OWS's problem: rich people look like the rest of us

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Time was, if you want to caricature a rich person, it was easy:

 

You put him in a top hat and tailcoat, and away you went.  And rich men really did look like this. The image was universal in the early 20th century:

The Soviets particularly loved it.  Monopoly's Rich Uncle Pennybags lacks only the bloated belly.

BTW, don't worry what the banners say.  Part of the Capitalist's banner says "death to workers", which misses the point of exploitation so thoroughly as to be comical.

And let's not forget

Only the top hat is left, but the lust for lucre remains.

So I wasn't surprised to see people dressed as classic plutocrats at various Occupy Wall Street protests. But it's sad.  No one dresses that way anymore. And sometimes you'll see striped pants added to the ensemble, which is just wrong. Striped pants symbolize duplicitous or ineffectual Western diplomats, not plutocrats, for heaven's sake. Get your obsolete stereotypes straight.

But rich people nowadays wear exactly the same banal clothing everyone else does.  Their houses are just grotesquely swollen versions of our houses. They have a lot of cars, but everyone has a pretty nice car. Everyone's teeth are white.

This is one reason OWS has an uphill battle. If you can't mentally picture your enemy, its hard to become angry at them.  If only they would carry bags of money with big dollar signs on them, it would be so much easier.

Does obesity keep us safe?

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Several times on this blog I have wondered why crime rates have fallen, and talked about how little we really do understand about historical causation, even about events that are readily visible, with a lot of data.  The current riots in the UK would qualify as well. Those are on video, are extensively covered and investigated, and no one seems to have any real idea of what is causing those events.

But I have a possible explanation for the larger secular trend in falling crime rates: we are being protected by higher obesity. Or, at least, the two events are not separate, but are somehow related.

What? Of course I haven't actually run the numbers! Do you really want me to take grants from the mouths of deserving graduate students?

But think about these two large, visible, and inexplicable trends.  Crime has steadily dropped over the past two decades. Obesity has just as steadily risen. Coincidence?  I don't think so!

Does a packing a little extra weight make you just that much less likely to go out and commit a physically challenging violent crime? Or, maybe, does the same thing that make you fat make you less violent? This could be sitting around and playing violent video games while eating snack food. You're not out committing real crimes, and you're getting fat. Getting kids out for healthy outdoor exercise might be the worst thing we could do for our own safety.

Is the weight gain among the key crime-committing demographic, young males, correlated with decreased crime?  Come on, grant-seeking grad students. Step up to the plate.

Meanwhile, I will continue to indulge in unrestrained speculation, unhandicapped by having to run nasty regressions on piles of recalcitrant data.

The resurgence of Unspiek, Baron Bodissey

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One of the startling things to come out of the mass murder in Norway is that a source for the killer's manifestos was a blogger who writes under the name of "Baron Bodissey".

This is insider baseball indeed, akin to naming a housing development Undle Square. "Baron Bodissey" provides the epigraphs to various chapters in the works of Jack Vance, most particularly the Demon Princes novels.  The first two of those, The Star King and The Killing Machine, were particular favorites of mine in my youth. Given the Baron's pompous, elephant-picking-up-a-pea style, he seems an odd choice for someone supposedly providing real political commentary.

But, behind his own light and frothy style, Vance often engaged in fictional mass murder and even genocide--the event that starts the long vengeance of Kirth Gersen in the Demon Princes novels is, after all, the Mount Pleasant Massacre. So perhaps this points a way to seeing the way style can direct the uninformed eye away from content.

Like anyone else, the Baron has a Wikipedia page.

Why I've never moved back to Chicago

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I grew up near Chicago. In the suburbs, to be clear, one called LaGrange Park.

I went away to college, and never moved back.  Mary, who grew up near Toledo, sometimes agitates for us to move to Chicago. We both love the city, and could easily move to some hip area like Bucktown. Or, at least, so we would like to think. When I visit my brother Pete, who lives in Evanston, we often spend a day walking through the city, looking at buildings and stopping in at bars. The city of Chicago has some of the best urban structures in the world.

But a city isn't just its urban core.  It's everything around it, the whole vast metro area.  Chicago has one of the vastest metro areas in the country, and, not to put too fine a point on it, it sucks.  According to the linked newgeography article, it is the third largest urban agglomeration in the world, after Tokyo and New York. It is less dense than Los Angeles.

Aside from Lake Michigan to the east, there is nothing to block its growth.  The land is flat and easily dug, and the lake supplies an increasingly rare resource, one that will eventually be the limiting factor in urban development worldwide: fresh water.  The buildings range from undistinguished to ugly and the distribution is almost entire automobile oriented. And--not the fault of development--there really aren't many scenic features. Exactly what made it great farming country makes it uninteresting to look at.

The great thing about the Boston metro area is that you can leave it, and pretty fast.  And the areas around it vary. Going up the rocky North Shore is noticeably different than traveling through the glacial outwash plain to the south, or the hills to the west. Snooty zoning restrictions  in older towns keep me from ever being able to afford a house there, if that was the life I wanted, but provide me with picturesque landscape to bicycle through.

I keep seeing articles about the new urbanism, and people moving back to the urban cores. I have no idea what world they're talking about. What's needed is a New Suburbanism, since that's where almost everyone in the world will eventually live.

So despite the fact that Chicago bars are some of the best in the country, I'm going to remain a visitor. And I think people who live there will be sorry someday about the choices they made without even knowing they were making them.

 

Greece and debt ceilings: the normalization of deviance

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Like most other people, I am watching with bewildered apprehension as our fragile economic recovery faces incredible, if hard-for-me-to-understand challenges. Greece threatens to default on its debts, peeling off its rock face and dragging the linked rock climbers of the Eurozone down into the abyss.  All their chock stones have long since slipped out, and their fingers are getting tired....

The Eurozone was set up by people who told everyone they were really smart. I never got what big advantages the Euro was supposed to bring to people, but I'm not a politician. The system was set up with certain rules about debt and spending that were supposed to make it safe. Then they started violating those rules. Nothing bad happened. So they let things slip a bit more.

Meanwhile, here in the US, everyone is playing chicken with the debt limit.  The S&P 500 doesn't seem to even remotely reflect the terrifying possibilities. It seems routine, just another bit of partisan game playing. Stuff like this happens all the time.

This is the result of what Dianne Vaughan, in her book The Challenger Launch Decision, called "normalization of deviance". You get used to violating tedious and annoying safety precautions. Nothing happens, because safety events are rare. So you violate them more, and start ignoring important procedures. Nothing happens for a long time. You relax. This is great. You have a lot more free time than you thought. Stupid rulebooks. What do those guys know?

Then the crisis strikes. Your reactor gets hit by a tsunami. Your shuttle blows up. People lose their jobs, their savings, their support from their government.  We're supposed to be smarter than that. But, of course, we were smarter than that in 2007.  And in 2001. We still bought houses or pets.com.

It's hard for science fiction to catch this kind of thing. SF is about smart people. And smartness is defined as acting on events in such a way that they change in a favorable direction, and then detecting and feeling proud of that change.  If you are a smart individual, what do you do now? Sell all your stocks and make sure you have enough bottled water? Chain yourself to your Representative's desk until he or she helps in a solution? Write a sternly worded blog post?

I live in a science fictional universe, but am not a science fictional hero. I don't know.

2011's most irritating word combination: "controversial tweet"

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If you scan headlines on something like HuffPo, you eventually find some kerfuffle about something someone tweeted, about a car accident, or sex, or race, or some other topic that usually takes more than 140 characters to express yourself about. People respond that they are hurt, or offended, or enraged. Apologies are tendered, careers disturbed or ruined, commentary follows.

Of course, it doesn't take an actual tweet.  Lazar Greenfield had to resign from the presidency of The American College of Surgeons because of a joke about semen he made in an editorial.

Now, sometimes the tweet or statement is the issue, and sometimes it's just the excuse. It looks to me like people were gunning for Greenfield, as they were gunning for Larry Summers when he was president of Harvard. So what looks like "controversy" is really the public manifestation of a concealed power struggle.  I'm just guessing about Greenfield, but that was clearly what happened to Summers.

But usually they are completely without reason or consequence. People like these things. They are like mini speculative bubbles. Everyone can get involved, generate comments, and read what everyone else thinks. The topic seems more and more important. The bubble swells up then pops in a matter of days. No one loses their retirement fund or their house, but it's a bit of the same thrill of simultaneously making a mistake with a whole lot of people you don't know.

I still think "controversial tweet" is dumb, but then, I rarely change stock positions and have owned a house for years without ever feeling the urge to pull any money out of it, so I'm scarcely representative.

 

The madness of the engineer

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I was once an engineer.  My advanced academic degrees are all in engineering. I loved engineering, but something in my mind just is not suited for it.

I suppose that's also why I haven't come up with a spuriously precise date for the end of the world, like Harold Camping just did. Engineer.

Or why I don't believe in Young Earth Creation Science, like a number of members of that movement. Engineers.

Or why I don't seek a solution to political and economic development issues by hijacking planes and crashing them into large buildings. Many of the 9/11 terrorists were...engineers. One could argue that, if you want to have effective profiling of potential terrorists, an engineering degree should weigh as heavily than ethnicity or religion.

There is a mentality to engineering, a belief in closed systems, predictable outcomes of complex processes, and rationality. All of these are tools. They can be harnessed to reasonable ends, like designing bridges, electronics, and power plants. Or they can be used for insane purposes, constructing plausible structures on foundations of madness, confusion, and falsehood.  Theologians are just engineers without capital budgets.

To an engineer, everything should fit in the box, without leftovers. Tab A fits in Slot B. If you have the money, and a material with the right physical characteristics, you can build a tower to Heaven, and a translation device to handle the resulting multiple languages. Rationality cannot cure madness, but it can certainly make it more powerful.

I'm not going to claim I was a bad engineer because of my inherent negative capability. I was a mediocre engineer because I'm just not that smart.  Too bad, I really did love it.

But now, from outside, I can see how a useful mental process can run rampant outside of its natural habitat, like kudzu or Asian carp. It's worth keeping an eye on.

In praise of Ben Butler

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First, let's get the most important thing out of the way:  Benjamin Franklin Butler was short, ugly, and wall-eyed. Stephen Douglas and Alexander Stephens were short, Lincoln was ugly, and while I'm not aware of any Civil War era politicians with strabismus, there surely must have been a few.

But poor Ben had it all, and was pudgy to boot. The tall and handsome are not mocked, and so even the most foolish of them seem to have decent historical reputations. Short ugly people are screwed in that department.

Plus, Ben was not a good general. A political general, he managed logistics well enough, but feared combat, like many other generals did. He failed Grant during Grant's big push toward Richmond in the spring of 1864, but then, so did Sigel and Banks. Success is war is second only to handsomeness as a means of historical approval.

Butler was called to mind by an interesting article in last Sunday's NYT Magazine, about the first slaves to escape across the lines to Union troops early in the Civil War, and Butler's brilliant improvisation of calling them "contrabands of war", thus creating a formula that allowed for freeing escaped slaves without dealing with legal issues of property and reparation.

Ben Butler was involved in many other interesting events in the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1853, just before his inauguration, Franklin Pierce witnessed the death of his 11-year-old son in a railway accident. Pierce's wife, Jane, hired Butler to defend the railroad. She regarded the accident as a judgment from God.  Note: this is largely from memory, and it's hard to find a reference to this incident online.

He then, exceeding his authority, commanded troops that held Baltimore in the early days of the war, helping keep Maryland in the Union.

After his "contraband" improvisation, he commanded the occupation of New Orleans. His actions there, ranging from bold to deliberately provocative (notably, General Order 28), led to his execration throughout the South, and is probably what most people know him for.

After the war he managed the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, wrote several important Civil Rights acts, promoted payment in greenbacks, and entertained and irritated people in a number of public offices, including governor of Massachusetts. He also ran for President.

Years ago, American Heritage ran a striking photograph of a bizarre elevated railway , with Butler sitting pretty in the middle of a gaggle of local notables.  I can't find the photograph itself, but the description of it is here. That Butler is associated with an eccentric form of transportation is a sign--I had forgotten all about that picture when I started writing this post.

Here is a picture of the railway, from this obituary of the inventor.

Benjamin Butler is more interesting than most historical characters who make appearances in historical novels.  I think it's time to rehabilitate him. And give him a ride on a steam-powered monorail.

The zen of shoveling snow

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I live in Massachusetts and we've had quite a bit of snow. I've been shoveling a lot. My neighborhood is tight, without a lot of snow storage locations, so my piles are now well over my head.

I won't claim to like shoveling snow, but don't mind it either.  Until today the snow was light and fluffy (today is that dreaded thing forecasters call "wintry mix"). Shoveling, done right, is a nice workout. Just protect your back.

My wife bought me a great new shovel, a Garant, with an ergonomically curved shaft and a handle good for both pushing and lifting.  There's no name, but I think it's this one.  I love it.

There's been a lot of discussion about Tyler Cowen's ebook experiment, The Great Stagnation. I have it but haven't yet read it.  That's not going to stop me from commenting on it, however. It's, in part about large changes vs. incremental changes.

The Garant shovel is a good example of incremental improvement. Every angle on it, from the blade to the "Versagrip" takes a lot of snow shoveling experience into account. Its materials are both light and sturdy. We tend to overlook changes in materials over time, since they look pretty much like what they replace, while being cheaper, tougher, lighter, and often more attractive.

So, shoveling snow is still shoveling snow, but as my body ages, the shovels get better.  So far, I'm staying even.

The mysteries of pizza boxes

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Last night we had pizza delivered, as, I suspect, many people do while preparing themselves for Thanksgiving.

All pizza boxes have a whole range of carefully printed choices on the outside, with boxes (or open circles) to check: extra cheese, sausage, meatball, mushroom, pepperoni, peppers, onions, anchovies, etc.

My question: as anyone ever seen any of these things checked? Or is merely decorative, or vestige of some now obsolete practice? Someday soon, I suppose, your phone will tell you what's in each box, useful if you're handling a large crowd. But I suspect these notations will remain, because otherwise it's just a flat cardboard box.

Hope you enjoyed your pizza, and have a good Thanksgiving.

Is it really hard to balance the federal budget?

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There is a lot of discussion about how politically impossible it is to keep ourselves from destroying our economy by increasing our long-term government deficit to unsustainable levels. Everyone has an interest, no one wants to reduce entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, and, in general, our financial meltdown in the next couple of decades is, as they say, "baked in".

Today's NY Times has an interesting interactive graphic that lets you play with possible budget cuts and tax increases to close the gap.

I had no trouble at all doing it.  In fact, I found that I had proposed a bunch of tax increases that I could roll back. If I didn't roll those back, I presume I could be running a substantial budget surplus by 2030. My "new" taxes arenow just Bowles-Simpson loophole reduction with an overall tax rate decrease, which would make sense anyway, out of a concern for simple fairness and transparency, and a small carbon tax (I actually favor a revenue-neutral carbon tax, with corresponding reductions in payroll taxes, particularly for low-income earners who are disproportionately affected by higher energy costs--but that wasn't one of the choices).

Almost everything suggested seems relatively easy. Do we really need to entertain ourselves by maintaining a gigantic, contrary-to-Founding-Father-principles standing military? Do we acknowledge that Social Security and Medicare cost huge amounts of money, or do we pretend we get them for free? Do we pay special interest groups to deform our economic production?

Any particular cut might injure our personal interests. But the need to make the totality of cuts is in all of our interest. Can we actually manage to do it?

Give me a laptop and an interactive chart, and I can do it today.

We've tried bending the healthcare cost curve before

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Pretty much everyone agrees that healthcare costs in the US are out of control, way too high and getting higher. And pretty much everyone agrees that it's someone else's fault.

As nation's get more prosperous, they spend more on healthcare. This is universal, and healthcare costs have been climbing everywhere in the world, no matter what the system of reimbursement or set of controls on use.

But the US is a definite outlier. Its costs are noticably higher than that of other nations, as this graph, from The Incidental Economist, shows:

There are two basic types of solutions, according to The Incidental Economist:

  1. Each of us makes individual choices that lower these costs. We use less, we choose more wisely, we get "skin in the game", we maintain our own health through decent diet and exercise.
  2. The government forces us to use less, by rationing, controlling choices, disallowing certain expensive procedures.

How likely are either of these to happen? We each want others to minimize their healthcare usage, just as we hope other people with cars will stay off the road so we will have a quicker commute. And no one wants actual restrictions imposed on anything except what other people use.

Remember, we did have a successful and effective system of healthcare cost control, back in the 90s. It was called managed care. Remember HMOs? Remember that they controlled healthcare costs? Remember how pissed off everyone got?

Remember movies where desperate men got transplants for their children at gunpoint (2002's John Q), and mothers cursed managed care because their child had asthma (1997's As Good As It Gets--incidentally, the most depressing movie title ever)? These were easy applause lines. Everyone got how awful HMOs were.

It will all happen again, no matter what the reform. Individuals benefit, while the system becomes unsustainable. It would be nice to find a specific villain.  But, while there are always small villains that can be called out and punished, the only big one around is...us.

 

 

 

Green symbols and reality

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"Green" has become a potent symbolic term. But what does it mean? Less carbon for the same output? Less forest harvested, less water polluted, less solid waste produced? A less-damaged web of life, of which we are an integral part?

The word mostly seems to refer to a set of visible practices that announce the practitioner as part of a specific status community. Those outside that status community thus feel it essential to denigrate those same practices as useless or even pernicious, which makes even less sense.

As always, though, the visible practices are just proxies or indicators of the underlying benefits. Thus, if you can achieve the proxy without the underlying benefit, at lesser cost, you are rewarded. This is true whenever you try to incent some complex behavior by picking an indicator. You get more of the indicator, but not necessarily more of the beneficial behavior.

So you get such difficulties as the fact that, in printing, green is an environmentally hazardous color, containing damaging halogens or toxic metal ions. But a green brochure is an indicator of virtue, regardless of the invisible damages.

My local Whole Foods for a while used wood blocks to separate purchases in the checkout line, presumably because oversensitive customers had complained about the plastic ones. I don't recall ever getting splinters from the plastic dividers, but, for a symbol, the wood blocks were startlingly hazardous.  Eventually they disappeared, presumably returned to the wild.

I like to think of myself as relatively green. Once I save a bit of carbon by biking to work and by keeping my thermostat down, I get in an airplane and fly across the country to deposit my bodily waste in environmentally sensitive areas.

I do get some lovely photographs, though.

What is the real cost of clean energy?

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From yesterday's New York Times, an article titled On Clean Energy, China Skirts Rules. Once again, when it comes to clean or green energy, someone is shocked, shocked! to find subsidies going on here.

As far as I can tell, there is no green energy without subsidy. At least right now.  If you dig, you'll find a grant, a tax break, some debt forgiveness: some sort of cash for the implementer that doesn't come from actual project savings. It's all lemonade stand economics. If Mom buys all the ingredients, it isn't that hard to show a profit on sales. And, right now, every form of green energy gets subsidies, whether solar panels, wind turbines, or even insulation.

Now, you'd think, that if it really saved so much money to insulate, or put solar panels on your roof, building owners could run the numbers and make the right decision. The problem is, when you do run the numbers, they don't look as great as you'd like. Returns are small, and take a long time to realize.

Now, just to be clear, I would love to find non-polluting, non-world-destroying sources of energy so that I could continue to live my comfortable lifestyle without occasionally fretting that I'm melting the ice caps or creating sterile deserts where there was once fertile land.

The problem is, I think too much about what's actually going on.  And all the hand-holding-leaf logos in the world aren't going to persuade me that things like electrochromic glass or sedum-covered roofs are actually going to do anything that matters.

If you need a subsidy to get the numbers to come out right, guess what: the numbers don't come out right. If your green project shows a benefit because of a subsidy, that just means that you're burning my money to keep warm, rather than your own.

So the short answer to the title of this post?  We don't know.  As with healthcare, too many people have an interest in making sure the answer is not clear.

Philosophical disclaimers

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This week's New Scientist (August 29 - September 3, 2010) notes a road condition disclaimer usage that I too have been amused by: "Icy conditions may exist". Way to take a firm position there, Department of Highways!

It reminds me of my favorite "lost or stolen item" disclaimer, on a coat check rack in a place I no longer remember: "Not responsible for personal loss."

Obviously, these are the result of too-creative responses to the problem of having a warning sign that may or may not be relevant to the actual situation.  Warn of ice in July? List all the things your patrons may lose or have stolen?  It's fear of sounding dumb, which leads to sounding even dumber.

For example, consider the problem of the exit from a long tunnel, where people have put on their headlights.  It may or may not be daylight on the far side.  Do you tell them to turn off their headlights only if it isn't dark?  The solution, I've read, is just one word:  "Lights?" Leave it up to the user.

At work, in the bathroom, is an insultingly detailed discussion of why I should wash my hands after using the toilet.  Now, I appreciate that this is a real hygiene issue:  a physician acquaintance once told me of observers at an infectious disease conference who were startled by how few of the participating physicians washed their hands after using the toilet.  If you want to know how smart doctors really are, just watch their behavior when they aren't pushing you around or giving you useless drugs... On the other hand, don't.  It will just make that health insurance bill even more unbearable.

But as for the sign at my work bathroom:  I'll bet the level of compliance is lower than if the sign just said "Hands washed?" Appeal to my sense of self, not some alleged rational faculty I barely possess, and that I certainly won't activate on your account.

But what communications department is going to leave their work at two words?  Makes you look lazy.  "How much did I end up paying you per word?" So you create a big illustrated poster with a bunch of useless text whose only effect will be irritation.  Believe me:  this is my life.

At least my work life.

Visualizing energy flow

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Via Ezra Klein, a superb graphic that shows all energy flows in the US economy. Such an image is only as good as its underlying data, of course, and I have no way to check its accuracy. But presuming the numbers are right, it really helps to understand where energy comes from, and where it goes.  I sometimes feel a glut of infographics, but this one will improve your understanding significantly.

Note the huge amount of waste.  Some is inevitable, but it's clear that improvements in electricity generation and transmission could have significant payoffs.

Coal makes electricty.  Coal is dirty, and electricity inefficient.  Improving mileage on our cars won't do anything about that.

Natural gas has a role in everything that doesn't move.

Nuclear is still way bigger than any of the alternative sources of energy, which are almost impossible to see on the chart.

 

 

Historical ignorance, redux

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A few months ago I wrote about how the fall in crime over the past couple of decades has no good explanation, even though huge amounts of analysis has been done on it. So how can we presume to explain why any historical trend occured?

Well, it continues. Recent numbers show that not only has the decline not slowed, as one would have expected by this time: it has accelerated.

What is going on here? Are we suddenly more virtuous? Nicer? Accepting of the social contract? No one seems to be claiming this. But if none of these is true, what is the cause?

What if a great moral movement had swept the nation in the past ten years?  Imagine vast stadiums filled with citizens of all conditions and ethnicities raising their hands and swearing peace and brotherhood. Such movements have certainly come through in the past, and there is no reason to think that they won't again. Wouldn't we now be saying that the Empirical Brotherhood Movement was responsible for this dramatic drop in violence and property crime? And who could argue?

Those opposed to the EBM would, of course, be saying that they had nothing to do with it, and they would be right. But they would be saying it, not because they were right, but because those fraternal empiricists are so annoying and self-satisfied.

What if the things that erode our stern moral virtue, like video games, pornography, fast food, reality shows,drugs, and surfing the internet for movies of pets doing cute things are the same things that cause us not to go out and rob people at gunpoint? Is the sacrifice of our moral autonomy in favor of passive consumption of entertainment a price worth paying?

A few days ago, I argued that virtue has nothing to do with our refusal to own other humans as slaves. Maybe it has nothing to do with our refusal to assault and rob others either. We just have other, more fun things to do now.