The Decline of Overtly Signaled Subcultures

"...entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive
for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly." - William Gibson's Neuromancer

The web is full of essays with nostalgic hat tips to the optimistic naivete of 1950s science fiction, but I feel the same way about the naive pessimism of 70s and 80s science fiction - not only cyberpunk but the whole body of sf with the theme of "the future will be disjointed and schizophrenic and incomprehensible and alienating" beginning in the 70s and extending through the 80s, exemplified by works like Shockwave Rider. It's 2009, and guess what? Yes, things move a little quicker; we have a recession and some wars; and on the whole, not many people pine away for the simple 70s - a time when, if you wanted to learn about a company, you had to drive to the library and hope you could learn something from of the two printed paragraphs about them you might find if you dug through microfilm for three hours.

One prediction of the dark, scatterbrained future that seems to be exactly wrong is the fragmentation of subcultures. When was the last time you saw a kid with a metal shirt on? Compare that to ten years ago. I have a special sensitivity to this issue, because as a reformed (but not retired) metal fan, I've noticed the trend - and it seems to extend to every strongly-signaled subculture (in terms of clothing or speech or hair). I don't think that's a coincidence.

Youth subcultures are about establishing identity - not only in opposition to your parents, but to the rest of the people in your own generation. I never once wished there were more metal kids at my school - I didn't have much contact with the other kids who were, and I kind of liked being "special". In fact, at my first Metallica show I had the uncomfortable realization that I was no longer "the metal guy", because suddenly I was surrounded by 10,000 Klingon-looking guys that were indisputably more metal than me.

But what did I get out of the long hair and the scary facial hair and the T-shirts? That signalled my specialness, and (stupidly) as a teenaged male, made me feel good that here, finally, was a way I could make others react - by signal that "I am a member of this clan of loudness and drinking and aggression." Contrary to one folk belief, most metalheads actually do like the music - it's not just about shocking people, and in fact it's the only part of the deal that I retain today. But would it have been as much "fun" if I couldn't signal my membership in this subgroup of unknown values to strangers? Of course not.

You can apply these same arguments to any non-mainstream subculture of the 80s or 90s whose members behaved or dressed in such a way as to mark themselves; I think kids do it for the same reason, and I think that signaling has faded for the same reason. That reason is, what else, the internet.

Kids in 2009 don't expect to be able to shock guys my age or older by coloring their hair or putting something on a shirt. They know we have access to the same websites they do; driving by a high school one day you see a weird-looking kid wearing a T-shirt with some incomprehensible expression on it, you go home and Google it, and you say "Oh, that's all it means." Any subculture that would rise and fluorish - or even survive - must be able to do so even after being catalogued and described and compared by the peers and families of the teenagers that would adopt them. References to taboo subjects are irreversibly weakened when you can start reading Wikipedia articles about them. That's why, if you're a teenager now, you know instinctively the futility of trying to establish an incomprehensible artistic and dress code, because it'll be on Youtube tomorrow. And in particular, any subculture that tries to build a feeling of power in its members through the intimidation that its other-ness creates is doomed to failure ab initio. Know why? Snopes.com. No kid, your Satan shirt doesn't scare me, because there's never been a real sacrifice. Now go back to gym class and see if you can run a mile in under 10 minutes.

In a way I feel sorry for kids who are 15 right now who, had they been born 20 years earlier, would have been punks and metalheads and goths. But there are still pockets of America where one can view these endangered species. The last time I saw a group of teens in full I'm-not-mainstream regalia during business hours (i.e. T-shirts and black trenchcoats not right outside a concert) was in Cody, Wyoming in August 2008. Go there, would-be Goths and punks and metalheads! Be free!

Caesar's Civil War, or Early Heuristics

I just finished reading Caesar's account of the Roman Civil War, which for me was an interesting exercise in first, trying to read between the lines of what was certainly some level of self-promotion and historical revision; and second, admiring the clear-thinkingness of the famous people of classical antiquity. Even if it was mostly B.S., it's very well-constructed B.S. that shows a cunning insight into human nature that Kahneman and Tversky would envy.

Next time I'm in Spain or Marseilles or North Africa, I'd love to visit some of the battle sites, but the real value in the work for me are Caesar's occasional incisive and pragmatic asides on human nature and the workings of the universe:

"In war, trivial causes can exert great consequences."

"It is a quirk of human nature that the unfamiliar or the unusual can cause overconfidence or anxiety."

"We are very ready to believe what we want to believe, and expect others to think as we do."

The Possibly Vain Search for Laws of Global Development

As an amateur socioeconomist, I've recognized that there is an assumption that is made by economists and development experts, but rarely stated explicitly: that there is a nice clear set of principles governing nation-level material betterment, a kind of socioeconomic answer to the three laws of thermodynamics. In his draft of The Success of Development, Charles Kenny verbalizes it, and names the eight countries that have at least quadrupled their economies from 1929 to 1988: Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Italy, Norway, Finland, Bulgaria, and the USSR. Tell me what the common thread is there.

Though such laws may exist, we haven't found them yet. After all, how many American economists even saw the recession coming in our own economy? The assumption (or hope) that such laws do exist I think comes from our sense of an orderly unvierse, as well as our sense of fairness; i.e., if country A tried it and it worked, and the world is fair, then it should work for country B as well.

What's becoming increasingly clear to me is that institutions and culture matter, and they're highly stochastic. The accidents of history ensure that development is incredibly substrate-dependent. For example: by this argument, even if China were the same size as Japan, and never had a communist government, what worked for Japan would not have worked for China. This is to illustrate my point and I recognize it's not a testable hypothesis, so over the course of the next few months I'll be asking questions that try to quantify gauge the impact of culture on economics. For example, what impact does the cultural aversion to debt (or lack thereof) have on economic growth and cycles? Beyond ensuring basic necessities, does the relation between wealth and happiness (or the impact of positional goods) change between cultures? What effect does media and Gini have, and does this differ between cultures? These questions are important if the whole project of economic growth and the search for human happiness are to be realized.

Presidential Approval Over Time

There's not a lot of non-intuitive information in this graph, except I did find it interesting that revelations of torture apparently don't damage national opinion of Bush (click to expand).



It would be interesting to look at approval urban vs. rural, to see the split widen, although again I don't think presenting the information this way would provide new insights.

Islamic China

The Chinese population policy has created a surplus of males, and this is a demographic time bomb. Simply put, lots of unoccupied, unmarried young males in any one place means trouble. The linked article focuses on the human rights ramifications, in terms of the commodification of women, but I have another concern. Combine the overabundance of males with China's policies encouraging emigration to the West (by already-poor and uneducated rural workers) and we have a great recipe: unmarried, poor, marginalized young men (many of whom will go back and forth to their home province) in an area where Islam is already the dominant religion, despite the efforts of the CCP to squash it.

Could West China become the next breeding ground for extremist Islam? I suspect that we would be seeing this already, far in excess of what we've already seen with spotty incidents of Uighur militarism, if not for China's oppressive policies with regard to religion. I'm not a fan of those policies, and in any event if we're going to see a new recruiting ground for disenfranchised Islamists in western China, I'm not sure that such policies would stop it anyway.

Can Humans See Bubbles Coming?

The most underreported story of the decade is that so few seemingly smart people who spend their time thinking about economics didn't see the bubble coming.

There were several odd moments in this decade where economists realized that for the first time, consumer demand (for houses and everything else) was driving or damaging growth. Have we become so wealthy that our individual incomes are driving these cycles? Clearly not - consumer power was predicated on credit.

What's not clear is that we could have seen it coming, or that the people who claim to aren't just doomsayers who, like broken clocks, are bound to be right eventually. Bubbles are like a cognitive closure principle of economics - if we could clearly see them coming and understand the cascade leading up to them, they wouldn't happen.

Which leaves us with how to avoid them in the future. If such things as depressions are predictable in principle (even if not by the legacy system of meat inside our skulls) then we could conceivably commission economists and programmers to put together an expert system to stand guard and warn us of impending calamity, unencumbered by the madness of crowds that keps us all from seeing what's coming. But if Tolstoy's aphorism about unhappy families all being unhappy in a different way also applies to unhappy economies - as it seems to - then the only thing to be done is to accept that economic crashes are part of the human condition.

Have There Been More Air Accidents Recently?

No. According to the Aircraft Crashes Record Office (the international record-keeper for these statistics), the number of air accidents recently (at least in 2008) is the same or lower as the average for the last ten years:

Year	Accidents
2000	190
2001	200
2002	180
2003	198
2004	165
2005	184
2006	165
2007	139
2008	149

Note that these are acccidents, not deaths, although the death trend is similar. It would be a little more scientific to look at accidents per flight. Fine; the number of flights per year from 2007 to now is going to be basically flat, or maybe even slightly lower owing to the recession.

Originally I was going to post something investigating a possible relationship between the recession and the uptick in accident, but I can't do that because there is no uptick. It certainly seems like there have been more accidents, or I wouldn't have asked the question(and "more plane crashes lately" wouldn't pop right up in the Google search box). Maybe there have been more in the developed world or in the U.S.? The FAA doesn't have statistics for 2009 yet, so instead I went to planecrashinfo.com's database. Their overall-accident statistics are lower than ARCO's by a factor of 2.4 (on average for the period 2000-2008) but we can still see a trend, if there is one:

Year	Accidents, World	Industrialized World	U.S. Accidents
2000	76	34	14
2001	70	35	17
2002	75	30	11
2003	61	23	10
2004	61	24	14
2005	51	15	6
2006	49	16	6
2007	64	15	7
2008	62	23	13
2009	52	21	9

For the 2009 figures, I extrapolated events through 3 June (22, 9, and 4 resp.) out to a 365-day year. "Industrialized world" was all accidents in Australia, British Virgin Islands, Canada, France, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Macedonia, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, the UK and the US.

Still no clear trend. What could be at the root of this sense of more crashes? More mediagenic crashes, which could mean crashes with more fatalities or with more famous victims, though that's hard to quantify.