Saturday, July 18, 2009

Ya Don't Say?

NYTimes:
Even as Democratic leaders and the White House insisted that the nation was closer than ever to landmark changes in the health care system, they faced basic questions about whether some of their proposals might do more harm than good.


And yet they proceed...

One can only hope, and it's a small hope, that the conference to merge the senate and house bills improves the damn thing. However, it's just as likely to make it even more of a monstrosity.

Friday, July 17, 2009

FLG's Two-Cents On Objective Truth

FLG mentioned earlier how he was interested in the dispute over at A&J about objective truth and rhetoric, and felt compelled to add his two cents.

FLG described why he's a conservative in one of his first posts. It begins with the assertion that the totality of human knowledge was discovered via the principle of cause and effect:
Science, despite terminology such as double blind study, is simply a rigorous method for isolating and perfectly correlating a cause A with an effect B. If we assume that A is the only possible cause and it results in effect B every time, then we say we have proved it. An important point, which I will return to later, is that A causes B through an unknown mechanism. Proving that A causes B never reveals this mechanism.

Wait, you say, I know one or many mechanisms for causes and effects. No, you don't. Let's use an arrow to represent the unknown mechanism. Therefore, A causes B would be A->B. I guarantee that any explanation that you can come up with for a mechanism is actually: A->C->B

Now, you are referencing two causes and effects. A->C and C->B. You have introduced two unknown mechanisms. I don't believe that this is a function of how I defined cause and effect, but rather a result of how the human mind works.

Before science, the determination of cause and effect was unsystematic, but it still yielded positive results. Humans controlled fire, invented agriculture, built roads, designed boats, etc. But this cause and effect goes beyond technology.


FLG believes there is objective truth and fact. However, he questions humanity's ability to know it. Much like a fractal, the closer we examine it, the more complex it gets. Yes, we can know things. There can be facts. But these facts are useless devoid of context. This context involves rhetoric. Science pursues facts and knowledge, but since it cannot move forward without context it necessarily must be a form of rhetoric or use rhetoric.

That said, I disagree with Withywindle's contention that because we can never know any and all of objective truth that we are left solely with rhetoric and by extension love. FLG guesses you can say he sees both sides, but believes that science is the best method for pursing the objective truth of material reality.

Fiscal Multipliers

In economics, multipliers are basically the idea that when I buy something the person from whom I buy then uses that money to buy something from somebody else, and so forth until the effect of the initial purchase by me has been diminished. Kinda think of it like a rock thrown into a pond. The number and size of the ripples is like the multiplier.

Anyway, Paul Krugman is taking a very technical look at the multipliers from government stimulus using some rather inaccessible language. I think this is due in part because the models don't really support his policy preferences, but much of this boils down to whether people factor in higher taxes in the future to pay for current government spending. He writes:

Bear in mind that all these models assume perfectly rational, perfectly informed consumers engaged in optimal forward-lookin behavior. Economists are in vast disagreement about the right model to use — but consumers are assumed to know the true model, and base their spending decisions on that knowledge. Um, I think we have a problem here.

And for what it’s worth, my sense is that the empirical literature on consumption behavior casts doubt on the underlying model of long-run intertemporal maximization: consumer spending is much more responsive to short-term fluctuations in income than it “should” be. If so, a bigger multiplier would be appropriate.
What I really think is that consumers rely on rough rules of thumb, which leads in the short run to something much more like a Keynesian consumption function than is currently fashionable to admit.


He's basically saying that people don't factor in higher future taxes that will be used to pay for higher current spending, and that therefore people won't change their behavior all that much in response, and therefore government stimulus is like super-duper awesome.

Chainsaws

Telegraph:
An American, Dustin Britton, used a chainsaw to fight off an attack by a mountain lion while he was camping with his family in Wyoming.


Who's laughing now?

Assumptions

This paragraph in a City Journal review of Kenan Malik's book, From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy concerns FLG:
The merit of Malik’s book is that it seeks the answer in modern conditions. Even in Islamic countries, fundamentalists are not medieval throwbacks, however they may see themselves. They derive their ideas, even if they do not acknowledge it, at least as much from Lenin, Gramsci, and Mao as from Mohammed. They claim to want to return to seventh-century Arabia, but this is no more realistic or sincere than the wish of Victorian admirers of the Gothic to return to the Middle Ages.


It's not the paragraph, but the sentiment. Yes, we can and should bring modern social and political science to the task of understanding Islamic fundamentalism. However, the social, economic, and political conditions are so different in Britain from those in Saudi Arabia from those in Afghanistan that FLG's convinced there is something inherent to Islamic theology. In fact, this passage from Maududi's Political Theory in Islam immediately sprung to mind:
With certain people it has become a sort of fashion to somehow identify Islam with one or the other system of life in vogue at the time. So at this time also there are people who say that Islam is a democracy, and by this they mean to imply that there is no difference between Islam and the democracy as in vogue in the West. Some others suggests that Communism is but the latest and revised version of Islam and it is in the fitness of things that Muslims imitate the Communist experiment in Soviet Russia. Still others whisper that Islam has elements of dictatorship in it and we should revive the cult of "obedience to the Amir" (the leader). All these people, in their misinformed and misguided zeal to serve what they hold to be the cause of Islam, are always at great pains to prove Islam contains within itself the elements of all types of contemporary social and political thought and action. Most of the people who indulge in this prattle have no clear idea of the Islamic way of life.


FLG doesn't have all the answers, or even any answer. His point is only that many in the West who are trying to understand Islamic terrorism through social and political science are making assumptions of which they may be unaware and that result in an unrecognized myopia in examining the problem.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Taylor The Impaler

Yahoo:
In an unusual defense against war crimes charges, former Liberian President Charles Taylor told judges Thursday that he saw nothing wrong with displaying the skulls of slain enemy soldiers at roadblocks.


Evil fucker.

The Modern Food Movement Needs To Learn About Kosher Foods

Phoebe rightfully tees off on some asshat who thinks eating raw pork is a good idea:
First, we need to get past the notion that food-borne illness is unique to modern times and to processed foods, industrial agriculture, etc. People have been saying, 'Must've been something I ate' since the dawn of time.


It's FLG's long-standing contention that kosher food laws were the result of people living in a fucking desert without refrigeration and knowledge of microbes determining what foods got people sick. Shit. Even thousands of years ago people knew raw pork was a bad idea.

In Case You Didn't Know: Tyre

FLG was shocked to discover one of his co-workers, who also happens to be a Georgetown alumnus, was unfamiliar with Alexander's Siege of Tyre. Now, FLG realizes he knows a tinsy bit more about Alexander than most people, but come on, isn't this common knowledge?

The City of Tyre was an island that had never before been captured. It was, and still is, located at a strategic point on the Eastern Mediterranean coast. Alexander asked them nicely to surrender. They refused. So, he built a mole out to the island, huge towers to protect the moles while under construction, and coordinated his naval forces to arrive on the other side when the mole was completed. He captured the city, destroyed much of it, and sold its inhabitants into slavery. Harsh by modern standards, but nevertheless an impressive feat by any standard.

'Nawlins

FLG has a serious hankerin' for some beignets and cafe au laits,


hand grenades to go,


gumbo,


a muffaletta,


a hurricane,


and jazz.


And there's never a bad time for Elvis:

FLG is currently listening to

Quote of the day II

George Pal writes in response to the first Quote of the day today:
Like “friendly brunette” isn’t a siren alarm! Everyone knows it’s dumb blondes who are friendly and red heads crazy. Safest bet is a sun streaked auburn haired dame that’ll buy the drinks at a bar.

Fuck Your Social Networking

FLG finds the love affair with social networking fucking annoying. You wanna do social networking, then fine. But please, for fuck's sake, stop adding social networking features to otherwise fine applications. Case in point Google Reader. This showed up today:


FLG doesn't want it and didn't ask for it. You geeks out there in Silicon Valley can circle-jerk yourselves silly with your social networking, but stop fucking everybody else's shit up.

Looks like FLG isn't alone. Some new threads in the Google Reader help include:
  • Turn off the "like count"
  • Hide the "x people liked this"?
  • Please remove this facebook-copying 'like' button!
  • I love Google Reader but how in the world do I turn off the Like feature? I didn't ask for it and neither can I find a way to opt out of it. HELP, it's annoying the living daylights out of me!


Let FLG read his news and blogs in isolated peace. Thank you.

Odd French Thinking

The Indian Prime Minister was in Paris for Bastille Day, and an Op-Ed in Le Monde argues that France should play the India card to prevent the emergence of a bipolar Sino-American world.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this idea.

Objective Truth

There's a spellbinding, at least to FLG, discussion going on in the comments over at A&J. Basic gist -- Withywindle questions our ability as individual human beings to know objective truth because we must rely upon other human beings to obtain knowledge. Therefore, all knowledge is hopelessly entwined with rhetoric. Therefore, we must rely upon love. Alpheus and Arethusa strenuously object.

Quote of the day

MosNews:
Waking up in hospital with clonidine poisoning and penis trauma, all the victims could remember was a friendly brunette who gave them drinks.

Demography Is Destiny?

FLG found this paper, entitled The Cost of Low Fertility in Europe, by David Bloom and his co-authors David Canning, Günther Fink, and Jocelyn Finlay fascinating:
In this paper we have explored the effect of fertility on income per capita in the short and long run. In the short run, a decline in the fertility rate unambiguously increases income per capita as youth dependency falls and the working-age share increases. As we have shown in the theoretical framework presented in section 2 of this paper, the relationship between fertility and age structure in steady-state is more complex in the long run. Although it is true that very high fertility levels have a negative effect on output per capita through low working-age shares, the positive effects of lowering fertility only exist up to the rate at which working-age share is maximized; any fertility decline below this maximizing rate lowers the working-age share in equilibrium and may induce a reduction in output per capita. In high-fertility countries such as Zambia, the message is clear: lower fertility will increase income per capita. For low-fertility European countries, the implications of fertility decline are more complex: lower fertility will increase income per capita in the short run, but decrease it in the long run. This poses a policy conundrum for European policymakers.


Translation to layman's terms:
In this paper we have explored the effect of fertility on income per capita in the short and long run. In the short run, less babies definitely increases income per capita because fewer children means a greater percentage of the total population is working. As we've shown in this paper (look how smart we are), over the long run the issue is more complex. While it's true that in countries where a smaller percentage of the population is working more babies do lower economic output per worker, having less babies makes things better only up to a point. In countries where people screw like rabbits without contraception, like Zambia, less babies will improve economic circumstances. But in European countries, where nobody is having babies, things look better in the short-run, but produce a world of hurt in the long-run.

H/T

Dear Matthew Yglesias:

In a recent post, you write:
Unfortunately, conservative economists and conservative politicians have been extremely effective at making the American political system extraordinarily tax averse.


Perhaps they didn't teach you this at Dalton or Harvard, but the American Revolution began over tax issues. It's not some mysterious and nefarious plot by conservatives to dupe Americans into tax aversion, but rather a fundamental part of the American collective psyche. It's a problem that American progressives will always have to contend with in their evil attempts to drive the country off a cliff misguided attempts to tinker with economic outcomes.

Sincerely,
FLG

Blair For President

Le Monde:
Londres soutient Tony Blair pour le poste de président de l'UE


London supports Tony Blair for the position of president of the EU


Hague knew the story over a year ago:


UPDATE from Charlemagne:
No, Tony Blair has not launched an EU presidential bid...I am told that senior British officials believed, to quote one source, that Lady Kinnock "fucked up" in the way she phrased this, and that makes sense to me.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

FLG is currently listening to

Bread and Doughnuts

The FLGs watched a new episode of Anthony Bourdain where he was in Chile. Mrs. FLG wants to go there now. Two of FLG's favorite clips are below. The doughnut freaks in Portland and, man, do the French know how to bake:




Protestant Self-Identification

As a self-professed heretic, FLG found this question over at Ferule & Fescue interesting:
This here's a question for my Renaissance peeps (and scholars of religion and lit or religious history more generally):

How common is the term "Protestant," when applied to the people we now call Protestants, by the people we now call Protestants?

My sense has been that "Christian" (or something similarly broad and/or vague, like "our church") is usually preferred, and that "Protestant" is more often used by Catholic polemicists than by actual Protestants--but that's just my sense, and although there's been a lot of scholarship challenging "Anglican" and "Puritan" as meaningful descriptive labels, I can't remember reading anything similar about "Protestant."


Discussions like this always bring FLG back to thinking about the ways in which the differing definitions of a witch and differing concerns about witchcraft appeared within each tradition:
Witchcraft was used as an effective tool to protect society. The Protestants used witchcraft as a way to reinforce fear of Catholicism and encourage strong families. Catholics used witchcraft as a way to demonize and eliminate Protestants.


Not that this has anything at all to do with Flavia's question.

Update: I added to the quotation for clarity's sake.

Defense News Round-Up

FLG doesn't quite know what to make of this post, reprinted here in its entirety:
July 15, 2009: American and European efforts to get peace negotiations going between the Palestinians and Israel, seem to be ignoring what Palestinian officials say in Arab language media. TV interviews are the most compelling examples of this. When Fatah officials are asked about these negotiations, some of them are quite frank. Just as maps of the area, used in schools and the media, show no Israel, only Palestine, the officials explain that the peace negotiations are just a means towards an end. For Fatah, as well as the more outspoken (in English) Hamas, the ultimate goal is the destruction of Israel. Any peace deal is considered as a pause, so that the Arabs can build up their strength for the final battle.

In the West, more people, especially in Europe, are agreeing with the Palestinians. Officially, though, Western leaders believe that a peace deal will eventually change the minds of Palestinians.


Couldn't they have at least included a specific quote or something to back up this position?

al-Qaeda in the Maghreb is threatening revenge for the killing of Uighurs.

North Korean beer commercials are fucking weird.

Danger Room examines why US Cybersecurity sucks and blames it on bullshit, ineptitude, and complexity.

Apparently, it's harder for the CIA to put together hit squads than previously thought.

Global Labor Force

Jim Manzi writes:
As globalization continues inexorably (in practical terms, this has very little to do with McDonald’s in France, and almost everything to do with the economic rise of Asia), U.S. income inequality is a demonstration that many – probably most – Americans don’t have the capabilities required to maintain anything like their current standard of living in competition with a global labor force. Does Will think this is accurate, and if so, is it a problem?


As many of you know, FLG is always wary when somebody brings up "to compete in the global economy." This is a bit too close for FLG's comfort.

However, there is such a thing as the Factor Price Equalization Theorem. Here's part of the wikipedia entry:

Factor price equalization is an economic theory, which states that the relative prices for two identical factors of production in the same market will eventually equal each other because of competition. The price for each single factor need not become equal, but relative factors will. Whichever factor receives the lowest price before two countries integrate economically and effectively become one market will therefore tend to become more expensive relative to other factors in the economy, while those with the highest price will tend to become cheaper.

An often-cited example of factor price equalization is wages. When two countries enter a free trade agreement, wages for identical jobs in both countries tend to approach each other. After the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed, for instance, unskilled labor wages gradually fell in the United States, at the same time as they gradually rose in Mexico. The same force has applied more recently to the various countries of the European Union.

The result was first proven mathematically as an outcome of the Heckscher-Ohlin model assumptions.



The important thing to note is that American labor is not identical to Mexican labor or Chinese labor or whatever for a variety of reasons, including the amount of infrastructure, capital (both physical and human), network effects, etc. It's a question of productivity determining income. The average American worker is more in competition with other American workers than workers in any other country. And if they are in competition with workers from other countries, then it's France, Britain, and Germany. And the rest of the global labor force, the cheap, but less productive portion, also makes available cheap goods at WalMart.

Regardless, we need to leave aside this competing in a global economy stuff, and just focus on what is economically beneficial for the United States of America. Absolute, not relative welfare.

Eyes Wide Sins

Telegraph:
The whole group were dressed in these great costumes and it looked exactly like something out of Eyes Wide Shut.

"But then one of the organisers announced: 'The moment has come. The spell has begun' and everyone began kissing and having sex.

He immediately sent two 19-year-old waitresses home and the party continued unabated until the bar closed at 3am and the guests retired to their rooms.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

More On Three Year Degrees

Arethusa was nice enough to include links to some articles about three year degrees in the comments section. This point is questionable methinks:
The problem with the other proposal—awarding a degree for only three years of learning — is that three is 25 percent less than four, and so three-year degrees will be worth 25 percent less than four-year degrees in the job market, and so people won’t want them.* The question of transition to graduate and professional school also goes on the table.


I'm not so sure the job market will really care. Majors usually occur during the last two years of undergraduate education and typically require one the equivalent of one full year of course hours.

What I'm talking about here is basically cutting out sophomore year. Students still take English 101, a history course, a philosophy course, etc. I'm proposing precisely the elimination of courses unrelated to the student's proposed career. If they only take American History until 1865 and not the follow up course will potential employers really care? I don't think so.

Even More On Meritocracy

Withywindle writes:
FLG: When you say "emotional deformation," you make it sound odd,
inhuman, deranged, needing explanation. But the meritocrat is only one
version of the ambitious man. It may be an unpleasant personality, but
it's a quite normal one. Indeed, the whole Madisonian project, checks
and balances, assumes that ambition is normal, just in need of proper
channeling. It's not just that the meritocrat is ambitious, but the
sort of ambition, or the lack of countervailing education in virtue,
that's a problem.


Okay. So, as I understand it the issue is simply ambition wrongly understood. I guess I could buy into that if we consider that raw ambition used to be considered something vulgar and yet today it is not only accepted but often encouraged in our youth.

But I'm talking about more than just ambition. There's the whole love versus hate as motivation. I'd argue that plain old greed (the love of money) and ambition (the love of power and status) are what Madison was harnessing. However, I'm arguing that today's meritocrat is motivated not by love of anything, but the exact opposite -- hate.

Maybe it's just semantics or I'm framing it in a way that creates a distinction with no difference, but it's that anger, hatred, and lack of love that motivates the meritocrat. An emotional deformation that is both the cause of and reinforced by a fundamentally disordered soul.

I'd also add that motivations based on hate are more detrimental to the soul than ones based on love. So, revenge far worse than greed. But that's a whole 'nother line of argument.

Higher Ed Policy

This video from Reason goes too far for FLG's taste:


Part of the problem is that FLG thinks Charles Murray goes too far, but FLG's written about that before and believes a 3-year degree is part of the solution. But there are two other problems here.

First, too many people look at education the way they look or looked at home ownership. Namely, that it's an unmitigated good that both promotes good citizenship and economic growth. There's feedback, but this gets the homeownership causality wrong. Responsible, good citizens buy home. Giving somebody a home doesn't make them responsible. Giving somebody a hand who has been saving to get a down payment together can be helpful, but at some point the law of diminishing returns kicks in and the policies are, as we've seen, putting people in homes who didn't save a dime.

Likewise, history has shown that college graduates are more likely to be economically successful and good citizens. Therefore, the logic goes more education means more good citizens and economic growth. FLG won't dispute that education as the ability to mold mind and character. A good education can produce a good citizen. But we cannot entirely isolate education alone.

Second problem is that college graduates, especially before WWII but even today, are smarter than the average population. Furthermore, they have connections and other social capital. Put simply -- a smart kid born in New Canaan, Connecticut would probably be successful with or without a college degree.

The point here is that each of us is born with an endowment of both natural intellectual talent and social capital and connections given to us by our parents. In the intellectual part, assuming at least some of it is innate, then we can't really do anything about it. The social capital can be compensated through certain policies, and FLG'd argue that's why Dale and Krueger found the greatest benefits in attending elite universities went to those from disadvantaged backgrounds:

Finally, we find that the returns to school characteristics such as average SAT score or tuition are greatest for students from more disadvantaged backgrounds. School admissions and financial aid policies that have as a goal attracting qualified students from more disadvantaged family backgrounds may raise national income, as these students appear to benefit most from attending a more elite
college.


So, yes. FLG agrees that sending some smart, poor kid from the backwoods of Mississippi to Harvard will help even out the playing field and increase economic overall economic output. Especially if they take the spot of some bumble-headed legacy. That student will build personal connections to the wealthy and powerful, and future wealthy and powerful, that would otherwise be closed to them. But FLG is far less sanguine about the returns, both economic and non-economic, of cramming some kid of mediocre intelligence into a 500 person lecture hall history class at SW Mississippi State A&M Tech in which they have no interest.

As FLG has argued before the secret of America's economic success is liberal arts. So, he doesn't want to shift people into narrowly vocational two-year programs for the sake of easily quantifiable cost-benefit analysis. The benefits of liberal arts both to the individual and to society will never be fully encapsulated in any cost benefit measure. Nevertheless, I think two years of liberal arts is one too many for the vast majority of students.

The extra year is expensive, and most students, wrongly but understandably, look as college as a means to a job. A ticket punch. Hopefully, it clicks with some that education should be more than narrowly vocational, but for many it won't. Let's not waste their time and money.

To conclude this rambling post, the BA isn't something intended for mass consumption. Furthermore, the supposed economic and citizenship benefits are overstated. We need to keep the rigorous liberal arts BA in place for those that can hack it intellectually. And instead of dumbing down the existing BA for everybody we need to create a more cost effective and vocational degree for those that aren't BA material while keeping some liberal arts in place.

A four year, liberal arts BA isn't for everybody and we've well exceeded the number of people pursuing them who should be. Let's leave four year BAs to the more elite private schools and flagship state universities. Others should save money and time by pursuing a three year BA-lite. The trouble is how to transition without stamping poor or stupid man's BA on the BA-lite. Perhaps it's unavoidable.

More On Meritocracy

Conor Friedersdorf:
What strikes me, all these years later, about my lousy but better-than-average high school education is how useful it proved in preparing me for college and the job market. Absent exceptional teachers, an academically competitive high school basically teaches the young how to game the system lots of people call the American meritocracy. It is difficult to describe this skill set precisely, though it certainly includes things like earning good grades in classes you know little if anything about, learning to game standardized tests and exams, employing writerly tricks to obscure the fact that you know nothing of substance about the topic of your five page paper, and understanding which teachers aren't desirous of substance insomuch as they want an ability to fake it on pages where the margins and font are diligently set to their specifications.


It's that superficiality combined with objective factors like margin specification that are a huge part of the problem.

Le jour de la prise de la Bastille

The Meritocrat's Disordered Soul

Robert Stacy McCain wrote a provocative piece on meritocracy the other day and this part interested me:
Not every kid who scores well on standardized tests decides to orient his life toward graduating at the top of his high school class and attending an elite university. Those who elect to follow that treadmill of "gifted" programs and honors classes, who grind for an all-A average and organize their extra-curricular activities with an eye toward how it will look on their applications to Harvard, can be said to differ from other children (including children of equal or greater intelligence) in terms of temperament.


It was primarily the temperament issue that piqued my interest. What is it about the temperament?

McCain continues:
Our public education system, after all, is not operated by geniuses. As The Bell Curve points out, education majors are, on average, the stupidest category of college graduates.

An education system dominated by such mental mediocrities inevitably tends to reward the compliant, the obedient, the natural-born conformists with an appetite for regimentation. A few years spent covering the education beat, combined with my own experiences as a public-school student, convinced me that many of our brightest students are essentially "lost" by the system because of this factor.


That last part is my primary issue with investment bankers. They're prodders. The students most draw to it are the obedient, conformist, and regimented. There's a reason why many military officers get MBAs after completing their service. Ask any West Pointer or Naval Academy graduate who isn't interested in a military career what they'll do after their tour, and it is almost invariably get an MBA and get into investment banking. I'm getting off-topic though...

Withywindle then brought education and the passions into the discussion of the meritocracy:
This all tangentially related to Robert Stacy McCain's post a few days ago on meritocracy, where he talks about the obnoxious temperament of the meritocrats. (And by-the-by raises as a corollary the idea that meritocracy would be far more tolerable if the meritocrats were less full of themselves.) "Temperament," I think, is another way of talking about character and passions. One critique of the meritocrats is that they are not judged by the education of their passions - all facts, no virtue. Another would be that they have the wrong passions knocked into them - a passion for "social justice" and the like, which seems to be an updated version of Lady Bountiful self-importance, but at least has the saving grace of being a passion, and one that aims to be unselfish. Anyway, I think you can fold in the meritocracy debate into the education of the passions debate.


I'd like to argue that the obnoxiousness of meritocrats is unavoidable as it is part of the deformation of the meritocrat's soul.

In June, the Atlantic ran a story about a Harvard study that has been following more than 200 Harvard men since the 1930s. It's a great piece, and you should read the whole thing, but I'd like to focus on the accompanying video. At about the three minute mark is when it starts to get good. I've transcribed the important parts below.



You can put yourself in positions where positive emotions are likely. You can pick up gardening. What you are trying to do is make the poor little plants grow, not win prizes at the horticulture show. As soon as gardening becomes doing it for me, then you get third prize and the best garden club in town doesn’t invite you and your life sucks.

Something to prove

Probably most of the famous men were striving for a reason. They were trying to prove something. A dramatic example of someone who wasn’t in the study was Eugene O’Neill. His head master thought that he would end up in the electric chair. Yet when all was said and done he won a Nobel Prize. The people where everything went right needed less to be artists, needed less to be business tycoons. They weren’t going to be President of the United States, but they were going to be good at what they did.


Meritocracy needs objective measures of success and, well, merit. So, you need to have gardening shows. But you also, and more importantly by necessity, start to keep score using bank account sizes and prestige of position. Getting into Harvard is better than getting into Yale is better than getting in Princeton is better than getting into Stanford is better than...and so forth. Likewise, it's better to be mayor than a nobody. It's better to be governor than mayor. Better to be senator than representative. Best to be president. Of course they're obnoxious because they are motivated specifically by being better than other people at things. Their entire self-hood is defined by that outlook.

This distorts the soul. All the important things in life, the ones that bring true happiness, cannot truly be measured. Cannot be compared. For example, nobody can measure how much I love my wife and daughter or how much they love me in return.

Yet, that's not particularly relevant to a meritocrat because they can't prove the love in their marriage is better, more pure, or stronger. Sure, they can create the outward, superficial appearance of a perfect relationship if they feel that will prove something to other people, but that isn't what's actually important.

And that brings me to the second point made in the video above. That the most successful people have something to prove. Either a parent died or left or somebody ridiculed them or whatever. As David Brooks wrote today, "It is amazing how many people who suffer parental loss between the ages of 9 and 13 go on to become astounding high achievers." If you really boil down the motivation here it's what? Anger. Hate.

Speaking of David Brooks, what got lost in his discussion of the Republican Senator thigh touching was his analysis of politicians:
They're all emotional freaks of one sort or another...a lot them have spent so much time needing people's love, and yet they're shooting upwards their whole life. They're not that great in normal human relationships...they're lonely.


And there you have it. Emotionally broken people driven to prove something to somebody else or everybody else using a system of objective, superficial criteria that can never provide true happiness because that's not at the end of some table of figures or a prestigious resume. And the scary thing is that the people most successful in the system are often the most broken. It originates often some seminal event(s) in their life, usually parental influence, and the system only exacerbates it by further warping their soul.

Now, I have no better idea than meritocracy. Perhaps, like representative democracy, it's the best choice from a set of bad choices. Furthermore, one could make the argument that the drive inherent in these disordered souls creates personal pain for them, but benefits for society in the form of their hard work. Perhaps. But we need to be cognizant of the nature of the disorder within the souls of those who rise to the top of the meritocracy.

State The Obvious And Become An Investment Banking Genius

Are investment bankers are other people in finance really this stupid?

The 15-year-old became a surprise hit at the financial services provider after writing a research paper on the way teenagers view media such as the internet, mobile phones and Twitter.

He was on an internship when he was asked to write about how his friends used the internet, mobile phones and games consoles.

Matthew said he was now considering a career in investment banking.


After talking with friends in finance FLG is becoming increasingly skeptical of anything even close to "talent" existing in investment banking. Oh, sure, the are rainmakers with loads of contacts, but is that talent exactly? Otherwise, it seems that they recruit rather mundane people with prestigious education to do mind-numbing number crunching and then pat themselves on the back for making loads of money despite themselves. No wonder Matt wants to be an investment banker...

Now, FLG's been a bit harsh here. There are certainly talented people in finance. Very, very smart people making very, very smart decisions. However, and this is what bothers FLG, there also seems to be a very large compliment of people who are of mediocre talent getting out-sized rewards. FLG is not begrudging them for their money. It's just that we need something better than the current system of circle-jerking and glad-handing.

The thing that gets FLG most is that the people most set on investment banking as a career were largely the most uncreative and off-puttingly striving people in his classes. A collection of such people in one place cannot be good. There's probably nothing that can be done about the inherent selection bias of a career that exchanges huge time demands for huge amounts of money attracting people what concern FLG, but there it is.

Anyway, way to go Matt. Type up the obvious. Or simply make shit up. Get hired. Get praised. Think you're master of the universe, but show false modesty. You're right. You did learn banking in two weeks.

The Most Precious Commmidity

Anytime somebody really rich gets asked what they wish they had more of the answer is almost always the same -- time. It is the ultimate limited resource for us mortals.

Taken in this context Greg Mankiw's analysis, though he is far from the only one, always made sense to me:
The reason that we spend more [on healthcare] than our grandparents did is not waste, fraud and abuse, but advances in medical technology and growth in incomes. Science has consistently found new ways to extend and improve our lives. Wonderful as they are, they do not come cheap. Fortunately, our incomes are growing, and it makes sense to spend this growing prosperity on better health


Whether it is for our pets, our family, or ourselves medical care is fundamentally about buying more healthy, productive, and fruitful time. And since time will always be extremely scarce it is no surprise that we always want more of it.

Monday, July 13, 2009

External Economies Of Scale

One aspect of economics that FLG wishes people, and even himself, better understood is external economies of scale. Most people understand that a big corporation can usually produce and distribute goods more cheaply than a small firm. No big surprise. That's called internal economies of scale. But external economies of scale are more interesting.

FLG's favorite explanation is Hollywood. There are lots of different companies geared around the production of movies in LA. There are production companies, editing companies, lighting companies, camera rental companies, film marketing consultants, etc, etc. The existence of these various services make the production of movies easier in LA than in other places.

This makes it difficult for other cities to compete with LA in movie-making. Others have tried (Orlando, Chicago, NYC) to mixed effect, but ultimately the infrastructure is in place in LA. What makes this interesting to FLG are the consequences for international trade.

Certain places make certain things. Sometimes this is because the climate is conducive. See France and wine. Sometimes the location is conducive. See Hong Kong and Singapore and shipping. Sometimes it's simply for historical reasons that few people even remember. See London and finance, Silicon Valley and tech, or Switzerland and watches. That last one, historical reasons, is often due to external economies of scale.

London attracts the skilled labor and has the other resources available that make finance possible. Switzerland probably has the skilled watchmakers and companies that excel in fashioning itsy-bitsy gears.

The problem arises for these incumbents when the efficiencies of their external economies of scale are displaced by the cost savings of cheaper inputs elsewhere. Let's say for example that the copious labor in China can produce watches of equal quality at a lower price. Then Switzerland is fucked.

It's actually not that simple, but rather a complicated function of price and quality. China might be able to seriously erode the Swiss watch market if they made watches only half as good and could sell them at one quarter the price.

Anyway, the dynamics by which external economies of scale form and are displaced fascinate FLG. There are other factors as well. The distribution of technology can also have similar effects, but the external economies of scale are pretty neat nonetheless.

Quote of the day

Greg Mankiw:
Lately, Paul Krugman has been dissing modern macroeconomics, mainly because many macroeconomists do not agree with his conclusions about fiscal policy.


Snarky.

No Ships For You

BBC:
The UK has revoked five export licences for equipment to the Israeli navy because of actions during Israel's Operation Cast Lead in Gaza this year.

The British Foreign office said the exports would now contravene its criteria for arms sales, but denied that it had imposed a partial embargo.

The UK says it does not sell weapons which might be used for internal repression or external aggression.
 
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