Examples of Antiquity's Influence on American Founders

Of many, here are two of recent interest:

1) Gibbon's pointing to the increasing power of the Praetorian Guard in the Roman Empire leading to its decline. You might say this is a particularly virulent case of the kinds of special interests internally distorting the priorities of an empire (or over-reactions to those interests), like eunuchs in Ming China or the shepherd lobby in colonial era Spain; particularly virulent, because when the lobby is the people who know how to kill people, their demands are more difficult to ignore, resulting in few natural deaths for emperors.

2) The recognition by both Gibbon and Machiavelli that there may have been a connection, fortuitous though it was, between non-violent succession during the non-inherited Five Good Emperors period, and the prosperity at that time in Rome; hence the installation of regular peaceful power transfers. Good institutions are indeed important.


Relating to #2 above, I would have liked to find some quantitative work with nice graphs on the damage to the Roman economy by civil unrest or governmental inefficiency during turnover/civil wars, but I couldn't find any; there's this article by Bruce Bartlett which is mostly about the damage done by the Roman deep state (deep for that time). Suffice it to say, the Julio-Claudian dynasty marked a period of stability after the civil war between Augustus and Antony, the Five Emperors were a period of peaceful succession, and the Crisis of the Third Century was the opposite. (Note how Bartlett is gunning for the deep state and he skips the Crisis entirely.) Economies grow when credit and capital are available, which requires the world to be predictable. (In other words: risk is okay as long as it can be evaluated.) The Pax Romana and Mongolica are good examples of this; civil wars are obviously bad, but expropriation/nationalization events by otherwise stable states can do just as much damage, because they concentrate the unpredictability in the safety of capital.

The War on Terroir

FINALLY, people are starting to avail themselves of the pun opportunities given the similarity of terror and terroir.

I for one have long suspected (and our foreign policy similarly ignored) the possibility that a team of suicide vintners from Bordeaux would infiltrate Napa. But for those of us with refined palates, this worry is but one of many crosses to bear.

We Might Be Careful What We Infer From These Happiness Statistics

Here is a list of "top" countries ranked in order of what percent of interviewed people were satisfied according to the question, "In this country, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?"



Possibly more informative is how Americans' answers have fared over time on this poll in terms of percent satisfaction (not relative rank):



(Full article here.) Any poll where UAE and Uzbekistan tie for fifth, ahead of (for example) Canada and Scandinavian countries, suggests at the very least that this isn't measuring what is useful to us, or isn't measuring what we think it is.

The Endowment Effect as a Rational Strategy

The endowment effect is well-studied: people assign higher worths to their own possessions than to same things owned by someone else. That is to say: you wouldn't pay more than $30 for that couch on Craigslist, but when you list your own - same model, same condition - for some reason, you ask (and somehow, actually expect!) $75.

To many of us there are two central features of cognitives biases that make them so interesting. The first is that they're cognitive biases, not cognitive stupidities. We aren't just all over the map due to limited brainpower, as bounded cognition models would suggest; we consistently make mistakes in the same "direction". This consistency (even if it's consistent incorrectness) leads to the other interesting aspect of cognitive biases, which is the extent to which they might actually be instrumentally rational shortcuts in disguise, either being seen out of context or profitable only over the long run. That is, perhaps when we were hunter-gatherers, they were useful. For example, hyperactive pattern detection (type I error) is a terrible thing in the modern age when we're looking for incoming nuclear warheads, but during the Pleistocene, we were stupid and it couldn't get us into too much trouble. Sure, maybe you might end up thinking the gods struck the mountain with lightning because your children cursed a lot that morning, and a thousand other strange things, but we couldn't really do too much about our strange beliefs anyway - but if that one time you saw a shape in the grass that looked like a hyena, and it really was a hyena - well, you still came out ahead.

There's a lot in behavior and medicine like this that only makes sense in evolutionary context, for instance fever. Fever is not something that pathogens do to us, it's something that our bodies actively choose to do to them. In the modern age it's really hard for us to understand how fever can be beneficial, until we remember that merely two centuries ago when, without medicine, we could (and often did) die of fevers. But this is a kind of base-rate fallacy. Fever is a way our body shakes off pathogens, and before modern medicine, that cut in your foot might have a 70% chance of going septic and killing you. If the fever only has a 65% chance of killing you, you still come out ahead of any competitor who didn't have a fever response.

So how could a completely judgment-clouding bias like endowment effect ever be helpful? Finding a group of people who don't appear to have it might point us in the right direction. And indeed, Apicella et al found that Hadza hunter-gatherers in contact with markets show the endowment effect just like the rest of us, but Hadza way out in the bush away from markets do not.

This is pretty amazing - there's a difference in a known bias, even within the same group of people. So we've already learned one thing: the endowment effect is a learned behavior. So either we post-agricultural types are stupid, or we're getting something out of this bias. What's the benefit? And what exactly is different about the two groups of people that makes one group adopt this strategy?

A simple model of markets assumes information symmetry between participants. But in reality, specialization of labor means that the person approaching you to buy your possessions will almost always have better information than the aproachee who's selling because the buyer buys (cars, computers, art, etc.) all the time - and if they're initiating the transaction, they are even MORE likely to have better information. Therefore, the endowment effect may be a learned behavior whereby we value our own possessions more highly than is justified on the open market as a defense against information asymmetry.

Here's a concrete example. Imagine you're selling a car. You seek out an offer, and you find another individual buyer. Are you more comfortable that you're getting a fair deal from them than the car dealer? Of course you are. Now imagine you're approached out of the blue by someone who buys cars for a living. Sure, you'd consider it, but only at a very high price where you're sure you're not getting swindled. (This isn't to suggest that the endowment effect occurs consciously, but you can see how when we calculate consciously, we might behave in exactly the way the endowment effect would influence us.)

Consequently, you can imagine the endowment effect as the cushion you need to come out even, when someone with better information than you buys your possessions, especially one who's initiating the deal. And returning to the Hadza hunter-gatherers, we may have identified the relevant difference. Hunter-gatherers are less specialized. If you're a hunter-gatherer, you know just about everybody you could possibly buy or trade something from, and there's not much special knowledge to allow information asymmetry - i.e., everyone is equally smart about the relative value of gazelles and axe heads - so there's no cause to develop such a bias.

This theory makes several testable claims.

1) The more information asymmetry that exists between possession-owner/seller and the buyer, the more the endowment effect gap should be. You think your car is worth more when the car salesman runs up to you on the street initiating and offer to buy it, than when you're selling to someone online with apparently equal knowledge about cars.

2) The endowment effect gap should be larger in markets where there is poorer information, there is less trust, and for goods that are more difficult to value. Complex goods are more difficult to value.

Not central to the theory, but relevant to the fact that this appears to be a learned behavior: children at some arbitrarily young age should not show the endowment effect, because if this differs between humans, it's learned behavior; kids haven't been swindled out of their possessions enough times. (And what is this arbitrarily young age?) Non-hunter-gatherers who nonetheless live in small groups of people with little interchange with other populations should lack this bias. Hunter-gatherers should develop this bias after they come into contact with markets.

There is also a kind of transaction cost argument, separate from the theory. Yes, you might have just gotten a good deal for your used Toyota, but now you have a Nissan and there's a utility cost to you of learning how to operate a new car. If that's ALL the endowment effect is, then each individual's ability to learn new behaviors should completely predict the entire strength of the endowment effect in each individual, at least with complex things like cars.

Passivity and Usefulness of Information Do Not Positively Correlate

Previously I posted that we shouldn't be surprised that media information that we receive passively isn't necessarily useful to us. It costs money for all the information to get transmitted so broadly, and the reason it happens is because the people on the other end think it is benefiting them, usually financially. This of course doesn't correlate positively with that information being useful to the recipient, and might even correlate negatively. If you put in effort to find information you used to make a decision, it is more likely to be useful to you. Robin Hanson approaches this same idea in his post Why Info Push Dominates.

Anarchist Conference Devolves Into Chaos (Not from the Onion)

Story, such as it is, found here. I wonder if anyone asked "I thought we were an autonomous collective?"

Crime and Punishment: If We Could Create Hell, Should We?

This is also posted at my religion and morality blog The Lucky Atheist.

Sam Harris has in several places discussed his moral thought experiment of a pill that would make prisoners think they'd been tortured when they really hadn't. This is why a recent piece in Aeon about length of punishment was so interesting. First it asks if it's ethical to extend someone's life so they could serve a thousand year sentence; then it asks if it would be ethical to change their consciousness so they thought they had served a thousand years, or least much longer than they actually had. (Star Trek fans will recognize an episode of Deep Space 9 here, where exactly this happened.)

More broadly, the moral issue they're getting at here is whether some kind of hell is permissible or even to be encouraged, once we can create it. (Again science fiction has been there: Iain Banks readers will recognize the central question of Surface Detail, where virtual reality hells are used to punish brutal dictators.) It would also be interesting to ask theists about this. Assuming a situation where everyone (theist and atheist) agrees that a particular person's actions are suitably heinous, shouldn't we begin their punishment as soon as possible? If Hell is a real place that bad people go to, why wait?

Leaving aside the more mundane questions that we can ask of our prison right now - who wants to feed a bad guy for a thousand years, and does knowledge of a thousand year sentence actually deter behavior (utility calculations don't seem to affect bank robbery rates, for example) - I think it's obvious that we should focus on how to prevent terrible behavior in the first place, instead of how to make punishment after the fact more severe. Instead of creating virtual hells, shouldn't we focus on creating a real heaven? If you have the science to make someone think they're living a thousand years, what about the science to keep them from becoming a serial killer in the first place? Here people might object that if we choose that path, surely there's something scary about tampering with human nature and free will, to which I answer: you better have a very, very clear argument then. If we weigh the very concrete suffering experienced by Ted Bundy's victims and their families against this amorphous threat to human nature, I think engineering better behavior wins hands down.

In a way, up until now we've been fortunate, because this hasn't been a choice that it's within our power to make. But once it's within our grasp, if we don't face the facts head on and make an explicit decision based on our values - if we muddle through pretending we still don't have that power, or we just let inertia be our guide - then we're being profoundly immoral. Maybe not this particular decision, but many decisions like it, are going to have to be made already in this century.

Wealth and Coastline, Part 2: The United States

Previously I showed that the average income in the set of 138 countries for which I had income data, countries that do have some saltwater coastline is $13,562, vs $9,040 for those with no coastline. This is not surprising, to the extent that you'd expect places with globally linked economies established by their historical presence on the seas to do well, as you would expect for places that were non-extractively colonized (they'll often be the same places, i.e. the U.S.) So it might be worth asking, is there a similar effect in the U.S.?

Yes. In general, the coastal states have higher per capita incomes than the landlocked states. But the scatter plot is interesting. There's a U-shaped trend to this data, of distance of each state capital from American saltwater, versus per capita income (U.S. Census). I say "American saltwater" because there are two states (New Mexico and Arizona) where it's faster to go to the Gulf of California. Even including that as the closest saltwater doesn't change much.



You notice the income minimum at 607 miles from saltwater? It's not just a curve artifact - if you look at the states with capitals 500-700 miles from saltwater, they have a lower per capita among them ($24,141) vs the country as a whole ($28,051). These 7 states with capitals 500-700 miles are the sparsely populated and therefore small service economies of the northern Rockies (Utah, Montana, Idaho), as well as part of the Bad Stripe in the Appalachians (Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana), and post-industrial Michigan. Is there something worse about being 600 miles from the sea, as opposed 1000 or more? (6 states: Iowa, Colorado, Wyoming, Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota, the latter the furthest at 1,235 miles.) But it's possible that it's just a historical accident, as with the supposed effect of rainfall at 100 degrees west longitude causing the population to drop off toward the west. In the case of 100 degrees west, Americans had settled to about that distance inland when the rail lines were completed. (Read the history of towns in western Texas and you will usually see a discussion of which rail line it was on; true for most of the Frontier Strip.)

Also of note: I used driving distance to saltwater, but this is not a great approximation. Even if we were going to use driving distance to saltwater regardless of country, you couldn't include Hudson Bay as North Dakota's closest, because you can't drive there! And just because you can drive to coastline doesn't mean there's a port there, or geography that allows ports to be built. Furthermore, the Great Lakes states are de facto on saltwater because canals and locks connect shipping all the way through to Minnesota.

If you count states in the discrete category of whether they're landlocked and how landlocked they are (1 state away from saltwater? 2 states?) it's clear that the median income of saltwater states is higher - $29,551 vs $26,073. However, among the landlocked states, the U-shaped curve appears again: for the land-locked states, there's no trend for more isolated = lower income; if anything it's the opposite (isolated means the more states you have to go through to get to saltwater from there). The only state 4 states away from Saltwater is Minnesota which at 30,656 has a higher PCI than the median of the coastal states., the better its income. (1 state away, $25,275; 2 states away, $26,695; 3 states away, $26,545.)

What Do the Patterns in Alternate Histories Say About Us?

For the most recent alternate history (a Buddhist Colony in Ptolemy's Alexandria) go here. This post is also cross-posted to my speculative fiction blog.

Added later: information about why the border between post-Mexican-War Mexico ended up where it did, and what an alternate "lesser" Mexico would have been like if the border had ended up even further south - and what the American Civil War might have been like if Sonora, Coahuila, and Chihuahua had been absorbed and admitted as states.

Alternative histories have tended so far to be about events in European (or Western) history, because they're written mostly by European-descended people, and mostly by English-speakers at that.

But that's kind of obvious. So even forgetting the (so far) Western focus of what-if fiction, there are two clear patterns that betray some of our assumptions. And the first obvious pattern is: alternate histories are about violence transpiring differently. How many alternate histories involve policy decisions or inventions happening out of order? It's not usually: what if Newton and Leibniz had not developed calculus, or antibiotics had never been invented (or been invented in pre-Mongol-sack Baghdad)? No, the large majority of what we see are the effects of different outcomes of battles and wars. What if Hitler won, what if the North lost Gettysburg, what if Alexander or Jenghiz had not turned around at India and Austria. And this is depressing; because it means either that history is mostly determined by violence, or (even if it's not true) it means that we at least believe that history is mostly determined by violence.

Yes, there are a few stories about political decisions (what if the Ming had not called back the treasure fleets is a favorite) but it's really mostly about if people had killed and dominated each other in a different way.

You could also argue that what we see commercially is not an accurate reflection of our beliefs about history. It's the same answer for why in speculative fiction, dystopias far outnumber utopias. There's clear conflict and thus they're easier to write.

The test at Sitio Trinidad, 1845, Jornada de Muerte, Nueva Mexico. The test was witnessed by governor Manuel Armijo and president Santa Ana, both of whom lost their vision as a result. (It seems both fission and high speed cameras were developed in nineteenth century Mexico but not dark glasses, go figure.) Despite this setback, the dreaded bomba santabarbara was smuggled in wagons and assembled in Austin and San Antonio and led to the end of the decade-long revuelta tejana and ultimately, the conquest of Alto México (previously the "United States".) Sure it did.

The second pattern, or really observation that students of history can make about this sub-genre: even with battles won or lost differently, it's very hard to find believable changes that affect the outcomes. Sun Tzu was right, the battle usually is won or lost before it begins, and even if the tide on one battlefield had turned, the currents were running one direction or another. For example, so what if Lee won at Gettysburg? A big setback for the Union to be sure, but the Confederacy was screwed from the start in terms of their population and economy. To really get big changes, you have to make major shifts long before the obvious change - the kinds of changes that would have given the South a fighting chance would have had to begin many years before the actual war. Case in point: someone once asked me what might have happened if, in the Mexican War, the Mexican factions had unified against the U.S. as an external threat, and the U.S. lost its first major foreign war and gained no territory. (Or if the U.S. had decided to actually press its 54'40" claim.) A suddenly unified and organized 1840s Mexico is (unfortunately for patriotic Mexicans) only marginally easier to imagine than the first atomic bomb being engineered a hundred years early at Los Alamos by Mexican scientists. Such a story might actually make for some really interesting Latino steampunk fiction, but might as well also include unicorns.

World Series and Superbowl Ratings: How Much Do Home-Team Markets Influence Them?

This is cross-posted to my outdoor and sports blog MDK10 Outside Next up: how much does winning actually correlate with the franchise making money?.

It's been said that it's a television ratings disaster when the World Series comes down to two teams that are from smaller markets, and/or closer together. That is, the thinking goes that if St. Louis plays Kansas City, it's a Midwest series and people outside MO and KS don't care, and consequently a ratings disaster. Yet somehow this same concern isn't expressed for the Superbowl, which always seems curious.

I'd never seen actual data on this. So, I got data for all Superbowls through 2013, and all World Series from the same period (starting in 1968).

The inputs I looked at (i.e. things that could influence viewership) were as follows: 1) total combined home market size of each team in the championship (i.e. greater metro area)[a][b], 2) driving distance between the two teams, and 3) time zone distance between the two teams. The logic for using home market size is obvious. The idea behind using distance is that the farther apart the two teams, the greater ratings might be because the broader the appeal of the game (i.e. maybe people in L.A. don't care about Seattle, but if Seattle is playing some East Coast team, well that's different, and ratings would be better; vs. if the championship were between San Diego and Los Angeles, maybe people in the Northeast wouldn't care, and ratings would be worse.) I also looked at time zone distance for this same reason.

My outputs were: 1) absolute viewership, and 2) viewership as a percentaqge of national population. Because the average audience can change over time, I also tried looking at each year in comparison to the 11-year moving average that bracketed the year (average calculated from 5 preceding and 5 succeeding years). I then looked at scatter plots of the data.

The answer is that there is no relationship. That is, the television ratings of both the World Series and the NFL are NOT influenced by home market size or distance of the competing markets from each other. So if the A's and the Giants play each other, fine! (Not counting any earthquakes that might be induced thereby.) So it turns out that demography is NOT destiny, at least not in football and baseball ratings. The highest R^2 for a linear trend anywhere in these comparisons was a worthless 0.08; there's no point in showing you some uninformative crappy scatterplots.

Just for grins I also looked at ratings against the Excitement Index calculated for the playoffs since 2001 (were the games snoozefests or edge-of-your-seat games); if there were exciting playoffs, there might be better ratings. Again, no relationship.

It's clear from the graphs below (total viewership over time, then % of US population viewing over time) that even if baseball isn't more sensitive to geography, it has other issues.


[a]In cities which have two teams I ran two versions, one which assumed that everyone in the home market would follow their home team when it's in the championship, and another that assumed only half the sports population would support each team.
[b]It's clear that there are some strange geographic distributions of fans around the country, but for simplicity's sake I just used metro area population to get a number for home market.

Political Geography, if Pangea Had Never Broken Up

More interesting maps here.

If Africa Had Never Been Colonized

Go here for more alternate history; go here for more weird geography.

Altitude and Population Density

Cross-posted to my outdoors blog, MDK10Outside.blogspot.com.

We typically go to mountains to get away from it all, especially other humans. I'd always wanted to investigate the relationship between population density and elevation. Surprise! Such a relationship exists. The higher you go, the lower the density; in fact the relationship is even stronger than exponential. Even more interesting than that is understanding why. But first: figure below is from Cohen and Small 1998:


Note the bump at 2,300 m and again at 4,000+. 2,300 is mostly people on the Mexican Plateau, and 4,000 is Tibet + the Andes.

I plugged in data just for ~250 cities in the state of Utah, and got a worse R^2 than I saw for Cohen and Small's data (0.25 vs >0.9 for theirs), but this isnt' that granular; when I tried to do the same thing using mean elevations and population densities for the 50 states it was a mess. I think it would work a lot better at the county level.



So why is this? You might be tempted to speculate that it has to do with the limits of human physiology. That is to say, the higher you go, the more uncomfortable people are (thin air, cold) and the less adaptable, right? It's hard to imagine (for example) that Las Vegas at 665 meters would be a more comfortable place at a lower elevation. And physiologically, as it turns out, in the second half of the twentieth century medical anthropologists studied people in Tibet and the Andes extensively for their physiological adaptations to altitude - the underlying mutations for which have now been characterized (and in the Tibetan case have all occurred in the last 3,000 years!). But the idea that a few hundred meters of elevation will start impacting physiology and population growth falls apart both in terms of common sense and as a direct implication of other work. Any decrease in fertility caused by altitude would cut right at population growth - but this turns out not to be a big concern even for Himalayans living much higher.

You could also argue that the world's large cities tend to be seaports, which are at low elevation, so it's ease of transportation that gives us this bias toward lower elevations; but this is more true for New World that got settled by the sea than the Old World that got settled by land, and people must be pretty lazy if what's keeping them at sea level is their ancestors having gotten off a boat there a few centuries ago.


Terrace farming in the Himalayas.
I bet they would rather just have flat fields.

Beyond some historical accidents, the answer is likely to be mostly "agriculture". The overall population distribution we see in the world today basically reflects how early people in a certain part of the world adopted agriculture and how effective it was, given the crop and the climate, and escaped the Malthusian cycle; hence the highest densities being in a band running from east, southeast, and south Asia. The Middle East started early and although the marginal environment was also a driver for state formation, it was still marginal, and the Fertile Crescent just can't compete with the Ganges or the Pearl River. (So it can be accurately said that on average, humans are Asian; hence this map). So the relationship between elevation and population is really about where agriculture is better, and it's better at lower elevations for many reasons. Otherwise it's hard to understand the Mexican bump at 2300 meters, where (guess what) agriculture was first invented in the New World.

So, if someone ever thinks of a way to do agriculture as easily in the mountains as on flat lands, the days of undeveloped remote mountains are over.

REFERENCES

Cohen JE and Small C. Hypsographic demography: The distribution of human population by altitude. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 95, pp. 14009–14014, November 1998.

Goldstein MC, Tsarong P, Beall CM. High Altitude Hypoxia, Culture, and Human Fecundity/Fertility: A Comparative Study. American Anthropologist 85(1), March 1983.

"Small Government" Conservatives Forget States Rights When Marijuana is Legalized

Ted Cruz and social-conservative (read "fake") libertarians want to use government to force people to follow their moral code. Most of the time they think the state government is the way to encourage freedom, when (curiously) state governments are limiting freedom - of abortion, of religion, you name it. But when the state governments don't do what they want, well then, the Federal government is a-okay!

Losing to Specialists, and Competing for Attention

Economist Tim Harford has a short and pithy post, comparing some aspects of the modern consumer's experience to being in a casino. Specifically, he notes that the complex agreements that we have with (for example) cloud-connected devices are often so confusing as to be maze-like - exactly like a casino's interior, so you're less likely to act on your impulse to leave. (If you've ever stopped at a casino just to use the bathroom and spent five bewildered minutes wandering in the interior, you know what I mean.) It's been noted previously that in a complex modern economy, specialization is required - and since the consumer doesn't have the same level of understanding of their (real estate transaction, mobile device, etc.) as the specialist, there is an information asymmetry that damages modern market's efficiency.

In the same post Harford also notes the competition for attention that is increasingly part of our economy, most obviously online.

How to Become Dominant During the Twentieth Century

Reproduced from the Economist, originally from Thomas Picketty's Capital in the Twenty-first Century

It is difficult to overstate the geopolitical impact of the destruction of European capital during the World Wars. Note that the graph here is capital as a share of national income. The European countries represented are now back to pre-war levels, and higher than the U.S., but it's the rate of capital loss (and the implied shock) that is most salient.

As with most things, America's narrative of its own success is more complicated than boosters or detractors would claim. One factor that absolutely helped the U.S. surpass its competition was that it is on a separate continent than its competition, so when wars broke out, they flattened each other twice in less than half a century, leaving the U.S. mainland unscathed. (Even Australia came in for worse treatment in the Second World War with repeated Japanese bombing runs on the mainland.) Probably because this was mostly the result of geopolitical good luck rather than any decisions America's leadership made, or America's cultural values or institutions, this part of the narrative is grossly under-emphasized.

Dunbar's Number and Startup Companies, Part 2

More on the Dunbar number transition in startups from Ribbonfarm.

Many people have noted and describe the culture shift that occurs at startup companies - curiously, usually at a headcount right around Dunbar's number. Of course, differences occur over the causes.

One explanation from personal experience as a consultant at multiple companies (full post here) is that the influx during this growth phase consists mostly of people who are middle- or lower-tier contributors, whose strategy is primarily that of seeking a stable institution and burrowing in. This is a rational strategy for these folks, because as the company grows, the individual's contribution (especially the lower-level, later hires) is less important to the company's health and therefore feeds back less to the individual's fortune. There's no reason to knock yourself out, if you know it won't make much difference to your future well-being, and you don't have confidence in your talents anyway.

(When aggressive young managers talk to these people, it sometimes feels like you're playing two different games on the same field. Manager is rewarded by scoring. S/he wants to perform, and wants others to perform, so risk-taking and occasional annoying of others with non-company-aligned-goals is worth it. Late-comer wants to keep a low profile and not rock the boat and often seems frankly confused at any suggestion that they should take a risk to accomplish something, but of course s/he can't say this out loud. Or sometimes, they actually do. I once had an employee, a recent college grad, who looked at me with surprise at the start of such a meeting and said, "This isn't me, this job isn't what I really do." I was grateful for this honesty because it saved time. Not in the way that I think this employee was expecting.)

Netflix has a set of slides that's been making the rounds in the Valley recently, with a different (though not necessarily conflicting) explanation. This explains the dilution of high performers as an efflux of talent (driven out by bureaucratic process sclerosis) rather than the influx of low performers. This certainly occurs as well though in my experience, it's a much slower process, as people tend to stay at a company they believe in with colleagues they enjoy even as administrative annoyances accumulate.

Culture from Reed Hastings

I also think that they're being too kind about the motivations behind the proliferation of bureaucratic rules, which they ascribe to well-meaning management trying to control the chaos at a company that's become too large and complex to run informally. I think there's a lot more conscious justifying-of-one's-own-existence processes that new administrators put in place, although I concede this is easier to do and probably happens more in my regulation-heavy world of biotechnology than in the tech world that the Netflix people know.

If Every U.S. State That Tried to Secede From Another State Became a State

It would look like this. I'm now living in Reagan (I might actually be if the current petition to divide California succeeds). As for the place of my birth, it didn't change names although the lower three counties succeeded in seceding and are now called Delaware. Jerks. (Full on alternate history here; cool alternate geography here, here or here.)