase in econ freedom (range 0-100), raise PCI US$70
PCI & life sat.	0.3106	Raise PCI US$1,000, increase life sat. 1.14 pts (range 100-250)
Econ free & life sat.	0.239	Add a point in econ freedom (range 1-100), increase happiness 1.67 points (range 100-250)
Econ free & growth	0.1075	Add a point in econ freedom (range 1-100), increase growth 0.001%
Econ free & Gini	0.0837	Add a point in econ freedom (range 1-100), decrease Gini 0.2685
Growth & life sat.	0.0544	Every 10% increase in growth, get 25 points happier (range 100-250)
Gini & life sat.	0.0258	Increase Gini by 1, life sat. drops by 0.5 (range 100-250)

CONCLUSIONS:
Unsurprising, but interesting to see in this form. Adopt policies that expand economic freedom in order to make people happier, partly by increasing growth. The best way to produce happiness is to reach a target high per capita income, but there is a diminishing return. Economic freedom has a weak beneficial effect on Gini, but Gini can offset the happiness effects of high PCI and good growth.

Future questions:
- There are a number of countries that, looking merely at per capita GDP, aren't as life-satisfied as they should be. These countries usually have large Gini; a surface in a 3D scatterplot would show this distortion. It might be informative to see which countries are "off the surface" in terms of how much we expect their Gini to distort their happiness:PCI ratio, and then ask how this effect is transmitted - a first guess to investigate would be degree of media saturation. Prediction: countries with more media and a high Gini will tend to be less happy that those with less media but the same Gini. Seeing how the other half lives forces everyone into the same status game.

- Are certain regions of the world off these curves in predictable ways because of cultural commitments? (See the World Values Survey.) E.g., are Confucianist countries less happy per dollar of PCI? Or are cultures with more family-oriented, traditional values differentially susceptible to the effects of Gini distortion?

- (Added later: personal economic freedom in the 50 U.S. States can be found by category here.)

What Happens When You Confront Chinese Secret Police?

2011-05-26T13:48:00.000-07:00

This. The reporter then asks for the "regular" police for protection, who, shockingly, don't show up. One approach: next time, might be worthwhile telling the regular police that there are "Falun Gong hooligans" harrassing foreigners trying to spend money, just to see the look on the regular cops' faces when they arrive.

Meanwhile, in a fun report on General Motors in China, GM "gratifies the Party orally" in a CCP propaganda film.

How to Measure Ideologies

2011-05-10T16:33:00.000-07:00

From a post at my atheist blog:

The existence of dissidents is a fair acid-test for whether there is actual logic underlying the ideology, however monstrous its manifestations in the real world ever became; in the barks and howls of race- and personality-driven dictatorships it's not clear what "dissident" could mean, apart from diametrically opposed. To my knowledge there has never been a North Korean hetero-ideologue driven from the Kim family's inner circle to exile with artists in Mexico, to scribble furiously about how his version of Juche was the pure one, and the Kims had perverted it to their own ends. The same is true of the Nazis: without Germany and its late iron age tribal chief, there could have been no grounds for schism.

Full post is here. It reflects a point I made earlier that discussions of cultural preservation or serving an ideology or political system only to preserve that system are badly and dangerously missing the point of how we should live; bottom line, cultures can't suffer but people can. Plus the new post features a rare disagreement with a Hitchens piece.

Finally My Tragic Artistic Genius Has Been Recognized

2011-04-26T08:26:00.000-07:00

I entered a "freestanding art" piece in the UCSD grad student art show. There's no picture here, because there's no need. It was just one of those old plastic boxes used for holding cassettes, with 15 cassettes in it - Megadeth, Skid Row, etc. - and if you're under about 30 and you don't know what I'm talking about, my trying to explain it further won't help. I was about to give or throw it away anyway, and for grins I thought I would tug on some nostalgia strings by setting it out unaltered and titling it "Still Can't Go Back".

It won third place.

Not only is this an insult to the amazing talent obviously required for my spraypaint-on-canvas piece Black's Beach (which I also entered but which garnered little attention), it in general is a high indictment of the UCSD community's taste in art! (Sniff.) Mostly I'm mad because 3rd place has no prize money or certificates. Do you think Dali had to deal with this kind of thing? Did Velasquez give up when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

Brilliant Review of Joyce's Ulysses

2011-04-09T12:23:00.000-07:00

Ulysses is an overwrought, overwritten epic of gratingly obvious, self-congratulatory, show-off erudition that, with its overstuffed symbolism and leaden attempts at humor, is bearable only by terminal graduate students who demand we validate the time they've wasted reading it.

Ron Rosenbaum is my new hero. I'm going to make an effort to use the phrase "terminal graduate student" every day for a month. (Found via The Daily Dish.)

Alternative History 1: What If Homo Erectus Still Existed Today?

2011-04-03T18:57:00.000-07:00

I'm nerdy enough that I keep a list of possible branchpoints in history where it would be interesting to explore counterfactuals, and which (to my knowledge) no one has. Originally I was going to write them as short stories, but since short stories take longer to write than blog posts and in alternative history the characters and dialogue are often afterthoughts, so this would seem a better venue. Starting with this one I'm going to go in chronological order of the branchpoints.

First: there are neanderthal alternative histories. There's a Harry Turtledove story about a present where Neanderthals have their own nation-state in the dry Mediterranean salt beds, as well as (excellent) Robert Sawyer novels about a Neanderthal physicist from a parallel universe where sapiens died out.

But in these stories the neanderthals were of equal intelligence; the point of alternative history, as a subgenre of speculative fiction, is to bring setting into play as a variable among the elements of literature to ask questions that would have otherwise been senseless or impossible (discussed here.) In this case, that question is what happens if there is an intelligence gap? In fact there were erectus-descended hominids still on Flores until 10,000 years ago or so, and presumably the arrival of humans didn't help them very much. So the first problem with such an alternative history is it's hard to imagine a coherent sequence of events that would have allowed erectus, if they're less intelligent than us, to have survived to the present unless they're in complete isolation - and the converse is true as well. Harry Harrison explored the same idea in East of Eden, where humans isolated in North America meet the highly advanced descendants of dinosaurs, previously unknown to them, as they push out from the continent-spanning city in their home in Africa. Once contact is made it's hard to imagine a good outcome for both species. Might this not be truer the more biologically similar they are? After all, reptiles and mammals aren't competing for the same resources.

So, perhaps imagine an alternative history where eighteenth century English sailors talk to Chinese fisherman off the coast of Australia, and take the Chinese myths of small hairy men they met on the shores of a vast southern land to be just old wives' tales - and then find they're true. If the representatives of King George had found Australia carpeted with the glittering crystalline technology of an erectus nation-state, all of whose citizens spend the day in quiet inward-looking meditation (which is why they haven't colonized the world), might they not have been well-advised to quietly turn around and sail back out to sea, hoping not to have been noticed?

What if that spear were a ray-gun?

Conversely, let's assume that today, there is a mistake that's been buried in satellite code since the first launches that has resulted in a certain latitude-longitude blind spot in the south Atlantic, where there turns out to be an island harboring barely-tool-using erectus. With our modern sensibilities, would it be moral to make contact with these "people"? Could we make contact with them, if they can't fully understand language? Meaningful and fair trade would seem to be out of the question. They could barely be assimilated into the global economy as manual laborers, and their island would be quickly swindled out from under them by the tall pretty people who came to visit them. What could be a possible positive outcome for them? In 2100, will humans again accept serfdom as a moral alternative for these not-chimps-but-not-people? Or should the U.N. keep them isolated as a nature preserve, defending the island from smugglers and poachers, and darting the curious ones that swim out to the observation boats, to be replaced back in their brush-nests before they see anything?

This is the first in the alternative histories series. Next post, alternate history vs actual history test: which really happened?

Rand Paul at the Congressional Correspondents Dinner

2011-03-31T16:12:00.000-07:00

You gotta love the guy, he actually made a Star Trek reference. Given that he was in D.C., I'm not sure how many people in the room got it.

He's doing a valuable service. We're in a bad spot right now. Democrats are a-okay with being Team America: World Police when it's their guy doing the bombing - and among many, Rachel Maddow's fawning that Obama's "attitude" is what makes the difference is particularly disgusting. I don't think the people dying in what is now our conflict, on either side, particularly care about Obama's attitude. And we hear precious little real opposition from the GOP, who don't dare criticize a war on humanitarian grounds for fear of looking soft.

Of course, one suspicion is that by starting a new war and simultaneously saying he'll encourage new oil drilling inside the U.S. (that's right Democrats, drill baby drill!) Obama is co-opting the GOP's few remaining sane moral and economic points and forcing them further to the fringe. Think how this war will play to the heartland during the 2012 debates when the GOP primary winner tries to call him soft on defense, or says the Democrats are weak on energy. Appointing Jon Huntsman ambassador to China was another move designed to assimiliate possible GOP moderation, and it's still not clear why Huntsman isn't more widely considered a literal Manchurian candidate in the GOP primary field, to torpedo a certain fellow moderate Mormon, and let the evangelicals have their way with the GOP in spring 2012.

The bottom line: the crazier the tea party and social conservatives get, the happier the Obama administration is, and the more rotten (or completely ignored) our discourse and legislative process become. This problem of democracy is not a uniquely American problem. Sarkozy's hair-trigger enthusiasm to bomb someone seems to have been influenced by similar electoral calculations. You're serious about human rights, gentlemen? What about North Korea and Congo and Somalia? I guess human rights must have something to do with oil that we just aren't understanding.

Political strategizing is fine but not when a side effect is using my tax dollars to end human lives.

Signing Off Until Late June

2011-01-11T16:13:00.000-08:00

Interesting as the world is (to me at least), I really have to focus on studying until after my big test. Thanks for reading. Until then: whatever you're up to, make sure that you're making yourself and others happy, and really make sure you have actual evidence that's what's happening!

Spot the Difference, or Political Multiple Choice

2011-01-10T23:54:00.000-08:00

Time for some political multiple choice. Pick A or B:

"...[former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin/FBI Director Robert Mueller] said s/he's 'all for' profiling [Muslims/conservatives] if it saves 'innocent American lives.'

"Speaking about the [Fort Hood shooting/Tucson shooting], s/he said there were 'massive warning flags that were missed all over the place' because of a 'fear of being politically incorrect.'"

Which do you think it was? If these are not equivalent, why not?

Obesity and the Bad Stripe

2011-01-07T15:56:00.000-08:00

Maps here. Obesity splits into two bands in the eastern U.S.; one is the Bad Stripe and one is the Black Belt. I originally noticed the Bad Stripe when it shifted more Republican for president in the 2008 election (the opposite of the rest of the country) and then when the same shape continued to appear in maps of other indicators. My initial surprise about the Bad Stripe is that it was not the Black Belt, which can be clearly seen on the obesity map.

"Chavez Squeezes Scientific Freedom"

2011-01-07T00:06:00.000-08:00

To the rallying cries of "Let's be more like West Virginia!" and "Let's be more like North Korea!", we might add "Let's be more like Venezuela!" The headline above is from Nature. (Scientists have noticed Chavez doing other questionable things before.) While Eric Cantor is not yet in Chavez territory, it's worth it (and fair) to ask him directly if he would like to be.

Assorted Links: Transparency and War

2011-01-05T19:35:00.000-08:00

1) I Paid a Bribe, a bribe-tracking site with a focus on South India. Has anyone ever estimated the damage that the prevalence of bribes in South Asia does to economies? Also check out the zero rupee note and Transparency International. Future project: multiple regression for happiness indices against factors including transparency (if not already done).

2) Supposedly the 90s were more violent, and the narrative was that the end of the Cold War freed up more national interests to fight without touching off World War III. Turns out violence has decreased steadily since WWII (including in the 90s), and the tail end of Stephen Pinker's observation of a six-century decline is mirrored in this graph. There were however more non-governmental conflicts. This is an interesting development; growth of non-governmental warfare ironically only possible in a wealthier world? There has not been any post-colonial fighting since the 70s, and France was involved in the most international conflicts since WWII. (Really.)

Electoral District Reform: Give Seats Directly to the Special Interests

2011-01-03T13:09:00.000-08:00

A post at opensecret.org described the outcome of the 2012 Congressional elective"Transportation unions lost three seats...And the mining industry gained two new seats." Many states and Congressional districts are transparently dominated by one or a very few industries. So why don't we cut to the chase? Why don't we have legislators that represent labor unions and mineral extraction interests right on their name tags, instead of pretending to represent New Jersey or Wyoming?

Big Five Personality Traits, Outliers and Per Capita Income in the U.S.

2010-12-29T20:33:00.000-08:00

I went back and played with the data from that survey of Big Five personality traits by state (the OCEAN traits) and the NYT has a neat gadget; data below from there. Per capita income data comes from the Census. Automatically you start thinking about correlations between the Big Five and other things like income.

- Big Five traits and per capita income.
- Interestingly the strongest correlation at the state level both in terms of goodness of fit and slope (strength of influence) in a linear model is an inverse one with conscientiousness. Want to make money? Be lazy! Who knows the causal relationship here if any, so I won't hand-wave. With an R^2 of 0.2646, the regression says the state's per capita rises $236.87 for every rank lower you go on the conscientiousness scale. You also get money for being disagreeable ($221.87 for every rank the state drops, R^2 = 0.2321), although you also get money for being open-minded ($182, R^2=0.1566). This is probably largely the Northeast talking, although it might be interesting to look at the correlation between education and openness.

- Combinations of Big Five traits by state. If you do scatterplots with each of the Big Five characteristics against the others, several states appear repeatedly as outliers at the "corners" of the scatter - DC is one and Alaska is another. The whole reason that the study which initially generated this data is interesting is because it shows that there actually is a geographical difference in personality types (whether that's because of memes or genes is another question entirely). But it stands to reason that if gene and/or culture flow can explain this, then we should see outliers at the geographical extremities. It also stands to reason that the outliers on the coasts won't necessarily be outliers in the same way. While the map of openness does bear a similarity to the Red/Blue presidential voting distribution, there is no other obvious correlation between other characteristics or states.

So I looked at the coastal states (those with a saltwater port) against the non-coastal states, excluding Hawaii and Alaska. If geographic extremes correlate with personality type "outliers", then the saltwater states (which are farther from each other) should also be more dissimilar to each other than the interior states. By my count there are 26 interior and 23 saltwater states, so all other things being equal, the saltwater states should look more similar to each other, since there are fewer of them.

Indeed, the standard deviations for 3 of the 5 big 5 are smaller for the interior. They're the same for the other 2. As far as the averages, the interior states are more extraverted, agreeable and conscientious than the coastal states. (Those first two are consistently a shock to me.) The noncoastal states are on average less neurotic and less open to new experiences and ideas.

- Combinations of Big Five traits by region. If you do scatterplots with combinations of Big Five scores by region, then the Northeast (DC to Maine) is frequently an outlier (conscientiousness vs neurotic, conscientiousness vs openness, consciousness vs extraversion; more on this in a bit). The contiguous Pacific states are a major outlier on agreeableness vs openness; otherwise they land near the other states in and west of the Rockies. The Frontier Strip lands with the Midwest and the Bad Stripe tends to sort with the South, except that it's much less open than other Southern states.

- Per capita income distribution and average, coastal vs. non-coastal. It's also worth pointing out that the per capita incomes of non-coastal states were a) more similar to each other than the coastal states' were and b) on average lower, by $5,128. This is not surprising, as land-locked countries also have lower per capitas than those with coastline. 2/3 of all Alpha and Beta cities are on saltwater (or a river delta leading into saltwater), so, par for the course.

The Dialect of the Bad Stripe

2010-12-29T17:19:00.000-08:00

The Bad Stripe as I've marked it out before (most recent here) is in many ways a boundary or transition zone between North and South, for example in social networks and religion. It turns out that it's a separate dialect zone too. The map can't be embedded well so click through to this dialect map of North American English, and you'll see that the Bad Stripe largely overlaps with the non-Texas part of the Inland South zone.

In many other systems (ecology and social networks) being at a phase transition is good, i.e. tidepools, savannas near jungles, being the only person who speaks both languages of two adjacent and relatively wealthy populations, etc. If the repeatedly observed "boundariness" of the Bad Stripe is not a coincidence or a historical accident, it could be that either the principle is reverse here, or that some aspects of the Bad Stripe are caused by the other negative conditions that previously obtained.

Punished for Transparency

2010-12-27T23:29:00.000-08:00

"The Wikileaks method punishes a nation -- or any human undertaking -- that falls short of absolute, total transparency, which is all human undertakings, but perversely rewards an absolute lack of transparency. Thus an iron-shut government doesn't have leaks to the site, but a mostly-open government does."

- Jaron Lanier, The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy in The Atlantic

Amen to that. Where are the leaks from China? From North Korea? Hint: nowhere, and not coming anytime soon either. Without even accusing Assange of a deliberate focus on one or the other imperfect liberal democracy, it's easy to see how they might draw relative benefit from this and future leaks.

Why Is the Frontier Strip Where It Is

2010-12-26T23:52:00.000-08:00

Summary: Climate continues to have a profound impact on the distribution and economic activities of humans. There is a rapid population density decrease in the Frontier Strip states. Moving westward, there is a sharp increase in population when the Pacific coast is reached. This is usually attributed to difficulty of farming in the country's interior as the 100 W meridian is approached. I show here that this is not consistent with current agricultural productiveness of Frontier Strip and Pacific states on a per person or per area basis. I also show that in the Frontier Strip, temperature, precipitation and latitude are poor predictors of agricultural output but strong predictors of population density. Population density and agricultural output do not predict each other.

Since the 100 W theory of population density drop-off appears falsified, other explanations must be sought. The appearance of easier transportation during the settlement of the Frontier Strip, as well as the depression are explored and discarded. Further research with better agricultural output data and higher resolution climate data may support the hypothesis that investments in agricultural capital came too early in the Frontier Strip to benefit from irrigation technology, and that modern transportation and U.S. population preferences of climate as well as the coastal location of large population centers with service economies combine to keep the Frontier Strip the low-population boundary of the U.S. interior.

PART 1. I've written enough about the Bad Stripe recently so I thought I'd move to another grouping of U.S. states: the Frontier Strip. The Frontier Strip is the north-south line of states including the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, identified retrospectively in the 1890 census as having been the frontier in 1880. I've been interested in the idea ever since I visited Scottsbluff, Nebraska on a road trip two years ago. Like many places in the High Plains, Scottsbluff is proud of its pioneer heritage, although you have to ask how proud you want to be of being famous for being on the way to somewhere else. Inspection of a population density map of the U.S. shows that there is a dramatic drop-off as you move west across the Frontier Strip states, which never "recovers" until you hit the coastal cities of Washington, Oregon and California. The precipitation map is underneath it for comparison.

The geographers' conventional wisdom on this phenomenon involves the hundredth meridian west, which I've drawn in as a black stripe. It does seem to track just to the west of the density drop-off. The argument is that precipitation drops off to the west of this area, so agriculture becomes less productive. In earlier times economies were more strongly dependent on agriculture; consequently, large cities would not tend to develop in these dry regions and, even if they did, could not be supplied with food. Therefore further settlement coming from the East passed these areas and continued to the (contiguous) Pacific coast states. This argument also assumes that the potential agricultural productivity of an area has been realized by settlement and farming, i.e. it is at steady-state, and North Dakota's population isn't about to explode due to settlement by new farmers.

I've always found this argument dubious. First of all, most of these assumptions are not addressed explicitly in discussions of the 100 W boundary. But the most direct thing to do would be to look at agricultural output and see how it stacks up by state. Because states differ in population and size, we should look at output per person and per area. This information comes from the 2010 Census. There is not an obvious unit of "agricultural output" (if we include tobacco, none of the Frontier Strip or Pacific states will do very well) so I used combined receipts for the four principal products that the Census tracks by state (beef cattle, dairy products, corn and broiler chickens). Yes, wheat is an obvious omission but I couldn't find data for it by state, so it's possible these numbers are off by virtue of neglecting important crops.

So, if we have cause to doubt the traditional 100 W explanation, the Frontier Strip states should do the same or better than the Pacific states in agricultural output, meaning that it's not such a farm productivity death sentence to be near 100 W. Here's how the Frontier states and Pacific states stack up when ordered by agricultural value produced per-person.

State	Ag $/person
Nebraska	6,040
South Dakota	3,954
Kansas	2,846
North Dakota	2,091
Oklahoma	890
Oregon	590
Texas	451
Washington	286
Arizona	233
California	229

(I include Arizona because I'll use it later as an example.)

Before we get excited and declare 100 W theory dead, it should be noted that the above table probably isn't that interesting. We're looking at 2010 data, and even if California really is more productive than the Frontier states (as the traditional theory predicts), it might be masked in this table: states with large populations are likely to have higher proportions of people in other sectors, i.e. doing something other than agriculture. What really counts is the potential productivity of the land itself (owing to climate); that's the crux of the argument. So here's how they stack up when look at agricultural value produced per land area:

State	Ag $/Area
Nebraska	55,405
Kansas	38,319
California	21,154
Oklahoma	18,765
Texas	16,698
South Dakota	16,364
Washington	11,128
Oregon	9,080
North Dakota	7,598
Arizona	5,059

This doesn't look good for the 100 W theory. Yes, California is productive per land area, but still, if you're in Nebraska or Kansas, why go west? You're better off in the High Plains! There are possible explanations for this, besides the limited four-product index I'm using: a) The farming business has changed a lot over the past century and a half, and what used to be family-owned farms are now gigantic industrial facilities. So what makes Nebraska so productive now might not matter to people economically today (if it's all going to one or two corporations) or it might be different from conditions a century ago. b) You could also make the argument that dollars produced per area is a weak proxy indicator, because the land isn't being used for valuable crops, because the value of crops has changed over time, or (least likely) the areas haven't reached steady state and are still being developed by settlers agriculturally.

Additional point: agricultural productivity cannot depend entirely on precipitation, i.e. on proximity to 100 W. Length of growing season has something to do with it as well, which as you might guess has a strong north-south trend. This map shows number of days below freezing:

That map is a little small so, if we can assume 1911 was typical, here's a larger map showing basically the same thing, the day of the last killing frost:

As it turns out, there is a north-south population density trend in the Frontier Strip. Looking further north to Canada, any semblance of a 100 W-population boundary disappears. In fact the population density along the country's southern border increases beyond 100 W, after having dropped off in Ontario well to the east. Again, black line is 100 W.

You might make several arguments to explain this: 1) The 100W boundary is in fact country-specific, due to different development policies, and/or 2) that as latitude increases, the strength of the association of precipitation becomes relatively weaker and latitude becomes stronger. (Who cares about number of days below freezing when you go from 30 to 50? Precipitation makes a bigger difference. But when you go from 120 to 140, latitude makes a bigger difference.) 3) The western part of Ontario isn't yet at steady state and its population will growin the future when settlers arrive to realize its agricultural potential, and the precipitation-driven east-west density gradient will assert itself.

Rather than speculate, I did linear regressions on the Frontier Strip and Frontier plus Pacific and Arizona, using latitude, rainfall (not including snow), days below freezing, average annual temperature, lowest average monthly low, highest average monthly high, and population density, and their correlation to agricultural dollars per area. Rather than take up space with a bunch of ugly scatter plots I made a table of R^2 values. This is exploratory so there's no fancy Bonferroni corrections going on, but in any event none are strong correlations.

	All	Frontier
Latitude	0.0077	0.0039
Rainfall	0.0205	0.1513
Frz Days	0.0986	0.0014
Ave Temp	0.0216	0.0003
Lowest Mnth Lo	0.1123	0.0004
Highest Mnth Hi	0.0006	0
Pop Dens	0.0358	0.0125

Since agricultural output is just a proxy for the original question we're concerned with (population density), I used that as the output and looked at the same factors. Wow. The R's are much stronger.

	All	Frontier
Latitude	0.1355	0.9463
Rainfall	0.0484	0.4844
Frz Days	0.5628	0.9773
Ave Temp	0.2918	0.9475
Lowest Mnth Lo	0.6001	0.9577
Highest Mnth Hi	0.0117	0.8587
Ag Output/Area	0.0358	0.0125

First: agricultural output and population density do not seem to be strongly related. Furthermore if rainfall is the reason 100 W is significant, it's interesting that rainfall is a much weaker predictor than temperature. These are both problems for the traditional 100 W theory.

Second, for the "inputs" with R's above 0.9, here's what they mean in terms of population density.

- For every day of the year where the temperature drops below freezing, the population density is lower by 0.197 people per square kilometer.

- For every degree lower the lowest monthly low is, the population density is lower by 0.863.

- For every degree the average annual temperature drops, the population density drops by 1.33.

- For every degree of latitude gained, the population density drops by 2.05.

It seems strange that there could be such a strong connection between climate and population but not agricultural output, especially in states where a huge fraction of the economy depends on agriculture. That connection could very well be concealed here by the limited set of agricultural products I'm considering. Really, what I should be using is climate and agriculture output data at the county level, and the agriculture data should be the value of all commercial livestock and crops. But I leave that to someone with access to real data and real software. It would also be interesting to crunch these numbers for every decade from 1850, and see how the R's and slopes for each of these change over time if at all. Maybe the weak predictiveness between climate factors and agricultural output is real, but it used to be much stronger.

PART 2. Other Possible Explanations

Explanation #1. The population drop-off is a result of timing, i.e. improvements in transportation and communication. Couldn't it just be that just as the Frontier Strip was getting settled, trains and telegraph lines were built? Finally, you could find out whether there were jobs in San Francisco, and you could get there. (Assuming that independent of mineral extraction revenues*, loss of population is equivalent to loss of economic growth, this is the root of productivity paradoxes that exist between areas with free movement of people and goods.

If this were the case, you would expect to see a shift westward from the Frontier Strip at least by the 1880s. The Transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869 and it was connected to Los Angeles in 1876. In fact this is not what we see. First, here are the population densities of all Frontier Strip states and Pacific coast states, and then the average density of both groups.

After the 1920s, the Pacific states never looked back. Among the Frontier states, Texas is by far the strongest performer, owing probably to a longer growing season, early discovery of mineral wealth, and ports to make transportation cheaper (though I suspect immigration from Mexico is also a contributor there; Texas Hispanics are 35.9% of the population, compared to 6.1% in neighboring Oklahoma and comparable or lower northward.) Furthermore, you can see there was a local optimum in every Frontier state except Texas sometime in the teens. I don't know of any events that would explain this drop, nor if people were heading further west. Bottom line, the fact that the drop happened so late argues against the railroads having been the contributor, and the roads weren't yet developed enough that cars could have been the explanation.

Initially I was also skeptical because of Arizona. Arizona is clearly not a state blessed with rainfall, and yet it had (and still has) a strong citrus growing industry (thanks to irrigation), and its population density passed the Frontier Strip's in the 1980s and is still growing. It's worth asking why irrigation doesn't also cause a sudden increase in the relatively wetter Frontier Strip's population; climate and sunshine preference are likely to play a part, and we could make a guess based on sources of internal immigration for Arizona. This would suggest that in some ways, transportation and information about local conditions do make a difference, but the precondition is that the area can't have been settled prior to modern irrigation technology (because capital commitments are made in the agricultural infrastructure), and it has to have sunlight. I think that the real explanation will have something to do with the random impact of the historical timing of technological progress, if not transportation, then commitment to pre-existing agricultural infrastructure, shifting of economic importance to other sectors, and population preferences that make a greater difference in more recent history due to increased mobility.

Explanation #2. The Okie Effect. Can farm abandonment and consolidation during the Depression and Dustbowl explain it? See graphs above. These economic/agricultural events may have contributed but the trend was already underway at least a decade earlier.

*I give the caveat about mineral wealth because Texas and to a lesser extent Oklahoma have big oil sectors that impact their populations. In addition, most of North Dakota's counties are losing population and the state is just barely growing but recent oil discoveries have made the state profitable. Research suggestion: to what degree can sub-national entities be subject to the resource curse? What institutions or cultural features are protective against resource-curse type damage to economies?

Native-Born Californians Regain Majority Status

2010-12-26T15:49:00.001-08:00

For the first time since the Gold Rush. LA Times story here. Interestingly during the 2000-2009 Census period, California LOST 1,509,708 people due to internal em/immigration. Only international immigration kept the population-due-to-em/immigration above water (by about 1% of the state's total population.) Many of these are Latin American, but a large number of high-skill well-to-do Asian immigrants are coming on 747s.

Suggested research*: relationship between proportion of ethnic populations who are legal immigrants or permanent legal residents vs. citizens, and per capita income in those populations; relationship between prevalence of international immigrants or incidence of international immigration in last decade and per capita income change. Also, distribution within California by country of origin of new international immigrants.

*"Suggested research" translates to "someone else do the work, I'm not a frickin demographics grad student over here".

Let's Be More Like West Virginia

2010-12-25T18:05:00.000-08:00

"Only 1.1% of the state's residents were foreign-born, placing West Virginia last among the 50 states in that statistic. It also has the lowest percentage of residents that speak a language other than English in the home (2.7%)." From Wikipedia.

"Let's be more like West Virginia!" I encourage the nativists of the U.S. to adopt that as their rallying cry. Catchy!

Note also that a) West Virginia is the eastern- and northern-most member state of the Bad Stripe (most recent post here), and b) never having had as strong an agricultural component to its economy, WV's population is 3.5% African-American vs. 20.5% for VA, which by most accounts has performed slightly better.

Unexpected Wisdom from Hayek

2010-12-25T17:22:00.000-08:00

"The gullible do find agreement. Meanwhile, growing national confusion leads to protest meetings. The least educated - thrilled and conviced by fiery oratory, form a party."

- From the cartoon summary of The Road to Serfdom (at 2 minutes exactly).

Emphasis mine. Amazingly I've not yet seen Glenn Beck quote this.

Wujie: Top-Notch Internet Privacy Application

2010-12-25T14:02:00.000-08:00

So it claims, so evaluate for yourself. Website here, in Mandarin.

China's Development Policy in Africa

2010-12-23T16:04:00.000-08:00

From Wikileaks, via Spiegel Online: "No matter whether it's war in Darfur, repression in Zimbabwe or corruption in Nigeria -- for the Chinese, it's not their problem. For example, instead of taking Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe to task for his totalitarian policies and looting of his own country, they bestowed an honorary doctorate on him in 2005 and declared him 'China's No. 1 Friend.' Three years later, in 2008, they sent Mugabe the An Yue Jiang, a ship full of weapons and ammunition."

The Chinese government is at least internally consistent in their position on basic civil liberties: Memetjan Abdulla was just sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 2009 Uighur riots in Xinjiang. And what was his role, exactly? Reporting on the riots.

The Bad Stripe and Sexual Curiosity

2010-12-19T19:19:00.000-08:00

That's a heat map from okcupid showing the density of self-identified straight people who have had, or would like to have, a same-sex experience. Note the appearance of the Bad Stripe again: markedly less adventurous. Richard Florida has frequently shown positive correlations between economic growth, innovation as measured by number of patents, education and property values between gay-tolerant attitudes in cities and states, the assumption being that this reflects the post-scarcity values that promote innovation in a modern economy. (You can see the Bad Stripe jumping out at you again in this map, and others before it.) No surprise to most that West Virginia, Mississippi and Oklahoma are not the places to start your software company or make discoveries about yourself.

The Bad Stripe Continues: Human Development Index

2010-11-20T06:31:00.000-08:00

The largest contiguous area (8 states) of lowest-category development index is found in the Bad Stripe, and this tracks many other health, education and economic indicators (play with the map and data yourself.) One very ineresting mismatch: violent crime per capita absolutely does not track the Bad Stripe. Neither does property crime.

Gini coefficient is highest in the southern U.S. and California. Guess: different causes for the South and California. In California it's ongoing immigration from a developing country, and in the South it's a holdover from agriculture. It would be interesting to see this same map, but only for people born in the U.S. California would probably blend into the rest of the country, and the South would remain. Thesis topic if it hasn't already been done: relationship between caste-system agrarianism and high Gini, two centuries later, in multiple countries (India, slavery areas in the U.S., Russia's serf system, etc.) Countries could serve as their own controls by comparing parts of the country with similar agrarian output but different caste traditions.

Other interesting trend: western states have more women legislators in their state legislatures than eastern states. This seems to be true regardless of whether the states are left- or right-leaning. Why? That these states were founded later when women's suffrage was a reality or close to it, and that value was fixed in political habits through the generations? In any event it seems less strange in light of this to contemplate that Wyoming was the first state which gave the franchise to women.

The U.S. Plans to Build Its Own Great Firewall

2010-11-17T21:53:00.000-08:00

The Federal government have decided we Americans aren't grown up enough to avoid hurting ourselves with all the dirty, confusing things on the Internet. So they're drafting legislation for our very own Great Firewall. Apparently our Congress thinks China is the "it" government and thinks your freedom of information should be curtailed just like the CCP. Read more here.

Good News From Burma: Now What About Liu Xiaobo?

2010-11-13T11:16:00.000-08:00

Aung San Suu Khi has been released from house arrest, at least for now. This is good news. On a (nationally) selfish note, it also looks very good that it was done immediately after the big U.S. tour through the Pacific Rim.

It's interesting that the Chinese government is apparently not as confident as the Burmese government in its own ability to persevere if it releases and recognizes its own Nobel Prize Winner, Liu Xiaobo.

The Most Useful Analysis of the 2010 Election So Far

2010-11-10T12:11:00.000-08:00

"Transportation unions lost three seats...And the mining industry gained two new seats." I wish we always heard election results reported this way. From a great post at the always-excellent Open Secrets.

In other news, Jim DeMint (R-SC) says "You can't be a fiscal conservative and not be a social conservative." Is that right Jim? Why are these guys so interested in keeping fiscal conservatives from supporting them?

Tibetan Buddhists Find Home on Montana Reservations

2010-11-07T16:40:00.000-08:00

This jumped out to me because during the Tibet protests leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Americans were criticized as having our own oppressed "Tibetans": American Indians. That's why the immigration of Tibetan Buddhists to Indian reservations in the U.S. (particularly in Montana) is so rich. Something seems to be wrong with the Han-Tibetan, U.S.-Native American analogy, since we don't see too many Blackfoot or Navajo moving into China to practice their lifeways free from oppression.

These folks picked a great part of the U.S. to live in. The general awesomeness of Montana bears emphasizing.

North Korean Documentary Screening in San Diego

2010-11-06T14:19:00.000-07:00

If you're in San Diego, check out this event by UCSD Liberty in North Korea (LiNK) on Monday 15 November.

Where: UCSD Multipurpose Room (next to Yogurt World)

When: 8:00 pm, Monday 15 November

What: "Come watch a free screening of Hiding, a BRAND NEW documentary filmed in the summer of 2010.

"This 30-minute documentary will give you an inside look at the struggle North Korean refugees must face in China to find freedom. We will also be hosting DANNY LEE, a North Korean refugee saved through LiNK!

"This is a FREE event so make sure you come out and see LiNK in action!! Donations to reach LiNK@UCSD's goal of saving 3 refugees this school year will be accepted! Bring your friends for an evening of learning more of this humanitarian crisis!"

Politicians Won't Compete on Price

2010-11-05T20:07:00.000-07:00

"Price" in this title is really a stand-in for "easily comparable attributes". Businesses hate when consumers can easily compare on price (same product or service with easy side-by-side comparison). That makes life much more difficult for competing businesses and tends toward a race to the bottom. This is why businesses do things like shrouding. It's also probably why some businesses have arrived at a "norm" of making you physically visit in order to get the price, or the real one at any rate. Sometime try calling a car dealership and getting a price out of them over the phone, and you're likely to get a firm "Why don't you come down and talk about it." I was once literally yelled at by the sales manager for doing this. Why? Once you've committed your lunch hour, or dinnertime or Saturday to shopping and you would have to drive 2 miles to go get the next price, chances are you'll be more easily worn down.

Votesmart.org has easily-compared position lists for the candidates, based on information the candidates supply. Perhaps not coincidentally, for every single major party candidate I looked up, it said: "[Name] refused to tell citizens where he/she stands on any of the issues addressed in the 2010 Political Courage Test, despite repeated requests from Vote Smart, national media, and prominent political leaders." Many Libertarian candidates provided their positions. I didn't look up Green or other parties. It would be interesting hearing from a campaign staffer as to whether the campaigns' refusal to provide this information in easily comparable format is a deliberate form of position-shrouding.

[Votesmart needs your help! To volunteer time or donate, go here.]

Quote of the Day

2010-10-26T16:06:00.000-07:00

"In California, where the urgent question of something suspiciously like state failure is staring the electorate in the face, the Brown-Whitman contest hasn't yet risen even to the level of the trivial."

Christopher Hitchens, Slate, 11 October 2010

Thanks For Your Patience

2010-10-23T14:01:00.000-07:00

If you read my blog, I thank you and I appreciate your patience. My real studies (the one they'll give me a degree for, hopefully) have to remain my first priority. Although weeks or even months may go by without new posts, there will be occasional bursts of activity (like today) during which I will also review any comments you've left. So don't feel too neglected; your thoughts will appear, but it might be a few weeks. In the meantime, you can email me at mdcblogs@gmail.com. And keep me on your reader list!

A Resource for Background on Chinese Government Officials

2010-10-23T12:33:00.000-07:00

It's called China Vitae. This is an excellent idea and valuable resource.

Now where's the one for the U.S.? That's not a rhetorical question. By the same token, where are the Chinese and North Korean military documents on Wikileaks? That would be an exciting development. I fear that open societies are effectively being punished for that virtue.

Two Interesting Links

2010-10-23T12:31:00.000-07:00

A tool - Open Heat Map

A photoessay - What America Looks Like

Rainfall, Agriculture and the Emergence of States

2010-10-23T12:28:00.000-07:00

Recently Haber and Menaldo at Stanford and UW respectively published their rainfall theory of democracy. Rainfall and its impact on agriculture would seem to have an even greater impact on the history of the late neolithic in the formation of the first states. Large political structures have a tendency to first emerge in agriculturally marginal environments. The Nile at the edge of the Sahara (more savanna-like than desert like then); the Fertile Crescent; Cusco, at over 3,000 m in the Andes; and Tenochtitlan, on a lake in central Mexico - all are places where agriculture is very difficult without a fairly complex system of irrigation. Such systems are difficult to originate and maintain without some kind of central political structure to coordinate and maintain them. In addition dry climates allow for agricultural products to be stored for long periods. In fact in at least some places, storage predated agriculture, and was being done in the Middle East at least 11,000 years ago.

All this is to say is it's not necessarily the productiveness of land that predisposes strong centralized states to appear. In fact it seems that the key is marginal productivity which demands agricultural engineering, because a strong centralized state can more easily control agricultural production in such marginal environments. Once intensive agriculture is productive, the populations of those political centers grow, become wealthier, and raise armies, and any surrounding people either form their own states to resist the expansion or are absorbed, or once the empire contracts they're left with residual political structures. That is to say, once the initial political crystallization occurs, it spreads from the initial origins either by conquest or diffusion of ideas. (China is a real exception to this principle. The Mayans aren't a good exception because individual states never covered that much territory; some enemy cities could see each others' temples across the forest.)

If this model is predictive, then we would expect to see that people who are a) in rich physical environments and b) are insulated from trading with or being conquered by agricultural states, will not themselves develop strong, large centralized political structures, even if they themselves have agriculture.

The pre-contact cultures of the North American Pacific Northwest are striking for a) a rich material culture which took advantage of their physical environment and b) the absence of states or even proto-states despite this obvious sophistication. Visit the museums of any tribal nation in coastal Washington State - the Makah at the extreme tip of the Olympic Peninsula are an excellent example. This part of the world is infamously wet, and has rich soil; it would be easy to grow food, if you wanted to, but the deer and the salmon and the cedar and the whales and the seals ensured there was no pressure to develop agriculture, and in fact Makah did not have it. In any event in such a climate it might have been easy to grow food, but not store food. Consequently, it would have been very difficult for would-be states to control production. Any unhappy faction in old Makah villages could have just moved down the coast or two hills over, and the river there would be just as full of salmon, the forest just as full of deer, the cedar just as plentiful and the obsidian from the volcanoes just as available for making tools. With most wealth produced by nature, threats from kings would have little authority.

Waatch River, Makah Nation, Washington State, USA
(image credit Sam Beebe/Ecotrust)

This line of thought was initially inspired by the observed political gap between pre-contact Mesoamericans and the Pacific Northwest, despite the clear complexity of the latter's material culture. Other counterexamples include Amazonians (whose environment was rich but whose soil was not suited to agriculture). Perhaps a better example would be New Guinea, a highly non-marginal environment in terms of rainfall and plant life, and which did develop agriculture independently, but where again strong, expansive states failed to develop.

In 2010 true treatments of these kinds of questions should be quantitative, or explain why they're not. In every such model there are going to be strong biases (e.g., I obviously was impressed by the Makah!) that can be better accounted for by codifying your data numerically and using statistics to avoid cherry-picking. This also forces clear definitions; for example, to measure cultural complexity in a consistent way, or measure how much contact there is between "insulated" cultures, or whether geography is a confounder (maybe New Guinea geography makes state-expansion difficult.) This is why the work of Peter Turchin and others like him is critical if history is anything but a series of accidents and has retrodictable patterns that we can apply to the future.

Red Dawn Remake Release Delayed - Forever?

2010-10-23T11:08:00.000-07:00

If you're a Hollywood type you knew this, but if you're a political junkie maybe not. Here's a story. Important point: the remake was about a Chinese takeover, not Russian. Delayed due to lack of funding - from banks in a certain country, maybe? Sounds like it's time for a documentary - The Undoing of Red Dawn.

Quote of the Day

2010-10-04T07:01:00.000-07:00

"The Chinese people and other nations will also rejoice under the protection of the Turkish-Islamic Union"

- from the widely ignored but unintentionally very funny Turkish Islamic creationist Harun Yahya. I don't think even Uighurs expect or want the Han lands in eastern China to be under Islamic rule.

Prop 19 Ahead of Schedule? Almost

2010-10-02T12:42:00.000-07:00

Getting caught with weed is now the same as getting a littering citation - thanks to a law signed by Governor Schwarzenegger. No, this isn't the referendum that completely decriminalizes it - that's still on the ballot for next month (Prop 19 - vote YES.)

Marijuana has just become significantly closer to becoming completely legal in California, and civilization hasn't yet ended. Amazing! It's almost like adults can behave responsibly without the government telling them what they're allowed to do.

Christine O'Donnell and Noam Chomsky: BFF

2010-10-02T09:27:00.000-07:00

Here's a by-now famous quote about Delaware Senatorial candidate christine O'Donnell: "American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. So they're already into this experiment."

You don't have to be a biotechnology expert to sense that Ms. O'Donnell is perhaps not the best informed on these issues. Which is unfortunate, if you want a well-informed pro-business, pro-enterprise candidate. Until recently, in the U.S. the Republican Party filled this role. Unfortunately, barely two decades after the Reagan administration, its candidates are now much more interested in scoring populist points through fear than in defending American innovation. The GOP has candidates who frankly are starting to sound like the radical left. For years Noam Chomsky has been claiming that the American biomedical industry was evil because it did no real research, socializing risk and privatizing profit, a claim that the briefest contact with reality will immediately explode. But here comes Christine O'Donnell, parroting a similar line: that the biomedical industry is evil for doing the wrong kind of research. We're left wondering exactly what kind of research Commissar O'Donnell's scientific politburo would be willing to approve. Is this woman pro free-market or not? This is no time to be sitting on the fence, Christine. American industry has enough enemies without you piling on.

As you might expect, the kind of technical illiteracy that would lead someone to vote for O'Donnell and think they're improving America's business edge has more immediate and profound implications:

"...colleges in Russia, China, and even Iran [are] churning out an order of magnitude more programmers than universities in the US. It is only a matter of time...a generation at most - until our military loses its digital superiority." (From Douglas Rushkoff writing about digital illiteracy.)

If Christine O'Donnell wants to improve America, she should be doing everything she can to help "scientific companies".

Guatemalan Tuskegee

2010-10-01T14:51:00.000-07:00

It's a good sign (though too late for many) that today Tuskegee seems unthinkable. It turns out that the same organizations were doing the same thing in Guatemala too.

I've always found it frustrating that in criticisms of corporate pharmaceutical research, Tuskegee invariably comes up. It's useful to clarify that Tuskegee (and this Guatemalan project) were carried out by government organizations. Corporate America can be proud because it has never undertaken anything remotely as immoral as that. (And as historians dig, there's apparently more still to come.) So if you're worried about how people are treated in medical studies, history would strongly suggest that you should look at those carried out by government organizations rather than private companies.

No one wants more Tuskegees. The best way to ensure that is to know your history.

Immigration is Recruiting, Not Charity

2010-09-28T21:45:00.000-07:00

This is a message that needs to be repeated more. Pithy summaries: Jim Manzi said "we should reconceptualize immigration as recruiting." Reihan Salam adds urgency: "Incredibly, during a time when we’ve come to appreciate the importance of talent agglomerations and intangible assets, we’re reducing rather than increasing the legal influx of skilled migrants." We're only offering one third the skilled visas today that we did in 2001. Limiting skilled visas and granting amnesty to illegals has the same effect as blocking skilled labor and encouraging low-value labor. Not only are you selecting for low-value labor but you're creating an (ethnically defined!) service sector underclass which - progressive white collar Californians don't like to recognize - we already have. This is not good for the economy, and not good if you want a functioning democracy either.

All I can add here is an entreaty to the national Republican Party to include solutions to this issue in their platform. The GOP is really missing a big win here by ignoring this as a campaign issue and focusing instead on anchor baby idiocy. Refocusing the immigration issue in this way will also repair some of the damage to the GOP brand caused by anti-immigration support coming from open racists who taint the party's image - where as if you're for encouraging smart immigration (which will, by the way, largely be from eastern and southern Asia) you're self-evidently not a racist.

It's possible to find a real issue that has substantial economic and national security impact that can also resonate with voters, and this is one. It is tragically being ignored.

U.S. Internet Censorship Attempt

2010-09-27T18:10:00.001-07:00

Go here for information and the petition against it.

Politicians Speak in Code

2010-09-24T01:15:00.000-07:00

"The Vietnamese and the Republicans are - with an intensity - trying to take away this seat..."

That was Loretta Sanchez on Univision, talking about her opponent Van Tran. It's relevant that this quote is translated from Spanish.

It's amazing how often even in 2010 people feel safe using the opacity of a language barrier to (publicly) say things to one community that they wouldn't dare say to a wider audience - and how often the press and the public lets them get away with it. It's the same with Spanish-language radio, which gets away with language that would bring the FCC down on any English-speaking radio host. But this controversy is cause for optimism. The time when public figures could talk out of both sides of their mouths in different languages is now ending.

How Are the Mexican Drug Cartels Fighting Marijuana Legalization?

2010-09-23T21:46:00.000-07:00

In November California voters will decide whether to legalize marijuana (Prop 19). I've wondered for some time how the Mexican cartels who stand to lose in a huge way will fight this; after all, you can't directly give money to an American politician who will then stand in front of cameras and say "We should keep marijuana illegal so international drug-and-gun runners can stay in business."

The California Beer and Beverage Distributors group is getting press recently for their vigorous opposition to marijuana legalization. While they do have their own reasons for opposing legalization, I wonder what we'd find if we followed the money very closely.

China in Africa: Senegal

2010-09-20T23:39:00.000-07:00

23-minute documentary on Chinese emigration to Senegal, in the context of Chinese economy activity in Africa. Main criticism: it would have been nice to see more about incentives and coordination to emigration from the Chinese government. If you don't like the little window below it's better to watch on a larger screen.

Incentives in Social Engineering

2010-09-18T12:47:00.000-07:00

"If we miss the goals, who is going to punish us?" asked Esther Duflo, a development expert (and Macarthur Fellow, and Clark awardee) at M.I.T. "Nobody is going to come from Mars and say, 'You didn’t reach the goals, so we will invade' — there is no onus." The article addresses accountability problems with the U.N.'s approaches to fighting poverty. Maybe we need an X-Prize for measurable, realistic milestones in development?

Oddly, the types of private institutional giving discussed in the second link above (for example, the Gates Foundation) is proving difficult to get off the ground in the rising Number Two economy, China - not just because Chinese billionaires are cheap, but because the Chinese government doesn't want competition, even if it means faster improvement for its citizens.

Quote of the Day

2010-09-12T13:54:00.000-07:00

"...it is not a sign of intolerance for us to notice that some cultures and sub-cultures do a terrible job of producing human lives worth living."

- Sam Harris, talking about his forthcoming book The Moral Landscape

Don't Like Chomsky? Then You WILL Like This

2010-09-12T13:14:00.000-07:00

And I like this. Here's a great article about Chomsky's pretensions to political expertise. ("Pretensions!?" you huff, "How dare you!") There is an excellent allusion to the concept of horizontal fame. That is, Henry Ford was good at automating and managing production, which led him to believe he was good at everything else, including (oddly enough) politics.

Chomsky and Ford certainly aren't the first to think that because they can win at one game, they're experts at all of them, but it's up to the rest of us to wring the hero-worship out of what we read and not buy into the cult of fame - which, ironically, Chomsky enjoys decrying.

If you want to see some of old Noam's more ambitious claims even within linguistics punctured, for my money, no one is better than Stephen Pinker.

Rhetoric Check: Nuclear Disarmament Then and Now

2010-09-08T18:51:00.000-07:00

The following reads like a "dark" science fiction scenario, as it might be written by a social conservative author:

In September 2011, the Obama administration decided to deactivate the Minuteman II ICBMs. Over the next few years the missiles were removed from the silos and placed in storage for use in launching satellites. In order to assure the Chinese that the silos were being deactivated according to the SALT III treaty each silo was first stripped of useful equipment and then the top 25 feet of the silo was blown apart using 2,800 pounds of explosives. After being left exposed for several months so the Chinese satellites could verify the destruction the remains were filled in and covered to look as much like the surrounding area as possible. Only one silo escaped destruction to become the Minuteman Missile Museum.

Submission to the Reds! Revelation of the President's true Marxist plan! His desire to destroy America! Right?

Hold on: this is the sign at the preserved nuclear missile silo south of Tucson.

When you can get rid of nuclear weapons in your national interest, that's a very good thing to do.

New Painting - Redwoods

2010-09-07T23:11:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted to my outdoors and running blog.

This time I actually spent some time mixing paint to get the right hue for redwood. It's a complex color! The second picture of the pair is an attempt to emphasize the three dimensionality of the thick paint in the middle of the trees; I tried to recreate the actual texture of redwoods with my brushwork. This is also the first time I did pre-work of any kind (on my computer) to decide how I would what paint when, and to be sure that I could represent distance using tree size.

Why Does Xinhua Have a File Photo of Emperor Palpatine

2010-08-23T23:16:00.000-07:00

Similarly, the San Francisco Chronicle also has their file photo of the owner of the Oakland Raiders mixed up with a still-frame of an orc from Lord of the Rings (scroll to the end for it.)

Legislative Sclerosis and Subordinate Legal Systems

2010-08-21T11:01:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of my first year of medical school the administration told us we could write our own honor code. Because during my undergrad years I had a bad habit of over-committing my time to non-career-supporting activities, I banished all thought of participating. But then a few days later when the writers were in front of us presenting the honor code they'd written, it occurred to me: I go on and on here on this blog about various social theories including social contracts, gaming the system by over-specializing legal language, and compiling constitutions in a legal program language. Yet here was the opportunity to draft a new social contract, and I'd rejected it! Then again, so for that matter did most of the class. (Interestingly, the students who did choose to participate were demographically non-representative of the student body as a whole but I won't say exactly in what way because it would change the focus of the post to something controversial.)

Even when it was presented, people didn't seem to care, and I was one of the non-carers. Why? There was no revolution going on. We weren't Jefferson or Lenin drawing up the new law of the land; maybe if we'd been on a desert island a la Lord of the Flies the code would have some meaning, but as it was, such a code has the backing of a sovereign organization only insofar as it conforms to the sovereign organization's aims. The student body's regulations are essentially those of a reservation within the medical school as a whole. This is not a complaint about my own institution; I can't imagine how it could be different anywhere else, or why schools would want it to be. For example, if we'd drawn up the following:

1) We don't have to take the exams or show up for labs but we still pass.
2) If we do take the exams, we can look at other people's tests.
3) We can perform whatever criminal activities we want while we're in school and there will be no repercussions for us.
4) A beer fountain on the quad every Tuesday. (Why wait for a beer volcano in heaven?)

But I'm guessing that wouldn't have flown, because it wouldn't accord with the sovereign's pre-existing rules.

I'm sure you're not surprised by the lack of civic enthusiasm for student government legislation, which at any rate seems universal. But there are two interesting observations here. First, the reason no one cares about student government laws is that they know if there's ever real trouble, it's the sovereign organization that has the real power. Yet in the U.S., people respect state and city governments even though they're ultimately beholden to the Federal government. What's the difference? I suspect there are three factors: 1) Those governments have police, whose right to operate as such are reciprocally recognized. (The Iroquois Nation recently found out about the importance of reciprocal recognition.) 2) Those governments have money. 3) A psychological coordination game - a political entity just seems "real" once it and the people+territory it governs reach a certain size.

Also, the laws of limited, subordinate organizations must conform to the sovereign organization's laws - that is, be at least as, or more, restrictive - which means that each successive layer of government makes a more restrictive overall set of legislation almost certain.

Ultimately the issue is that we humans have figured out very few land use arrangements that allow multiple ownership of a parcel between political entities. This is in contrast to agreements about pieces of property between individuals, or agreements about individuals' labor. Yes, a piece of land can belong to a person as well as be within a country, but only rarely have two separate political entities agreed to administer the same territory (a notable exception in U.s. history is the agreement between the U.S. and Britain to co-develop Columbia (the Oregon Country) from 1818 through 1846, all the more remarkable because the agreement was completed between two countries that had been at war less than four years before.) The existence of multiple political entities administering the same piece of territory would allow actual competition, and avoid pitfalls like the sclerotic effect of multiple levels of government, or the regulatory ratchet problem. U.S.-and-British Columbia might not have been the best place to test this theory since there was hardly anybody there, and it was the relative number of settlers that decided the problem. Post-colonial enclaves like Hong Kong, where a regional culture and government survives as a result of the past collision between two cultures, could be argued to be a half-way point to geographically simultaneous competing political systems.

Currently emigration is one of few things that drives innovation - you lose people if you don't fix the things that are broken about your state - but there are barriers there too. From the emigrant's perspective, it costs money to emigrate, and you probably have to learn a new language and customs, and you lose your social network, and the people in charge either often don't care or don't understand what's happening, so the feedback loop is broken.

Medicare and Bush's Tricks

2010-08-11T10:15:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, Bush's tricks are now Obama's tricks too. Just as Bush put out budgets that had little to do with reality (especially regarding projected deficits and using unrealistically rosy best-case scenario projections) Obama's Medicare cost projections are dangerously unrealistic. Medicare's chief actuary says: "There is a strong likelihood that the cost projections in the new trustees report under current law understate the actual future cost that Medicare will face. A strong likelihood." More here.

If Bush's budget fantasies bothered you - and they should have - then so should this.

Spider Web in Barbed Wire

2010-08-08T02:37:00.000-07:00

If I'd had a digital camera back then (2001, did anybody?) I would've kept taking shots until I was sure I had it. Then again I kind of like it as it is with just the barest suggestion of the concentric strands of the web inside the wire.