Precipitate

Why does no one like free trade?

2012-02-13T18:19:00.001-07:00

Most states engage in protectionism, and lots of it. Brazil, for example, just put up a significant tariff against Chinese imports, amidst fears of de-industrialization. And Obama, in his State of the Union, signaled that the U.S. isn't about to let its manufacturing jobs go either.

The properly schooled free-trading economist is supposed to dismiss all these efforts as "politics" (or so I've been told); and sigh that their advice is once again ignored.But I think it's telling that time and time again, when push comes to shove, most governments are not willing to embrace free trade, even though almost all economic theory shows that the benefits of free trade clearly outweigh the costs in the aggregate and in the long run. Such a consistent pattern begs an explanation.

Whether a country pursues free trade policies or not depends on how it balances the resulting costs and benefits. Clearly, the people who bear the costs and benefits are often different—and this is dilemma that the political economy literature has seized upon to explain opposition to free trade. The way the explanation goes is that because the winners and the losers are different people, and particularly because the benefits are small and dispersed across the population, while the costs are concentrated for small sectors of the economy, politicians find it more expedient to cater to the losers (who put up an effective lobby, since they have much at stake) rather than to the winners (who only stand to gain a little at the margin, and so won't notice if they lose their gain from trade). So free trade is blocked.

This is a powerful explanation, and goes a long way towards explaining a lot of the resistance to free trade. But it makes it seem as if opposition to free trade is inevitable.

Here's an alternative explanation that gives some clear conditions for when individuals will choose to support free trade. It relies on turning the focus away from the distribution of costs and benefits across different individuals, and instead to the costs and benefits over time.

The costs of free trade are most often immediate: lost jobs, industries, careers, and livelihoods. The benefits—economic growth, cheaper and higher quality stuff—come much later. Economists know well that people discount future benefits—that is, people value future costs and benefits less than those in the present. So if the discount factor is large enough, the benefits may come too far in the future to offset present losses.

To illustrate the effect that discounting can have, consider the following numerical example. Suppose a voter is deciding whether to support free trade or not. If she supports it, she'll face a stream of costs and benefits. Denote them by and . If she doesn't support it, then (in her mind) nothing changes and the net cost/benefit is zero. So it follows that if her valuation of the benefits is greater than her valuation of the costs, then she will support free trade.

Note that this is different than asking whether the benefits are greater than the costs for that individual. This question is given by:

whereas the inequality that the voter checks is instead the following:

where is the discount rate. These sums can produce substantially different values. For example, the following seems to me to be a reasonable graph of the costs and benefits of trade over time.

The costs start very high, but fade quickly. The benefits increase significantly over time. I have set the cost and benefit values so that the sum of the benefits is approximately 3 times the sum of the costs (43 to 16). That, in itself, seems to be a strong argument in favor of free trade. But given a reasonable discount rate of 0.9, the present value of the benefit stream is only 9.5, compared to 15 for the costs! Rationality demands that the voter vote against free trade.

Within this framework, how would we get the individual to support free trade? There are three clear options:

Mitigate costs in the present.
Since the initial impact has such a strong effect, even small reductions in the initial cost can significantly alter the cost-benefit calculus.

Accelerate the arrival of the benefits.
The sooner they arrive, the more they are worth.

Allow people the wherewithal be more patient.
The easier it is for people to wait for future benefits, the more willing they will be to do so

These general principles, in turn, recommend specific policy prescriptions. Mitigating costs in the present often takes the form of a social safety net: unemployment insurance, compensation funds to those who lose their jobs, and the like. Accelerating the arrival of the benefits can mean something like including provisions in free trade agreements to require foreign investment to begin immediately. And a policy that would allow people to be more patient could include setting up a robust and ready job retraining program so that people know they have future benefits to look forward to. [Incidentally, ideology, control, and repression are also ways to make people more patient and more willing to support free trade, and unfortunately this is the way many countries (particularly in Latin America) have gone about it.]

Often I hear economists say that people oppose free trade because they are misguided, or stubborn, or selfish. But my point here is that people may oppose free trade, even if they know full well its implications, simply because the timing of the costs and benefits are unfavorable. The timing of some of those costs and benefits can't be changed—but a lot of them can, and that means there is a lot of scope for policy to shift the politics of free trade. Focusing on concrete policy steps to alter the cost / benefit calculus are likely to go much farther towards increasing trade than the 300 years of sermonizing that economists have been doing.

Absence

2012-02-13T11:07:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the long absence, everyone. It's application season, and I've been busy with that. But I plan to get back to the blog now that I have more time. Plan to see a couple new posts in the coming weeks....I've had ideas brewing.

Competition Inflation

2011-10-03T14:53:00.002-07:00

In some places in the U.S., especially on the coasts, the competition in schools is absolutely insane. In Manhattan, for example, moms are enrolling their toddlers in gifted kindergarten test prep classes, in hopes that their child will make it into the "best" kindergartens in the city. In Southern California, it's common that kids will make hour-long commutes every day to attend the gifted magnet school, or will start studying for the SAT their freshman year, or hire private counselors to help them craft the perfect college application. All of this is a far cry from life in Arizona, where, for the most part, pretty much no one bothers with any of that.

All this extra competition, though highly stressful, might be worth it if it produced brighter, more able, students. But in my experience that doesn't happen. Students from the coasts aren't, on average, any smarter than those from other parts of the country. Even the brightest students from the coast are no brighter than the brightest from Arizona, or any other laid-back state. They've just done a lot more work. So ultimately all this extra work seems to amount to a tax on students with ambition in highly competitive environments. Society doesn't gain, and these kids are certainly made worse off.

Why, then, does it continue? And what accounts for the discrepancy in competition between places like Arizona and places like New York, or California?

Asking these questions has led me to a fascinating synthesis between monetary and labor economics. The idea is this: labor markets, like the macro-economy in general, can also suffer from inflation. And some of the insights about inflation that we've learned from monetary economics apply to this labor version of inflation, or what I'll call "competition inflation."

In this analogy, we can think of the jobs, positions, fellowships, etc. (i.e. the total available number of positions to which we can allocate people), multiplied by its prestige factor, as representing the "real output" of the labor market. To illustrate, suppose the labor market wealth is 100. This sum could be achieved either through 100 jobs with a prestige factor of 1, or 5 jobs with a prestige factor of 20. But by this metric, in both cases the labor market has the same level of output.

One's resume is the price one pays for a position. The more prestigious the position, the more it costs, i.e. the better the resume has to be. Like money, resumes have relative, and not absolute, purchasing power; to get a good position, not only does your resume have to be good, but it has to be better than everyone else who applies for the position. This makes resumes like a nominal asset, a kind of currency in the labor economy.

Regular inflation, you'll recall, occurs when the money supply increases faster than the total value of goods and services in the economy. Similarly, competition inflation—or the phenomenon of an escalating resume-price to achieve any given position—occurs when more people have good resumes than there are positions in the labor market to support them (i.e. to draw a more complete analogy, when people's resume holdings outstrip real labor market wealth).

One direct implication of this formulation is that competition inflation isn't inevitable: as long as labor market output increases with the rate of resume improvement, then inflation should stay close to zero. Labor market output is a function of prestige, and job availability. Clearly, if there were an expanding number of prestigious positions to go around, then inflation would be low. But inflation could also be kept low if the number of not-so-prestigious positions expanded at a fast enough rate as well. The reason is that the more plentiful and easily available not-so-prestigious positions become, the less and less motivated people will be to put in the effort for the prestigious positions. That will, in turn, slow the rise of ridiculously lavished resumes.

(We can think of each person as having a tipping point at which they abandon striving for a prestigious position and settle for less, depending on the relative availability of jobs. That tipping point will be radically different for different people. Some people will only work for the prestigious job if there are no other jobs available, and some people will never work in a less-than-prestigious job; most people will fall somewhere in between. Incidentally, this tipping point may be a way of assessing people's subjective prestige valuations.)

Like regular inflation, competition inflation is something that occurs naturally from generation to generation. Baby boom Ivy Leaguers "love to talk about how they would have been turned down by the schools they attended if they were applying today," perhaps in the same way they talk about 25 cent comic books [source]. Since their time, there has in fact been several "devaluations" of the resume. Test scores used to be enough to get into a good college. But when there were too many kids with perfect test scores, admissions officers started looking to extracurriculars, and touting the benefits of the "well-rounded" students. Now they're seeing so many "well-rounded" students that the new fad is "pointy-ness"—being well-rounded plus having some achievement spike in a particular area. No doubt, within ten years the standards will shift again. Each time this shift happens, someone who builds his resume according to the old model will find that their achievements no longer mean as much.

In general, a modest amount of inflation is a good thing, and the same holds true here: as the economy becomes more complex, and as modern jobs require more and more skills, it's a good thing that our institutions push people to become more skilled. The problems come with hyperinflation, as is the case on the coasts. When resume-building ceases to represent any greater skill or talent acquisition, people start to lose faith in the currency. Employers become more skeptical, and students begin to think of the competitive process as arbitrary, or unfair, or meaningless. Having a good resume loses its respect. (Note, for example, the tone of this NYT piece).

In the face of high inflation, people switch to more durable assets. In the labor market, those durable assets are relationships, and networks. When everybody speaks three languages, and has volunteered in orphanages in Peru, employers need some way to make a decision, so professional networks do the work that resumes used to do. In highly competitive environments, then, networking becomes essential, and those people who are highly capable but without contacts lose out the most.

With inflation, there are always winners and losers. The losers are everyone in training, the young and the inexperienced. The winners are the people who already have jobs, i.e. the people who have cashed out their resumes. Someone who starts working may find that twenty years later the average resume required to achieve the same position has increased substantially. In that case, the person has experienced a capital gain; when they leave their job, they will have a job experience more valuable than what they paid for.

With this framework, we can explain some generally puzzling phenomena. For example, we see that competition inflation is most intense at the high school level, but peters out post-college, and is virtually zero for the most demanding positions. (The President's resume has remained about equally impressive on average throughout our country's 200+ years.) The reason for this is that early in our career, the relevant labor market that we face is more closed and restricted. High school students compete only within their city for the prestige positions, which they need in order to get recognized by colleges. But if the city happens to be a hotspot of ambition (because, say, all the kids' parents are investment bankers, or highly successful government officials), then the same ambitious kids will be competing against themselves—and so the resume price will be bid up. After college, however, students compete nationally, and internationally, for jobs. That spreads the ambition around and helps keep competition inflation more stable. Imagine, for example, if Harvard kids were only allowed to get jobs in Boston: competition inflation would be through the roof!

Of course, the major, elephant-in-the-room difference between monetary and competition inflation is that the latter has no central authority that issues currency from the outside: there is no Federal Reserve of Resumes. Instead, resume creation is a highly decentralized process that depends mostly on people's ambitions. However, there are several smaller authorities that set resume standards. For example, ETS, the company that administers the SAT, could increase the value of a perfect score by making the test harder. At an extreme, passing high school (or university) could be made a very difficult, demanding task. These measures would be equivalent to cutting the supply of currency in the labor market, and would curb inflationary pressures. But this solution would be very temporary. Soon enough, there will be enough people mastering the new standard that it will have to be set higher still. (There's also a question of what would happen to the kids who DGAF, and will just stop trying when the standards are raised. It's a question I'll have to explore some other time.)

Is there any resolution to the problem? Ultimately, it seems that controlling resume creation will have no long term effects, since there are enough ambitious kids willing to do whatever it takes. That means the only option is to expand the number of positions available—we need more places for these ambitious high school kids to go. But that won't happen unless there is some miraculous boom in job-creation in this country, or a number of good universities suddenly open up, or ambitious students suddenly gain another route to prestigious position besides college. None of these seems particularly likely.

Update (October 7, 2011): One important implication of this framework, which I didn't mention earlier, is the presence of an inflation tax. In the normal economy, inflation works like a tax. Suppose the government needs to spend an extra $100 million dollars. Then it can raise that money either by collecting it in taxes, or by just printing it. The latter spares the government the hassle of dealing with angry taxpayers, and makes everyone feel richer, but it still costs them in the end: by printing enough money, the government makes each dollar have less purchasing power, which in effect takes a cut of real wealth away from people proportional to the amount of money they hold.

The labor-resume economy has the same phenomenon. Suppose that the government wants to boost the employment opportunities that people enjoy. It can do so by making it easier to graduate high school and college. In the short run, people will find better jobs. But in the long run, if graduation becomes too easy, the value of the degree will just become worth less, and you end up with situations like this:

“I was in a taxicab a couple days ago, and this is a story that really exemplifies how the economy is changing. Over the two-way radio, the dispatcher’s voice comes, and he says, ‘Gentlemen, I’m looking for someone to pick up one extra shift on the night shift, a new taxicab driver. If you know someone, they need to have experience. And I also need a college education.’ And I thought to myself, ‘If you need a college education to drive a cab in this country, what job don’t you need to have a college education for?’" [from this Freakonomics podcast]

Update (October 13, 2011): Caveat: Thinking of a resume as currency only makes sense when we think of it as a homogeneous product. In actuality, though, what happens is that experience that some employers value applicants experience differently, depending on how it matches with the skills necessary for the job for which they are applying (e.g. as an extreme example, having 10 years of solid experience in engineering will not help you get a Broadway gig).

There are some ways to work around this. For one, we could focus on just (near) universally valued qualifications, like college graduation. Alternatively, we could focus on what happens within specific industries, where all applicants are competing on the same resume, and where it is easier to make apples-to-apples comparisons on qualifications. Either of these would do the trick to preserve the integrity of the analysis.

As one of my professors pointed out, models aren't meant to explain everything at once. So naturally this one can't either.

Update #3 (October 15, 2011): More evidence for my thesis, from this NYT article:

Moulshri Mohan was an excellent student at one of the top private high schools in New Delhi. When she applied to colleges, she received scholarship offers of $20,000 from Dartmouth and $15,000 from Smith. Her pile of acceptance letters would have made any ambitious teenager smile: Cornell, Bryn Mawr, Duke, Wesleyan, Barnard and the University of Virginia.

But because of her 93.5 percent cumulative score on her final high school examinations, which are the sole criteria for admission to most colleges here, Ms. Mohan was rejected by the top colleges at Delhi University, better known as D.U., her family’s first choice and one of India’s top schools.

Ms. Mohan, 18, is now one of a surging number of Indian students attending American colleges and universities, as competition in India has grown formidable, even for the best students. With about half of India’s 1.2 billion people under the age of 25, and with the ranks of the middle class swelling, the country’s handful of highly selective universities are overwhelmed.

This summer, Delhi University issued cutoff scores at its top colleges that reached a near-impossible 100 percent in some cases. The Indian Institutes of Technology, which are spread across the country, have an acceptance rate of less than 2 percent — and that is only from a pool of roughly 500,000 who qualify to take the entrance exam, a feat that requires two years of specialized coaching after school.

The problem is clear,” said Kapil Sibal, the government minister overseeing education in India, who studied law at Harvard. “There is a demand and supply issue. You don’t have enough quality institutions, and there are enough quality young people who want to go to only quality institutions.”

A recipe for those that don't like Brussels Sprouts

2011-10-02T22:06:00.001-07:00

Brussels sprouts have a very bad reputation, but that need not be the case. If you dislike Brussels Sprouts, here's a recipe designed to change your mind. (The trick? Boil them until they lose their original flavor, and then douse them with spices.)

Brussels Sprout Subji

Ingredients
1 pound of Brussels Sprouts
3 tomatoes
1 medium-sized onion
1 small piece of green chili
1 chunk of ginger
3 teaspoons coriander seed powder
1/3 teaspoon tumeric powder
1 teaspoon red chili powder [depending on how much you can handle]

Steps
1. Boil the Brussels Sprouts. You'll know they're done when you're able to smash them easily.
2. Meanwhile, chop the onion, chili and ginger and fry it in vegetable oil. When the onions are slightly golden, add the chopped tomatoes.
3. Let the tomato mixture cook until the tomatoes become a pulp. Then add the spices. Mix well. Make sure that the mixture doesn't dry out—if you find that it's getting dry, cover the pan with a lid.
4. When the Brussels sprouts are done, scoop them out of the pot and place them in the tomato mixture. Then mash some of them, so that they soak up the flavor. Add salt, and then let the mixture simmer for about 5 minutes.
5. Eat with roti, naan, or rice.

New Reading List — Economics, Ethics, and Development

2011-09-30T19:57:00.000-07:00

Check out the new Reading List, which includes some of the most interesting articles that I've found over the past couple months.

You'll notice that almost all of the readings focus on economic theory and development (with the exception of a beautiful personal statement, which I encourage you all to read), which pretty much sums up where my mind has been for the past few months. But even if you don't study social science, I encourage you to read some of the articles. They are all highly relevant to our understanding of public policy, the role of government, and the meaning of economic progress in society—themes that I've found people can't help but care about.

If you like any of the readings, or you have anything to say about them at all, please leave a comment! I'd like to hear your reactions and opinions.

Look forward to some blog posts in the next couple of days.

Economics as Medicine

2011-08-09T13:02:00.001-07:00

Over the past couple decades, the field of economics has grown enormously. It has invaded its neighboring fields (like political science, and psychology), taken over their journals, and converted their students. However, it's a pity that the transfer of knowledge has been mostly one way. Economics could stand to gain some insights from other disciplines.

I'm particularly struck by the similarity between economics and medicine. At first it seems like an odd connection, but after a minute it seems completely natural. After all, the economy, like individuals, has health. Turn on the TV at any point of the 24 hour news cycle these days and you'll see at least eight different people discussing it. Especially now that the economy is doing poorly, these commentators are like doctors huddled around a patient with a stubborn disease, debating the cause and various prescriptions. In the case of the economy, the names of the diseases are inflation, or high unemployment, and the prescriptions are called tax cuts, stimulus packages, or deficit reduction.

I got the idea to think of economics as medicine from Jeffrey Sachs. As Professor Sachs was making a career out of advising crisis-ridden developing countries, he noticed how many of the skills he needed in his work aligned with those that his wife Sonia needed in her medical practice. Based on these experiences, which he details in his book The End of Poverty, he calls for a new kind of economics, which he calls "clinical economics," that "underscores the similarities between good development economics and good clinical medicine." There are a number of ways, he says, that [development] economics can learn from medicine. Here's his list:

The economy is a complex system, and complex systems require differential diagnosis. Doctors don't treat all symptoms the same way; they try to find the underlying cause. Economists, says Sachs, should do the same.
All medicine is family medicine. A country's economic situation depends on its history, and its international context. As Sachs puts it, "it's not enough to tell Ghana to get its act together if Ghana faces trade barriers in international markets....if Ghana is burdened by an unpayable mountain of debt....if Ghana requires urgent investments in basic infrastructure as a precondition for attracting new investors...and if Ghana is burdened by refugee movements and disorders emanating from neighboring countries."
Monitoring and evaluation are essential. Here takes a stab at the (now outdated) IMF and World Bank practice of judging a country's progress by policy inputs and not outputs. If it's told to cut the deficit, then it's judged by whether it follows through, and not whether this results in any solutions to their problems.
Medicine is a profession, and as a profession requires strong norms, ethics, and codes of conduct. Development workers need to take their work as seriously as doctors take theirs.

Excited by the prospects of this idea, I wanted to see how far I could push the analogy. In addition to the parallels that Professor Sachs pointed out, I found these ones as well:

Both disciplines have to find a way to make decisions in the face of vast uncertainty and bewildering complexity. In the case of medicine, the root of uncertainty is that the scale of the action is too microscopic for doctors to directly observe; but in the case of economics, it's because the scale is too big. Hence the reason why doctors and economists rely heavily on (statistical) data to figure out what's going on; the sense data (seeing, hearing, etc.) are just not available.
Both disciplines are fundamentally concerned with the well-being of people. For people to be able to live their lives, they not only need to be physically healthy, but the economy which sustains them also has to be healthy.
Both disciplines carry high stakes. In medicine, the stakes are life and death. In economics as well, the stakes can be just as severe. Poor economic policy can result in severe depressions, mass poverty, famines (even when food is plenty), and political instability.

Sachs' conclusion, and mine as well, is that in all the important ways, the economist's job is essentially the society-level analogue to that of the doctor, or the medical researcher. That is, even though the content of the questions economists and doctors ask are different, and even though the techniques divergely widely, and despite the myriad other differences that mark the two professions as distinct, there's a fundamental common pursuit for well-being that binds them together.

To some extent, the transfer of knowledge from medicine to economics has already begun. Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee have won a lot of fame for their work at using randomized control trials to assess the impact of various development policies. In talking about how they developed these techniques, Duflo and Banerjee cite medicine as their direct source of inspiration. The world of medicine before randomized trials gave us reliable information was dangerous. We hear tales of medieval doctors performing procedures (like leeching) or prescribing drugs without really knowing whether they worked; sometimes the patient's condition would improve, and sometimes not, and recovery seemed to depend more on random chance than anything else. This world seems so long past—but that's pretty much the state where we find modern economics. Economists prescribe policies based on their best guesses, but sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. Randomized field trials finally give us a chance of knowing what works.

But Duflo & Banjerjee's randomized control trials are just the tip of the economics-medicine-interaction iceberg. Just sitting in my chair right now I was able to come up with this intriguing list of research topics:

The first dictum of medicine is "Do no harm." Should that not be the starting point for economic policy as well? (This seems particularly applicable to the IMF and the World Bank when they advise developing countries.)
In medicine, a very related concept to randomized control trials is the placebo effect. What if something like that exists in economic policy—which is to say, what if some policies fix recessions, or solve prisoner's dilemmas, or promote cooperation (all classic economic problems) simply because enough people believe they will work. Will Wilkinson, my favorite blogger on the web, gives a scenario of how that's possible.
Our health, and in particular our weight, depends not just on the amount of food we eat, but also the quality of the food. Two thousand calories of junk food is very different than two thousand calories of a balanced diet. In the same way, we can't measure the performance of the economies just in terms of quantities: it matters not just how much GDP grows, or how much investment increases, or how much consumption increases, but also the kind of GDP, investment, and consumption growth that we see. Knowing that GDP increased 3% tells us very little about whether people are actually better off. (What fraction of the U.S.'s GDP growth in 2002-2008 came from housing and easy credit?). Similarly, as I discussed in an earlier post, not all kinds of consumer confidence (which is generally considered a good thing) are made equal.

Thinking about this connection between economics and medicine is really exciting. Not only do I see society, politics, the other disciplines in the social sciences all in a new light, but I'm also reminded of why I got into economics in the first place.

River Plate's Loss as a Metaphor for the History of Argentina

2011-07-18T18:54:00.000-07:00

On June 26th, the unthinkable happened: the Argentine football club River Plate got demoted to the B league. It's an event that provoked this kind of reaction throughout the country and the football-playing world:

For those of you who don't follow Argentine football, let me explain. The two strongest teams in Argentina have always been River Plate and Boca Juniors, and they have a rivalry that's practically unmatched anywhere else in the world. Every person in Argentina is a fan of either one or the other. When the two teams play, it's the sporting event of the year.

River (as it's known colloquially) has been one of the most successful Argentine clubs of all times. But lately they've been struggling, and losing, and losing. By June 26th it got to the point where River had to win the match in order to stay in the top ('A') league of Argentine football. It should have been a no contest; they were playing some no-name team from the interior.....and still they lost.

A dedicated River fan became so irate while watching that fateful game that this video of his tirade has made him the most well-known man in Argentina:

[As you'll soon tell, there aren't many different kinds of curses in Argentine Spanish. This man uses about three or four principal insults, with variations and combinations:

"la puta que te pario" = the whore that gave you birth
"pendejo / boludo / pelotudo" = stupid / asshole
"andate a la concha de tu madre / hermana / etc." = your mother / sister's /etc.'s pussy

At one point he cries out, in supplication, "¡No les pido que hagan 28 pases como el Barcelona, hagan dos seguidos, nada más!" ("I'm not asking you to make 28 passes like Barcelona, just two in a row, nothing more!")]

On the media circuit on which this poor man was later dragged, he sheepishly explained that he did go a little too far. But really, given the situation, who can blame him? Imagine being a fan, a devotee of River, learning from a young age to adore the River jersey, to be proud of a team with an international reputation and a long, glorious history; and to have that team that you so adore now be known as just "some other" team, with bygone glory days?! It's hard to comprehend how one copes with such a trauma.

But these kinds of falls from glory aren't new to Argentina. Rolando Hanglin, writing for the daily La Nacion, puts this story in its larger context, tapping into the essence of the Argentine psyche:

River ya no es la élite del fútbol mundial. Es sólo un equipo que fue próspero y señorial (de ahí el apodo de "Millonarios") con una escuela refinada, que se ha perdido. Además, está rodeado del entorno que corresponde a un país del Tercer Mundo. Un país que fue rico hace ciento veinte años, y que ya no lo es.

"River is no longer in the elite of world football. It's just another team that used to be successful and noble (from there came the nickname of "The Millionaires") with a refined school that has lost its way. In addition, it's surrouned by an environment that corresponds to a country in the Third World. A country that used to be rich one hundred twenty years ago, but no longer is."

What Mr. Hanglin is referring to is how Argentina (believe it or not) was contending with the United States as a world power in the New World around the end of the 19th century. Why not? Argentina had a vast resource endowment, skilled European immigrants, industry and trade. All signals pointed to success. But now all the books written on the history of Argentina have the subtitle, "What went wrong?" (how Argentine ended up "failing" is a subject that has so interested researchers that it has its own name: the so-called "Argentine Riddle").

For decades now, economists and sociologists from Latin America's dependencia school have been arguing that poorer countries have an inherent disadvantage when competing in the world economy. Something analogous seems to be true for football in the case of River: as D.S. over at The Economist notes,

The cruelest consequence of relegation, of course, is that the demotion itself makes it much harder for a club to work its way back up to the top:" River’s annual television revenues will fall from $6.8m to about $4m, and it will have to cut ticket prices. It will probably lose transfer income as well, since few European clubs search for talent in the second division.

For Argentines with pride in their people and their country, all this must be terribly frustrating. How do you prove you don't suck? If you're a batter in a slump, every hit you make seems fleeting; every strikeout just confirms and reemphasizes your worst fears. Similarly, every time the newspapers in Argentina report rising inflation, or the lack of respect their dignataries receive abroad, the more and more Argentines confirm their fears that they're stuck in the "Third World" (a category that they care a lot about, critical theory be damned) forever.

Argentines respond to this frustration in different ways. There are some (especially the rich) who stopped caring, and have simply shifted allegiances to America or Europe. They openly put down their country and go on and on about how glorious it is abroad. Then there are those who care about their country, but resigned at its fate. Many still harbor resentment against the world superpowers, especially Britain and America, for having cheated them out of a better position in the world pecking order. Throughout Latin America, Argentines are derided for their arrogance, and they have it, it's true; but when we see that arrogance through the lens of their history, it's much easier to sympathize and understand how they're feeling.

Like Argentina, which has been struggling to find its identity for the past century, River too will have to reorient itself in the world of football. Most Argentines haven't handled their country's fall from grace well, and remain bitter at the world. Let's hope River fares better.

Musharraf's Talking Points

2011-07-12T09:25:00.039-07:00

Yesterday I attended a talk by the former President of Pakistan, General Musharraf, who spoke at the Baker Institute at Rice University. Here are the talking points that I imagine he would have outlined for himself, had he been perfectly objective about the content of his talk. You can view his full talk here.

[Stylized] Talking Points for His Excellency General Pervez Musharraf

Intro: The deterioration in relations between the US and Pakistan is unfortunate. In my time, I had great relations with President Bush [...mostly because he was glad I was cooperating and I was glad he wasn't invading us.]
Thesis: Pakistan is the sufferer, the victim, and not the perpretrator, of terrorism. [Any actual violence supported by the state—say, in Kashmir—is actually freedom fighting, stemming from overwhelming public support for the cause].
Pakistan faces four main challenges: terrorism, extremism, terrorism, and extremism
Some FAQs:

What accounts for the "antipathy" of Pakistanis towards America?

America betrayed Pakistan in 1989. With the Cold War over, America left an anarchical Afghanistan that Pakistan wasn't able to handle; this in spite of Pakistan helping during the war effort against the Soviets.

What accounts for the current extremist problem in Pakistan?

The Betrayal of 1989

What accounts for the strength of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda?

The Betrayal of 1989
US failure in Afghanistan

Let's not get too distracted by Afghanistan, though. The real threat to regional stability is India. India is the clear enemy.

India is setting up an anti-Pakistan Afghanistan. For instance, Afghanistan sends its forces to train in India, but not once have they come to Pakistan.
India is not resolving the Kashmir dispute, which spurs attacks [not that we discourage that].
It's not fair that India gets special treatment and we don't. The world is, for some reason, hostile to our nuclear weapons. But our nuclear weapons are the pride of our people, even down to the most illiterate man, a symbol of our acheievement [even if they had to 'eat dust' for it, right?].

The stump speech: There is currently no strong candidate for election next year, so I'm "offering myself as a third alternative."

Be selfless: "I'm not doing this for myself. I'm comfortable already, I make good money, I could live anywhere in the world. But the people of Pakistan need a leader like me."

(Since I have to): We did not, did not, did not know about Osama bin Laden. We did not. [Delivered somewhat like this].

Note to self: Be respectful. Make sure to address audience as "ladies and gentlemen." The more, the better.

A Princess's Plea

2011-06-18T15:38:00.003-07:00

Last Wednesday, I saw a real, live princess. Her Royal Highness Princess Haya Al Hussein of Dubai came to the Baker Institute here at Rice University to speak on "The Politics of Hunger," as part of her larger efforts, through her non-profit Tkiyet Um Ali, to end world hunger.

The talk began at 6pm. As I approached the Institute I saw a number of black sedans parked in front, and men in impeccable suits. In the lobby sat a pretty, smiling receptionist, checking the roster for names (the day before I had to fill out a detailed online RSVP form and register as a Rice student to get in). A police officer was watching from the corner as she checked me in.

I walked inside, with my jeans and T-shirt (covered in chalk from class), and immediately felt out of place. Most of the attendees were clearly important people; donors, public officials, distinguished members of the community. They were dressed up, had white hair, and clearly knew each other. It was a group as close to aristocracy as we get in America.

We were kept waiting a little bit. In the meantime I flipped through the program, and people-watched the aristocrats, who were greeting each other with the familiarity and affection of fellow parishioners. Every now and then I would hear the loud tak-tak of high heels as someone from the Institute went in the back to check on something. After a while, people started trickling from the back; at first a couple men in suits, then some women, who would later walk back to check on something; they would return; some more important-looking people; and then finally, the princess herself, surrounded by a whole delegation of people, including the former Secretary of State James Baker, with whom she was finishing up a conversation. As I watched this scene, it struck me how the extended wait and the scurrying back and forth of the Baker Institute staff represented an integral part of the very spectacle of power and status that we were there to see. By the time the princess did come out, I already felt distant from her, blocked by layers upon layers of guards, staffers, and officials who guarded her access; a common man, glimpsing a world to which I wasn't privy. An aura befitting a princess, I guess.

Her Royal Highness shook hands with some people sitting in the front row, and then took her seat.

Mr. Baker introduced the princess. He spoke fondly of the work he did with her father, the King of Jordan, and the honor of having her to visit. He gave the air of a man proud to see his friend's daughter all grown up.

Then Princess Haya took the podium. She was just as I imagined a princess should be. She had a British accent (being educated at Oxford), and spoke only as loud as she needed to be heard, lending her voice an ethereal and other-wordly quality. If it weren't for the Bose speakers, I would have to strain my ears to hear her:

The main theme of her talk was that America needed to take moral leadership in the fight against world hunger. Global hunger "has to become a priority," she said. Without food security, "there can be no political security, and no peace."

What most struck me about her talk was the latent frustration that bubbled behind her serene front. She admitted to feeling powerless at times, despite her high station; and she explained her annoyance for endless rounds of policy debates, which she saw as an excuse for not meeting our responsibilities. Most of all, she couldn't understand why policymakers weren't sincere about fighting global hunger. Why do countries spend so much on weapons and so little on aid? Why do we permit hunger to continue? Where is the outrage?

This plea was so earnest and sincere that I felt guilty for also thinking it was futile. There is, I think, a natural progression of thought when one works for moral causes like this: first comes outrage, and zeal, and disbelief; but eventually, sometimes soon but often much later, there settles in a kind of serenity that comes with wisdom and understanding. Yes, fight on for the causes that are important, but there are reasons for why things happen. (In this particular case, I would say, Princess, that it is possible for all the people in the world to have good intentions and still find ourselves in miserable situations.)

But I know well enough not to become cynical. Exhorting important people to spend more money on food aid may not be the most effective way of ending world hunger, but God knows the world could always use more of the princess's sincerity.

Welfare as Poverty Insurance

2011-05-18T17:07:00.223-07:00

Most of the arguments I've heard in favor of "the welfare state" (i.e. a government guarantee of a basic standard of living, a.k.a the social safety net) appeal to compassion, or justice. This works for people who are already sympathetic to such appeals (such as myself), but it really does no good for those who don't put much stock in loose and subjective ideas like justice and compassion to begin with. Fortunately, this paragraph from University of Arizona Professor Lane Kenworthy's blog suggests an alternate—and, I think, fruitful—approach:

As people get richer, they tend to be willing to buy more insurance and more services. We observe this both among individuals and among countries. Some insurance and services are provided at good quality and price by private markets. Others less so. That’s the underlying reason why nations have tended to expand social policy as they grow wealthier.

Once we start thinking of welfare as insurance rather than charity, it opens a whole new series of possibilities. Most importantly, it gives us a way of addressing opponents of welfare programs (mostly conservative economists and their students), on their own terms, by providing an account of welfare programs that appeals not to any sense of morality or altruism, but rather rational choice, fully consistent with the idea of individuals maximizing their well-being.

Even though I myself don't fully believe in the conception of rational choice as self-interested utility maximization (for the same reasons that Amartya Sen doesn't either), I'll make an attempt here to defend the welfare state on this premise. This short post, of course, cannot hope to cover all the relevant issues. But I'll try to make a good sketch of what such an argument might look like.The exposition of the argument (below) makes four claims that collectively show how government-provisioning of poverty insurance is both consistent with rational choice and certain principles of liberty.

Claim #1: It is sensible to think of welfare policies as poverty insurance.

Birth is a kind of lottery. By random luck, and through no fault of our own, we end up either in a poor household, or a well-off household. Every one of us, when we are born, stands an equal chance of landing in a poor household. Therefore, we all stand to gain from a welfare program that would make the poverty that we would potentially face less dire.

Even after we are born, we face a non-trivial chance of becoming poor in the future. Upward income mobility is a blessing for poor people, but downward income mobility is a significant risk for the non-poor:

Most policy-makers view poverty as akin to a stagnant pool which may be slowly drained as each individual or family trapped there is helped to climb out. What this imagery and the policies it suggests disregard, however, is the fact that of those who are poor in any particular year, most were not poor in the preceding year. In other words, at any given time, many of the poor are newly poor. According to the University of Michigan‘s Survey Research Center study, Five Thousand American Families, the “persistently poor” (defined as those who were poor during all five years studied) amount to only 9 percent of the total poverty population. [link]

If it's not us that falls into poverty, then it is perhaps our children who will. Most often sons do not end up in the same income bracket that their fathers belonged to:

This table (source) shows intergenerational mobility between income quintiles in the U.S. Class 1 falls is the bottom quintile (the 0 to 20th percentile) and Class 5 is the top (the 80 to 100th percentile). So even if you're born into the top of the distribution, you have a 9.5% chance of ending up at the bottom. That's probably much higher than many of the other risks that we insure against. (Lest one underestimate what it means to land in the bottom quintile: according to this U.S. Census Bureau report, people in the percentile made $17,984 in 2003.)

So everyone, by the lottery of birth, faces a risk of facing poverty. Above this, people who are born into non-poor families face the risk of falling into poverty; or those born into poverty who manage to exit it face a non-trivial risk of falling back into poverty. The more severe the poverty, the more anxious people are to mitigate these risks; hence the need for insurance.

Claim #2: Government can provide poverty insurance more effectively than the private sector.

In a private poverty insurance market, I imagine that parents would buy policies that would cover themselves and their children. The premiums would probably be determined by a number of factors, such as general macroeconomic conditions, and also the policy holder's likelihood of falling into poverty. Rival plans would compete on, perhaps, how many generations they cover, or how generous the benefits are.

Now, why couldn't such a market work? In short, for many of the same reasons that completely private health insurance doesn't work (or more accurately, unpalatable). Prof. Kenneth Arrow already showed in the 1960s why the market for medical care has certain characteristics that make for "the laissez-faire solution for medicine [to be] intolerable." A market for poverty insurance would suffer from many of the same defects. Specifically:

1. Moral Hazard. As Arrow notes, "What is desired in the case of insurance is that the event against which insurance is taken be out of the control of the individual." But this is clearly not the case with poverty insurance. An individual who takes a poverty insurance policy can afford to be less careful about staying out of poverty, perhaps to the point of abuse. Insurance companies, of course, will write contracts that stipulate that they can deny coverage in the case of recklessness, but it's very difficult for the insurance company to make a reliable decision about the degree of culpability for someone who has fallen into poverty. As with health insurance, the lack of reliable procedures in a poverty insurance business will lead to mistakes: some people deserving of insurance will be denied, and some who should be denied will receive the benefits.

2. Adverse Selection. The people who are most likely to get covered are the ones who need it least. In the same way health insurance companies screen out people with unhealthy lifestyles, or with a predisposition for disease, poverty insurance companies will likely vet out people who seem likely to fall into poverty (being an artist will be the new preexisting condition).

3. Other-regarding preferences. Just as we are concerned about the health of others, we also care about their living standards. People prefer a healthier society to a less healthy one, and a less poor society to a more poor one. In economics, we say that health and poverty are externalities: that is, an individual's private good health or good fortune is not just a benefit to himself, but also seen by others as a benefit to themselves. In the face of positive externalities, the market will provide a level of insurance below the optimal amount (and significantly so, since our preferences for the well-being of others are generally quite strong).

Of course, showing that a certain market has defects does not necessarily imply a need for government provisioning. The electronics market, for example, also contains asymmetry of information, a market defect, but there's no one is calling for government intervention there.

The key difference is the severity of the consequences. In the electronics market, the worst that could happen is to leave the store dissatisfied. Severe poverty, however, can lead to death—or, at the least, it inhibits an individual's ability to receive the nutrition and education necessary to reach her potential, which results in a loss not just to herself but to all of society. That is why failings in the poverty insurance market would take on a certain moral urgency, and would be much more harshly criticized than failings in other markets.

Government, unlike private companies, is in a position to address most of the problems caused by the three aforementioned defects of a poverty insurance market. By offering automatic universal coverage, for example, the government can circumvent the adverse selection problem altogether. Universal coverage would also provide a level of welfare provisioning more consistent with our other-regarding preferences.

Admittedly, universal coverage does not solve all problems. Specifically, universal coverage by itself does not change the moral hazard of insuring another person for risks he has some control over. This is part of a major source of the frustration over welfare that lead to the overhaul of welfare in the U.S. in 1994. Welfare reform was meant to address the perception that welfare made people lazy, or went to undeserving candidates (such as so-called "welfare queens"). These are legitimate concerns, and they require that the government, like any private insurance company, craft its policy carefully. But then we enter the debate of what kind of poverty insurance we should have, and we're no longer discussing whether or not we should have it in the first place.

Claim #3: The majority of people in a sufficiently affluent society will rationally choose to vote for some level of poverty insurance.

Whether or not people would freely contribute to a poverty insurance program is not the relevant kind of rational choice in this case. After all, the main risk of poverty comes from the lottery of birth, so it doesn't make sense to collect payment for insurance after the main risk event has already happened. A welfare program needs the money of rich people in order to work, but since the rich have avoided the main risk (that of being born poor), they would significantly undervalue the benefit of poverty insurance, and hence underpay its true value.

In order for people to truly gauge the full risks of poverty, we would need to ask them how much they would be willing to contribute before their position in the income distribution is decided. This pre-birth state is similar to Rawls's idea of the "original position," except in this case I allow information about the structure of the society, such as the income distribution, the degree of income mobility, and the like. From there, then, just as in Rawls's original position, people in this pre-birth state would try to advance their own best interest, but in good-faith, knowing full well that whatever position that is adopted there would be binding once they find out their place in the income distribution.

What stance towards welfare would participants in this pre-birth position adopt? Unlike Rawls, I don't think that there will be unanimous consent, at the very least because people face varying levels of aversion towards risk. Since we don't have unanimity, it makes sense then to take a vote. The result of the vote will fall according to the preferences of the median voter.

Of course the choice of the median voter will depend on the factors specific to the country: the level of income mobility and the severity of the poverty, as noted above, but also the national income the degree to which the culture values equality.

In the developed world, I believe that the median voter will almost certainly opt for a level of poverty insurance greater than zero, for the very reasons that Prof. Kenworthy pointed out at the beginning of the discussion: as people grow richer, they become more willing to spend their money on insurance (that is, they would be willing to forgo a higher GDP in exchange for a welfare program, or they would be willing to pay the taxes necessary to fund the program if they were wealthy). In fact, it is probably even rational to do so: since individuals face diminishing returns to wealth and income, they would likely face a higher expected utility, given the right conditions, from shoring up their income in the event they end up poor rather than betting on making even more money if they end up rich.

Claim #4: Collective decision making does not violate the liberty of dissenters.

There will likely be some participants in the pre-birth position who will opt for no poverty insurance. But since the majority carries, and the majority will most likely opt for some non-zero amount, these dissenters will be forced to contribute to a program that they do not want. How is their liberty not violated? (Note that dissenting to contribute in the pre-birth position is radically different then dissenting to contribute in real life.)

This question is similar to a problem that Ronald Dworkin has posed in his article "The Majoritarian Premise and Constitutionalism" (In Philosophy and Democracy: An Anthology, edited by Thomas Christiano, pgs. 241-257): In a democracy we like to think of ourselves as a self-governing people. But how can that make any sense if you're on the losing side of the vote? That is, how can one reasonably think of himself as self-governing if he has to follow the majority will, which may not be his own?

The answer, Dworkin says, is that it depends on what view of collective action you take.

Now, government is required because there is a need for collective action. But Dworkin notes that there are two views of collective action: one, which he calls statistical, is where the group action is just some agglomeration of individual action with no sense of acting as a group. The example he gives is the stock market; when the "stock market" falls 20 points, there's no concerted effort behind it. The second kind of collective action is communal, where the group action cannot be understood as anything but as a group. We cannot make sense of a member of an orchestra, for example, except by considering her role in terms of the whole piece.

Dworkin thinks this distinction is very important. The only way for a person on the losing side of a vote to still think of himself as self-governing is if he adopts a communal view of the collective action of voting. He needs to think of himself as a genuine member of the political community, such that collective act of the group is also my act as well, in the same way that the victory or defeat of a sports team is the victory or defeat of each player, even if their individual contribution did not make a difference one way or another.

Now, to be a genuine member of a democracy, what Dworkin calls a "moral member," certain conditions must be satisfied. People need to be a part of the decision-making process (i.e. they should have a vote, a say); they need to have a stake in the decision (i.e. they need to consider themselves as a respected part of the group, and other people should also see them as a respected part of the group); and they need to be morally independent of the decision (i.e. they should be allowed certain private space to make personal decisions). Dworkin explains these concepts in more detail in the article. The upshot, though, is that once one is a moral member, one is then, in fact, self-governing. There is no meaningful loss of liberty when a moral member ends up on the losing side of a fair and inclusive vote on a problem that requires collective action (and poverty insurance is one of those problems).

The pre-birth position described in section three is a position of perfect equality, set up in such a way that it already establishes all the conditions necessary to make all parties a moral members of the political body. Therefore, even though some individuals in the pre-birth position would perhaps vote for zero poverty insurance, when the majority passes a non-zero level of insurance, they cannot claim that they were unjustly or unfairly treated.

I'm Kicking the Habit

2011-05-04T20:44:00.000-07:00

I cherish good writing. It's absolutely one of my favorite things in the world. Every time I read good, clean, limpid, effortless, honest prose a smile comes to my face. I can't help it.

We naturally imitate what we love, which means for me, in this case, that I spend a lot of time and effort trying to make my prose like that. Almost nothing to me is more satisfying than a paper that turns out well; but by the same token, nothing is more frustrating than when it doesn't.

In hopes of achieving the caliber of writing that I so admire, I've turned to style guides. I've read Strunk and White, of course, as well as Joseph Williams's Style. Plus there's a lot of rules and tips and tricks that I don't even remember where I've picked up, perhaps from classes or from the internet.

The point of all this help, as these style guides say themselves, is to shrink the gap between what we mean to say and what we actually say. As writers, we want the reader to access our mind, and we want the flow of ideas to be seamless. We want to feel at one with the written word.

But that's not how I feel at all. Instead, I'm completely paralyzed.

Every time I think up a sentence, I first have to run it by my filter. My filter is composed of all the rules and checks for good writing (sometimes conflicting) that I've built up over the years. Does it use the active voice? Does it have dangling antecedents, or floating "this"'s? Is it as simple as possible, but no simpler? All of these are good checks to keep in mind. But the more I think of these rules, the harder it is for me to think freely and naturally and uninhibited.

So you know, today's the day I kick my style addiction. No more worrying about parts of speech or sentence structure or clarity or grace. My only rule: say what you mean, and mean what you say. I think (I really hope) the rest will work out.

Economic Logic

2011-04-30T21:27:00.000-07:00

Here an upset Michael Moore asks Milton Friedman a question that gets at the very heart of economic logic:

Milton Friedman's point is very subtle, but it's very powerful. Understanding it is fundamental to understanding the nature of human society.

Coping with Loss in a Democracy

2011-04-27T15:23:00.000-07:00

Today Obama released his long-form birth certificate in an attempt to finally get the birthers to shut up. "We do not have time for this kind of silliness...I've got better stuff to do," he said.

Amen to that. I'm really worried at how lunatic-y this country is becoming.

But at the same time I'm wondering if the sentiment that's behind these allegations has actually become a constant part of U.S. democracy. Every time we've had an election in recent years, the losing side has always cried foul.

I remember three elections in my lifetime—2000, 2004, and 2008—and in all three cases, the losing side hasn't taken it lightly. If you google "bush 2000 election cheating" you get 23 million results, plus this Michael Moore video:

Similarly, if you google "bush 2004 election cheating" you get 21.4 million results—slightly less, but after all it was a less controversial election. The point is, a lot of people out there are convinced that there's no way Bush won fairly. One website, dedicated to exposing the myth that Bush won 2004 fairly, maintains,

Republicans can’t win straight up on the issues, because their policies are inimical to the best interests of 99% of Americans. To win, they have to cheat.

Sounds like the birthers know just how these people feel.

Losing in a democracy is paradoxical. The whole purpose and intent of the system is to make the rulers legitimate in the eyes of the citizens. But at the same time, each voter is asked for his opinion on who she thinks is right. If you're on the losing side, then you're forced to accept as legitimate a candidate that you don't think is right. But how legitimacy be separate from correctness?

To the extent that your belief in democracy depends on whether you think it gives the "right" results, it's uncomfortable to believe both that your candidate was the right choice and that he lost fair and square. One way of reconciling the conflict, as Rousseau did, is to drop the former assumption and stick with the latter—that is, to say that if I'm on the losing side, then I must be in the wrong:

Each man, in giving his vote, states his opinion on that point; and the general will is found by counting votes. When therefore the opinion that is contrary to my own prevails, this proves neither more nor less than that I was mistaken, and that what I thought to be the general will was not so. (On the Social Contract, Book IV)

But we're not inclined to think this way. Instead, most people would instead believe they're right (to the death perhaps; there's research that shows that incompetent people overstate their competence) and assume that the procedure was gimmicked in some way. The birthers, though they say they're just asking for evidence, really probably don't want it. As Prof. Redlawk put it,

It’s not the evidence that matters. Feelings come first, and evidence is used mostly in service of those feelings. Evidence that supports what is already believed is accepted, that which contradicts it is not. [link]

The Bush-deniers are, of course, not really as crazy as the birthers: they weren't nearly as distracting, and they're probably more justified. But both groups are strikingly similar in the way that they channel their resentment of the president by questioning his legitimacy. In a stable democracy like the U.S., where there's no hope of overthrowing the president, this is their way of coping with the loss.

As far as I know, this kind of denialism in the face of electoral defeats is a relatively recent phenomenon. If that's true, it seems to reflect one consequence of the undeniable growing polarization of U.S. politics. When people aren't so polarized, they're not so upset if their man doesn't win. But now it's become a matter of basic psychological integrity—and it's manifesting itself in bizarre ways.

I'm a Versatile Blogger!

2011-04-03T20:34:00.004-07:00

Guess what? I'm an award winning blogger now!

My friend Mugdha from high school and fellow blogger over at A Vigilant Muse just nominated me for the The Versatile Blogger award, a kind of virtual pat on the back/thumbs up that new bloggers pass around, and which I heartily appreciate. Thank you Mugdha!

The Rules of The Versatile Blogger Award:
1. Thank the person who gave you back the award and link back to them in your post.

Check.

2. Tell seven things about yourself.

I'm not really interested in doing this. I imagine you can pick out seven things about me from reading my posts...surely that counts?

3. Award fifteen recently discovered new bloggers.

I won't be able to nominate 15, since I don't even know of 15 amateur blogs. But here are some good ones that I subscribe to that I encourage you to check out.

Speculum Linguarum et Literatum by Scott Kennedy

The self-published work of a budding classics scholar.

TypicalMath by Howard Cheng

For now it's a study abroad blog about his semester studying math in Hungary. Hopefully he'll keep it up even after he returns.

The Desert Lamp by Connor Mendenhall, Anna Swenson, Evan Lisull, Vishal Ganeshan, and others

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this fierce watchdog of University of Arizona politics.

Fight Entropy by Solomon Hsiang and Jesse Anttila-Hughes

A cool compilation of economics and geography put together by a Ph.D. student in Sustainable Development at Columbia University and a post-doc at NBER. It may be out of my league to nominate them, but I'll do so anyway because I enjoy their work.

4. Contact these bloggers and let them know they've received this award.

Why Profit Doesn't Work in the Media Business [updated]

2011-04-02T17:49:00.000-07:00

In one of my previous posts, I looked at the reasons why the profit incentive doesn't get us the informed, reasonable news coverage that we'd like. Recently, I tightened up the argument. Here's the revised version:

"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people." -H. L. Mencken

Scholars around the country lament a national media that’s in decline. Neil Henry, Dean of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism talks of “erosions in content and traditional journalistic standards.” Kathleen Jamieson, director of the Anneburg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, describes a university setting where “students raised on faux news will enter our classrooms cocooned in their own biases and conditioned to mistake ridicule for engaged contention.” And Rick Davis and Peter Stearns of George Mason University agree that “the replacement of serious news by sensationalist nonsense” is undermining legitimate democratic discussion. [link to source]

To add fuel to these critics’ fire, the executives at Fox News unapologetically defend the state of the news, and their networks’ coverage of it. When Roger Ailes, president of Fox News, appeared on a January 31, 2010 edition of ABC’s This Week, he was criticized for certain ethically dubious choices the network made. His response? “I’m not in politics. I’m in ratings. We’re winning” [link]. In the same vein, Bill Sammon, vice president of Fox News, recently admitted to fabricating facts on air: “At that time, I have to admit, that I went on TV on Fox News and publicly engaged in what I guess was some rather mischievous speculation about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism, a premise that privately I found rather far-fetched” [link].

What’s so upsetting about these quotes is that they reveal a complete disregard for ethics in journalism. Clearly, Fox News executives’ eyes are all on the bottom line. Normally, these two goals—profit and ethics—should align: a company that mistreats its customers should eventually stop receiving business. But there are instances, like this one, where the mechanism clearly doesn’t work.

The basic defense of the profit incentive is that you're almost always likely to getter better results when you incentivize good behavior than when you force it. Profit supposedly sets up an incentive system that induces businesses to serve the public interest as much as possible. Ideally, businesses make profit when they produce goods or services that create a lot of value for people. Customers get what they want, and the business reaps the reward of going through all that effort. Everybody's happy.

But this system isn't foolproof. For it to work, at least a couple key things must happen. First, consumers need to be able to represent an effective check on business. If people generally can't tell when they're getting duped, or swindled, or cheated, or they have no alternatives (i.e. monopoly), then businesses can gain profits at the cost of the public. Second, the consumer’s individual interest can’t be opposed to a broader, collective interest. If individuals demand a good that’s harmful to everyone else, than supplying it can actually be welfare-reducing overall.

The problem with profit in the media business is that neither of these criteria is satisfied. For one, it’s very, very difficult for a well-intentioned layperson to stay informed. As David Foster Wallace puts it, grappling with the “Total Noise” means "dealing with massive, high-entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux… to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help" (q.v. "Host" in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays). In this light, news organizations have a moral obligation to help their fellow citizens make informed opinions and cast informed votes. Instead, what happens is that news organizations pose as guides through this media mess while simultaneously producing narratives of their own (Fox News is the best at this, which is why they’re “winning”). Since this strategy is successful, the profit incentive encourages news firms to pursue it; and average consumers of news, who may not realize the spin they’re being fed, also don’t realize that their news only contains half-truths, instead of the Truth that they were expecting. Unwittingly, they receive a defective product, like the Americans who ate tainted meat before health inspections were instituted.

In many cases, though, viewers know exactly what they’re getting out of their news. They like news that caters to their biases and preconceived notions about their world (a.k.a. “infotainment”) and news organizations profit by offering such programming. But is society really better off if everyone just decides which slanted version of the news she is going to watch? Clearly not. Biased news eviscerates reason, dialogue, and compromise—precisely the qualities necessary to have a healthy democracy—and replaces them with polarization, resentment, and suspicion. It’s impossible to come to a reasonable agreement when most people can’t even agree on the facts. So the profit incentive, though encouraging news organizations to satisfy individual preferences, also has the effect of allowing those news organizations to undermine the very democracy they are tasked with upholding.

Thus, the profit incentive is flawed—but it’s unlikely that a patchwork of changes in incentive structures will work either. The difference between legislating about, say, food quality (which has clear, objective measures) and journalism quality (which is hard to define, let alone capture systematically) means that regulation will likely be sidestepped by exploiting loopholes. Likewise, restructuring incentives, such as changing executive compensation packages or making quality reporting more attractive, can only get us so far. As long as most people prefer infotainment to real news, news companies will face a constant temptation to cater to their tastes.

In these kinds of situations, appealing to morality can solve a number of economic problems that external incentives can’t: morality drastically reduces monitoring costs by making people self-policing; and it, unlike most external pressures, tends to be self-reinforcing, since people, once convinced about the morality of certain behavior, generally do not to deviate from it. A sense of morality hasn’t always been absent from journalism. Don Hewitt recalls in his memoir that upon the launch of “60 Minutes” his producer came to him and told him to “make us proud.” “Which,” he says, “may well be the last time anyone ever said ‘make us proud’ to anyone else in television” [link]. We need to bring that sense of morality back.

Islamic Liberation Theology?

2011-03-27T14:17:00.002-07:00

This passage from an article in the Monthly Review by Qalandar Bux Memon suggests that liberation theology may not just be confined to Catholic Latin America. The article is called "Blood on the Path of Love: The Striking Workers of Faisalabad Pakistan," which you can read in its entirety here.

Bawa Lalif Ansari is famous among workers for his oratory and in particular for leading an energizing tarana [a call and response between leader and crowd.]. He is an entertainer and pedagogue, who hosts most of the workers’ rallies for LQM [Labour Quami Movement]. Bawa is of short and slim stature, with long black hair carefully combed backwards and a small and trim jet-black beard—a look that made more sense to me as our conversation developed.

“I used to be part of Lashkar-e-Taiba. I joined them when I was young.” LeT is a militant Islamist organization, suspected of involvement in the 2008 Mumbai attacks. It is banned in Pakistan but continues to operate openly in many areas. Sipah-e-Sahaba, another extremist organization, he tells me, was founded in the Jhang area, which neighbors Faisalabad, and is where he has been working with the LQM. He explains,

They have a strong grip on the people and tell the poor to direct their frustration against the Shi’as. The local feudals and zamindars, who are extremely rich, are generally Shi’a, while the common bounded laborer is Sunni. The hate manifested over years of exploitation can easily be directed by these originations against all Shi’as. But many Shi’a are also laborers and workers, as are Christians. I came across Mian Qayyum and the LQM and their analysis made more sense. The religious parties wanted me to merely seethe with rage but didn’t tell me how my material situation was going to change. What good does it do me to hate someone for being a Shi’a or a Sunni or a Christian? They too are poor people trying to work and feed their children. What good does it do a worker to fight a worker. I didn’t agree with this.

Bawa believes in Islam, but for him, it is a radical philosophy of liberation [my emphasis]. A few hours later, at a workers’ gathering he said, “God is sovereign and god asks us to fight for justice. The bosses are nothing; we will not bow to them, these pharaohs. What we work we should be paid fairly for.” Lashkar’s loss has been the Labour Quami Movement’s gain.

Religion, with its concern for the poor and disadvantaged, is a natural ally of Marxism. Surely Catholics aren't the only ones that have made the link.

Update (April 12, 2011): It turns out I was right; there is Islamic liberation theology out there! Dr. Ali Ashgar Engineer, a Pakistani Islamic scholar, has a book, available online, with just that title.

Where Liberals and Conservatives Are Born

2011-03-26T15:44:00.001-07:00

Liberal vs. Conservative in Abstract

For the past couple months I've been applying for various summer internships and other research opportunities. With applications on my mind, I've had a lot of time to think about how we allocate scarce opportunities.

Obviously, any allocation scheme has to have some criteria for picking candidates. Do we focus only on the applicant's recent work, or do we weight all of it equally? Do we focus on tests/scores/proven results, or do we look for potential?

Once we come up with certain criteria/weights for considering the application, then we automatically favor certain applicants and disfavor others. Some people will have a natural ability in the chosen criteria, so their application will be favored; meanwhile, other applicants will have natural abilities in other aspects, which they will likely to consider also important and relevant, but they will be disfavored. (To put this in concrete terms: colleges favor strong extracurriculars in the undergraduate admissions process, which advantages extroverts and suck-ups, and disadvantages introverts.)

So it doesn't seem possible to come up with a system which doesn't disfavor anyone. Someone has to lose out—and when they do, it's likely that they'll feel that the process was unfair, that they were structurally disadvantaged. But when things go well for them, then they're likely to think the system works just fine, and that they deserve the rewards they get in some way.

I say that because that because that's been my own experience. In and through this application game, I've found my attitude towards the process shifting between these two extremes, depending on whether things worked in my favor or not. When I get the opportunities I apply for, then I see myself as the deserving recipient of it. But when I lose, and especially when I lose consistently, then I start to feel maligned and cheated. I start to think the whole selection process is arbitrary and meaningless, and the person who got selected as just lucky.

I have a hunch that this thought process is both natural and widespread. For one, it matches very well with the discourse that divides liberals and conservatives. On an issue like poverty, for example, conservatives will likely say that the poor can escape poverty if they just work harder; many conservatives have rags to riches stories (i.e. the system worked for them); and they likely feel deserving of their place in the social order. Liberals, meanwhile, will argue that certain people, no matter how hard they try, cannot better their position, and point to structural disadvantages of race, class, and gender. We're accustomed to thinking of these differences as purely ideological, but I think the source of these contentions is that people have a natural tendency to think their personal experience accounts for the way the whole world works. (Including myself, since, after all, I'm arguing this post based on my own experiences. What else do we have to go off of?)

If this is correct, what's remarkable about the story I've told is that it's impossible for a liberal/conservative split not to exist. It seems to be a product of the very act of choosing an allocation scheme, which inevitably favors some qualities and disfavors others. Obviously, the full story is more complicated than this (e.g. Asians, though they do well, tend to vote liberal), but it's a starting point, I think, for a potentially rich understanding of politics.

The Logic of Spiritual Life

2011-03-14T09:09:00.001-07:00

[Last month I wrote a couple posts trying to couch religion in reason—but this article by Swami Chinmayananda, called The Logic of Spiritual Life, I think does it better. Swami Chinmayananda is probably the greatest influence on my life, and the reason why I still think religion is worthwhile.]

Religion is not a bundle of superstitions to be fumigated at regular intervals with incense and candle sticks. Carefully analyzed, it is a definite science of life, giving a complete technique of practical living. By faithfully adhering to its precepts and following its practical suggestions, we can make ourselves happier and this world a better place to live in.

As the Equipment, so the Experience

Life is a series of experiences. The experiencer comes in contact with the world of objects and ekes out for himself pleasure or pain, joy or sorrow and failure or success. His reactions are dependent upon the quality and texture of his mind-intellectual equipment. There is an infinite variety in the texture and composition of the equipment and one gains the particular vision envisaged by it. Thus, the world provides different and distinct visions according to the individual who projects them.

Analysing a few examples, we find that to scientist, the world appears to be a field of magnificent phenomena—discovered and undiscovered—of great power and potentialities; to a peasant in a remote village, the same world is insignificant with nothing spectacular about it. Again, to a poet, the world is a manifestation of nature in luxurious and extravagant beauty, and he sees in it everywhere an expression of divinity. The same world is viewed by a pessimist as an inferno of misfortunes and tragedies. Hence, the objects remaining the same, the experiences differ from person to person, and their reactions will also differ, depending upon the constitution of their equipment.

The world, therefore, has no precise and clear-cut definition. The pattern changes as in a kaleidoscope, according to the individual vision. As for instance, a man wearing blue glasses see the world blue; upon changing them to green, he sees the world green. Realising this truth, the religious masters advised people to reform and reconstruct their inner instruments of experience so that the world can be interpreted by them in its true perspective.

Politician, Economist, and Scientist

Man, in his innocence, continues to believe in development and beautification of the external world more than in the rehabilitation of his inner personality. This has given rise to three types of workers who have been sincerely serving mankind, making this world a better place to live in. They are the economists, the politicians, ad the scientists.

The economists provide more wealth and material prosperity for people. The politicians deal with the people and improve the pattern of mutual and co-operative living. The scientists harness and tame nature for man to enjoy it. The economists, the politicians, and the scientists have achieved wonderful things in our own time, for our own happiness and for the happiness of the society.

People Still Unhappy

Now, if we were to meet these prophets of our age one by one, each would admit privately that his had been a waste of noble energies! Not that their plans, ideas and discoveries were in themselves glorious mistakes. The political visions and programmes are well based upon historical experiences of the past. The economic schemes and plans are indeed the fruits of great study and deep ponderings. The scientists, no doubt, have been very creative; they have wrest ed out of Nature many of her splendid secrets. But, they all cry, "We strive, but somehow we find we cannot bring blessings to the society, because the society in its present state is incapable of receiving the blessings we shower on them."

How does society become unfit for blessings? Why is it that people are still miserable in spite of such mighty intellects constantly working to make them happy? We will have to enquire a little more deeply to discover where exactly lies the seed of this ruinous disease.

People in today's society live ever in a state of tension, in a state of withering discord among themselves, each shattered within himself. Ever agitated and restless in their minds, ever unsatisfied with what is available in society and ever striving to cut the throats of one another, all of them always feel, in spite of all that they have, a sense of insecurity in life. Each one tries to build a wall of safety for himself with money, possessions, power, strength and social laws. Why this sad plight? Is there no escape, no remedy? Should life be ever a groping in the dark, a wasteland of strife with no reward of peace and true joy? Should there not be a full contentment of love and unreserved affection?

Where is the flaw?

When we analyse this question as true critics of life, not as pessimists judging society as doomed, but standing apartment as intelligent and kind critics, lovingly analysing life, we have to ask the question, "Where exactly is the flaw?" Vedanta, or the philosophy of India, roars, "Try not to understand the world as a separate entity, but try to understand it in relation with you. Since you alone are the object available for complete study, you can observe and fully investigate 'you-in-the-world'. Thus understand the world through you, rather than objectively looking at the world, ignoring yourself." This is quite right, as life is possible only when a person is in relationship with the world.

Let us for a moment consider what exactly the politician, the economist, and the scientist achieve for the world. Politicians order my relationship with the people around me; the economists regulate my relationship with the wealth in the country; and the scientists command my relationship with the phenomena that constitute the world about me. Thus, everywhere I am being educated on how to relate myself with the world, so that I may come to life harmoniously with the community around me.

World and Me

There are naturally two factors here—the world and me. The happenings around me and the nature of the world that lies about me are at present not directly under my control, but in case I can reorganise myself within myself and by myself, I may then gain a glorious and healthy harmony with the world in which I happen to live now. The scientists the economists and the politicians can only tell us the correct relationship with which we must live in the society with social wealth an phenomenal energies. But in all patters of relationships, we have to be healthy and intelligent in order to maintain the right relationship. If man is not rightly educated, however much the politicians, the scientists, and the economist must strive to bless the society, the society can never be blessed. It is thus clear that I am the one who keeps an intelligent relationship with the world around. If I don't keep an intelligent relationship with the world outside, I become a nuisance to the society. A lunatic does not know how to maintain a proper relationship with others; he makes himself unhappy and he makes everybody around him also unhappy.

Tune up the Personality

Therefore, the main emphasis of religion and philosophy is on the individual, to make him competent to face his environment. The spiritual scientists—the subjective scientists—strive to tune up and strengthen the personality of man, so that he may be competent in himself to face his own challenges in life.

When man comes in contact with the environment, then there arises in him his experience of joys and sorrows. The external environment keeps changing continually. It is, no doubt, to some extent controlled, regulated and improved upon by the material scientists, politicians and economists. But however conducive the political arrangement may be, whether it be socialistic or communistic, whether it be capitalistic or democratic, in any condition of poverty or riches, it is you and I who have to face life individually. No economist or politician can take away from us our sorrows and tragedies. Happiness or unhappiness depends upon our interpretation of the world in which we are living. They may try to improve the world, they may try to adjust it beautifully, but after all, it is we who have to face our own challenges, not anyone else.

In this business of living, religion and philosophy say that each individual is compelled until death to face his own challenges. You may say that all of us belong to one society or one country, we are one race, and so on. Yet each person reacts differently to the same environment. Even in your own homes, as a father you have to face certain things yourself; you cannot share many of your problems even with your own wife; your wife has her own problems which she cannot share with you; your little baby lying between you two has its own private problems. If I am ill, the society may provide a beautiful hospital and the best of doctors to attend on me. All my friends may come and cheer me up. Still, I have to face my pain myself; no one else can do it for me.

Self-Improvement is Essential

How to improve the inner health of a person so that he becomes competent to meet his own challenges—this is the problem that philosophy tries to tackle; towards the same end, religion also tries to provide a field in which each can train himself to grow in knowledge and inner strength. As a technique of self-improvement, religion and philosophy provide certain exercises by which each individual's view of life becomes more ideal. When his view becomes thus elevated, his behaviour in the world also becomes correspondingly nobler.

Philosophy is never tired of repeating that life is an orchestra; it is not solo play. Each individual must, through education and self-effort, improve his own behaviour. No doubt, he must have his own goals in life, set by himself; at the same time, he must also learn to live harmoniously with others, bringing about an orchestration in his social behaviour. This orchestration has not been achieved to a great extent in the world so far, in spite of sincere efforts.

Master of Ceremonies

The politician who is talking aloud is certainly sincere. The industrialist who is trying his best to increase production is also sincere. The trade union leaders are also a sincere lot. Each one is sincere, but since each one is singing his won song, together it becomes a noisy clamour of disturbing discordant notes, rather than a harmonious melody of beauty. Therefore, there must be a Master of Ceremonies and he must serve as a conductor, and if the conductor conducts properly, all of them can fall into a synchronised harmony. He must order and regulate each individual's play, and thus generate the dynamism of togetherness, the beauty of togetherness. For this, each must sink his arrogance and implicitly follow the signs of the conductor.

Today, there is no harmony in life, nor is there synchronisation in its activities. This is because people do not have a synchronising ideal to look up to and act, regulating their own activities for the blessing of all. This synchronisation comes into our life when we provide ourselves with an inspiring ideal. The ideal in religion is Godhood; in philosophy it is called Self-realization. As long as this ideal is not discovered and accepted, each member will tug and pull and try to work only to fulfill his own little selfish desires. Naturally, all our programmes, even at their best, prove to be nothing but calamitous follies and stupendous failures.

Subjective Evolution

Therefore, to increase our happiness in life our religion demands the sublimation of our ego, sublimation of the individuality, the sense of the little ego, by lifting our vision to a higher standpoint.

This idea of bringing harmony in society through subjective evolution is not generally recognized by the materialists, who essentially follow the objective scientists. Objective scientists believe that the world creates man and causes his happiness. No doubt, external environments are necessary for political stability, material developments, scientific growth, and social justice in the world, but human happiness does not depend merely upon all these. If that were so, for anyone living in a palatial building, resting on its comfortable furniture in a costly and luxurious environment, there will never be any tears. Alas, nowadays it is in such places that you find maximum sorrow and tears. If the environment alone governments man's happiness, then there should not be any laughter or smile in our slums, and we know that this is not the case. So it is clear that a comfortable external situation alone is not sufficient. Man must learn to live in harmony with and enjoy the external circumstances.

The Right Kind of Ambition

2011-02-28T19:35:00.001-07:00

There are different kinds of ambition, and some are more right than others. We are entitled to have ambition over what we accomplish—the lives we change, the things we bring about, the results of our actions. What we're not entitled to, though, is ambition over the means to achieving those ends. We're not entitled to covet certain posts or positions or prestige in order to effectuate those goals.

What I mean, in short, is that we are entitled to ambition over ends, not means. When we have ambition over the ends, then people come to our aid, and rally to support us. But when we think otherwise, when we treat positions and posts as ends in themselves, then we're thinking purely selfishly, and people will distance themselves from us for it. Being an important person or having an important role should be seen only as a liability to the things that you're yearning to do.

Limiting your ambition to the ends of your action is a freeing feeling. It means you're no longer worried about whether you get a certain position or not, whether you get promoted or not, whether it's even you who's the one that brings about the change that you want to see or not. At any given position, you can contribute what little or lot that you have to advancing the goals that you care about; and if the goal—and not your personal involvement in it—is what you truly care about, then you'll be happy with that.

100 posts!

2011-02-27T16:20:00.022-07:00

I've made it to 100 blog posts!

In light of the Academy Awards tonight, I'd like to take the time to thank all the people who made it possible for me to get here:

First, I'd like to thank all of my English teachers, especially through high school and college, who inculcated in me a love for good writing and writing well. My college ENGL 109H teacher, Jack Skeffington, was especially encouraging. Writing is a skill like anything else, he would say—you only get better with practice. I took that line seriously, and so this blog was born to practice my writing. [Plus, he introduced me to David Foster Wallace, and so of course I'm indebted to him for that.]

I also owe a lot to my friends, with whom I've had many conversations that have inspired blog posts. I always learn something new from all of you (and I realize how much I depend on you for ideas because when we're on school vacations I have a hard time coming up with blog posts).

To the readers and commentators on the blog, a big thank you! It really makes my day when I hear someone mention a blog post of mine they liked, or when I see a new comment on my Blogger dashboard.

And, of course, I'd be amiss if I didn't mention my family's support too. I'm not sure how aware they are of this blog, but it doesn't matter. They're responsible for supporting the person behind the blog.

Dubious Dissertations

2011-02-27T16:07:00.002-07:00

I didn't realize it was possible, but apparently you can fake your way even through a Ph.D.

Rodney Glassman, a politician from Tucson, Arizona, liked to boast during his campaign for the senate seat last year that he earned a Ph.D. in Arid Land Studies from the University of Arizona. Then a real U of A Ph.D. scholar tore his dissertation to shreds:

"Rodney Glassman got a Ph.D. in Arid Land Sciences for giving 4th graders a test, leading them through some activities, and then retesting them again to see if they scored better.

Seriously.

While most science papers have figures made up of graphs and plots, his figures are…

Pictures of kids. Pictures of teachers.

There’s nothing wrong with this of course, but keep in mind that this is a Ph.D. we are talking about.

The actual plots that he does use consist of bar plots with two categories.

The categories are “incorrect” and “correct,” which refers to how the students scored on test. Since these have to add up to 100%, one bar plot would have contained enough information… in which case a single number would have been enough, but then you would be left with 42 less pages of fluff.

What is the big result? What did Glassman discover?

Apparently, if you lead kids through some hands on activities, they learn. And sometimes their scores will change, sometimes not."

You can read the full text of the dissertation here (which strikes me as the academic equivalent of watching scenes from The Room, movie so terrible it's funny).

All around really embarrassing for the University of Arizona, yes; but surely this doesn't happen at the big prestigious places?

It turns out not. You just need to be important enough, that's all.

Part of the ongoing comedy of the Qaddafi family now includes the fact that Muamar's son, Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, plagarized his LSE Ph.D. dissertation. And it seems he was "allowed to commission research from Monitor, a consultancy, to pad out the thesis" (Schumpeter's Notebook)? Get the full details at Schumpeter's Notebook, an Economist blog, here. [And of course, in case there was any doubt, there's donations to LSE involved.]

So what? Well, if you're wise or cynical, then this is probably stale news. But in case you used to think that universities were really strict about conferring degrees, be appraised that they sometimes make "exceptions." Plus, it's pretty humorous too.

Updated Reading List - February 23rd

2011-02-23T23:34:00.001-07:00

I've updated the reading list today with some articles on education, development economics, and charities—and a really nice novel about Indian Partition. Check it out!

Society from an Indigenous Perspective

2011-02-23T22:18:00.001-07:00

Recently a friend of mine, who also happens to be a member of the Aymara community from Bolivia, introduced me to her culture's way of thinking of life. I think what she said would be very useful to share here.

The indigenous people conceive of four communities: (1) the community of humans, (2) the community of the spirits, (3) the community of nature, and (4) the community of the ancestors. These four communities should exist in balance. But when we use any one of them as an object, when we use them as an instrument for our own end, then we produce imbalance, and societal problems.

She gave monoculture as an example of this imbalance. When we don't respect the natural plant diversity found in nature, then we cause problems by exhausting the soil too quickly. Europeans, using over-exploitative farming techniques, rendered their land fallow by the 1800s, so much so that they had to import guano from South America in order to replenish the soil. The Europeans' dependence on guano led to desperation and conflict: both Bolivia and Peru fought and lost wars, orchestrated by European powers, over control of the guano trade.

I see in this four communities idea a powerful framework for synthesizing the contributions of different schools of social thought. Some thinkers have emphasized the objective—that is, the role of economic and the political structures. Others have emphasized the subtle and the subjective, questions of identity, and belonging, and spiritual fulfillment. Others still have emphasized the need to ground social organization in philosophical terms, in terms of justice and the rights of humanity. The four communities framework can embrace all these approaches. It has room for both the overt wrong in slavery (using humans as objects, and disrespecting the first community) and the wrong in appropriating history for selfish gain (which would be, I think, an example of using the community of the ancestors as objects).

This framework also provided me with another takeway. In it I see how dependent we are on the nourishment and sustenance from all the four communities. We rely on our human community to raise us and support us; we rely on the spirit community to anchor us in a sense of purpose, to give our life meaning; we we rely on nature to provide us with a hospitable habitat, resources for our use, food to eat; and we rely on the ancestors to provide us with wisdom. We like to think of ourselves as independent and self-sufficient, but we're not.

Learning about this perspective has been a salubrious breath of fresh air to my thinking, just because it's so different.

Experimental Political Philosophy

2011-02-21T15:56:00.000-07:00

For centuries, political philosophers have been on a quest to figure out the best way of organizing society; and, needing no resources to further their research other than their own brains, they have come up with a plethora of theories.

Most of the time philosophy deals with the "ought to." But in political philosophy we also find some testable hypotheses. Marxist communism is, for example, a testable hypothesis, as well as the idea that property rights will encourage owners to be more productive. From Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, I got the idea that anarchy is inherently unstable, that governments naturally emerge out of it; that too is a testable idea.

Of course, political philosopher don't usually go around testing their theories because they consider it immoral to play with the lives of other people like that.

But I think political philosophers have overlooked an obvious place where experimental political philosophy is already taking place: nation building!

An experiment in democracy in Afghanistan

With the war dragging on, and American support waning, I'm sure the Pentagon is eager and open to suggestions about how to finally make stable, legitimate governments in Afghanistan and Iraq as quick as possible. They've already spent so much time and money—I'm sure they won't mind trying something unconventional if there's a possibility it could work.

Political philosophers, this is your chance! Time to see your theories come to life!

Social Obligations, Or How You Can Back Into Paternalism Without Trying

2011-02-14T19:17:00.005-07:00

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick argues an anti-paternalist position. That is, he says we cannot prohibit activities to people for their own good or protection. But he also says that we have the right to prohibit other people from engaging in activities which impose an undue risk on ourselves. ~~I believe these two positions are inconsistent.~~ [As reviewers have pointed out, I'm not showing there's an inconsistency; and there isn't one. Rather, I'm concerned whether there's an aspect of social life that Nozick didn't seem to consider which could undermine the analysis.]

Nozick's argument assumes that the individual is the basic unit of social life. However, as I have argued elsewhere, I think it's more useful to take the household as the basic unit instead. We are born into families, and we tend to grow up, live, and die in them. Even when we reject our families and all family ties, we still naturally form "households" in our new homes. College roommates, gay couples, touring rock bands—these are all examples of how even when we don't live in traditional family structure, we still have a penchant for community living (the anthropologist is always quick to point out that "the household" is socially defined). It's an essential part of being a social human being.

Whether we like it or not, this communal living creates obligations on us. Parents obviously have duties to their children. We believe roommates should take care of each other. Figuring out the exact nature of these "family/community living" duties is difficult, but we can't deny there are duties.

Now imagine we see a father drinking too much. The anti-paternalist would say we do not have the right to interfere if he is fully aware of the risks of his actions: not drinking may be in the father's own best interest, but we have no right to stop him. However, because the father has a child, and because that child is so dependent on him, the drinking affects the child too. A drunkard father may raise his kids well, but he will probably not. In Nozick's language, that's an "undue risk," which the child has the right to prohibit. The child, not being at the age of reason, has the right to have other family members intervene on his behalf.

We cannot, then, cleanly separate the father's best interest from the son's interest. The child's best interest is having his father in the best shape as possible, since the child is dependent. This dependency means that our actions no longer concern just ourselves. We are obligated and liable to our family members, and the dangerous actions of one family member (even if they're only directed at themselves in a narrow sense) end up imposing risks on all other members. This means, generally speaking, we may prohibit others from actions against their self-interest because their self-interest is itself vital to our self-interest.

When we embed the individual in a social context, we see that he is trapped in a web of social obligations (at the very least familial obligations) and that these provide the grounds for interference by other family/community members. These social obligations may be unasked for, but they are still binding nonetheless. The only one who can be free from paternalistic pressures of any kind is the lone wolf, who does not live in any mutually supportive/dependent community. But those people are very rare.

Endnote: I see how the risk-prohibition line of reasoning can get out of hand quickly. If we are to stop all people who impose risks on us, then are we to prohibit driving? Nozick's principle of prohibition does not resolve the core issue, which is determining which kinds of risk are acceptable and which are not. Still, I think there's merit to the idea of prohibiting actions that impose undue risk to ourselves. Even if there weren't, Nozick still argues an inconsistent position, for having a family member impose risks on us is just as bad as having indepedent agents impose the risk of unreliable justice procedures.

Update (Feb. 15, 2011): I've made small changes to make sure I more accurately convey my positions.

The Limits to Meritocracy

2011-02-09T16:39:00.004-07:00

In the wake of the financial crisis, income inequality has become a sexy topic again among economists. Following a host of notable commentators on the subject (including economists like Raghuram Rajan and Daron Acemoglu and a host of politicians), The Economist has chipped into the discussion with its own article.

The Economist article calls into question the perniciousness of income inequality in itself. It argues that policymakers would do better to focus on eliminating barriers that allow the "most pernicious, unfair sorts of income disparity" instead of focusing on redistribution. Their recommendation? Allow for increased competition and social mobility. "Governments need to keep their focus on pushing up the bottom and middle rather than dragging down the top." That means reducing trade barriers, investing in access to good education for everyone, and, at heart, promoting more competition and meritocracy.

I think they have the right idea in mind. There are definitely more fair and unfair types of inequality. But I have reservations about The Economist's embrace of meritocracy. If we follow the principles of meritocracy all the way to their logical conclusion, then we end up with a grim picture.

Pure meritocracy means, for example, that parents have no way of ensuring that their children will be as well off as they are. To properly judge who deserves to get better positions and opportunities, kids grow up constantly being evaluated and competing with each other. Tensions amongst parents and kids rise to a boiling point when success, or getting ahead, becomes a zero-sum game, where the success of my friend only implies one less opportunity for myself.

Competition is not only a benefit, as The Economist sees it, but also a cost. For some people, competition is a healthy motivator for them to develop their natural abilities. But for most people, it is a form of coercion to work harder than they wouldn't want to, for the sake of positions they otherwise wouldn't aspire to.

High social mobility (in itself a desirable thing) has the cost of intense competition. We already see an example of what that kind of intense competition would like in primary schools in New York City, where some parents are spending thousands of dollars on test prep sessions for their 4 year-olds in order to ensure that they make it into the city's gifted kindergarten program. When I saw an article about this in the New York Times, I was prompted to write a post about the paradoxical nature of a middle class that lives amongst plenty, but which acts as it were fighting for its very survival.

There are limits to how much meritocracy we're willing to tolerate. At some point, the burden of competition weighs down on the benefits of increased/equal opportunity. A world where people are heavily advantaged by their intellectual endowments is not really fairer than a world where people are heavily advantaged by their wealth endowments.

In the end, though, my point against The Economist is pretty weak: I agree with their main thrust, that we should remove people that systematically deny people opportunities. I just want to make sure that we're careful not to rush headstrong into meritocracy either.

Update (March 14, 2011):
John Rawls gives a much stronger argument against meritocracy in A Theory of Justice:

"[In meritocracy] there exists a marked disparity between the upper and lower classes in both means of life and the rights and privileges of organizational authority. The culture of the poorer strata is impoverished while that of the governing technocratic elite is securely based on the service of the national ends of power and wealth. Equality of opportunity means an equal chance to leave the less fortunate behind in the personal quest for influence and social position." (106-107, my emphasis)

So the complaint is not so much that meritocracy makes people work too hard, but that it punishes people for not being bright. This is why the competition that I stressed in the post is a problem: given the severe disparities in life chances that a pure meritocracy produces, one can't afford not to make it.

Religion and Rhetoric, part 2

2011-02-08T23:28:00.002-07:00

My last post, Religion and Rhetoric, generated a number of comments, and I'd like to follow up on them. I'm glad to get some discussion going on this blog! I won't be able to get to everything that was brought up in the comments, but I'll try to address the main points.

Before I do so, though, I need to clarify some things I think about religion. First, I don't think it's just like science. The main difference I see is that science concerns "objective" reality—the world as we see it—whereas religion concerns "subjective" reality—the glasses we wear to see the world. Given the same facts of reality, people can interpret the situation differently. You can face the same challenges of life either grudingly and despairingly, or with equipoise and confidence. I think the purpose of religion is to move us from the first category to the second.

Second, I see religion in purely instrumental terms. Like the pole valuter who uses the pole to cross the high bar, we use religion as a prop to help us over this mental "bar" that we can't surpass without. But once the pole valuter crosses the bar (i.e. come to realize God, become completely purified, etc.) then he has to let go of the pole, otherwise he'll come crashing down. Likewise, at that point, when religion has no more practical use, then we should not rigidly hold on to the habits that religion inculcates. I think we should think of religion (defined as the rituals, practices, commandments associated with spirituality) as an instrument to realize the truths that spirituality (aka religious theory) talks of.

Third, I think we have to separate the wheat from the chaff in religious doctrine. You don't have to believe all parts of a religious doctrine to subscribe to that religion. Because religions are meant to cater to a mass audience, they contain within them various levels of explanations, which vary in logical rigor depending on the mental capacity of the devotee. More simple-minded people won't be interested in deep, rigorous philsophical debates; they find supernatural explanations/appeal to a personal god/etc. more appealling, and it's for those people that these reasons are crafted. [This is why religions offer what I called "child" answers in my original post.] But if you want logical rigor, then you can find that too—in Hinduism we have the Upanishads, which are incredibly difficult to parse but read just like philosophical treatises, and base their explanations on pure logic and natural laws.

Think of the distinction between "high" and "low" explantations in terms of math. Only few mathematicians dedicate themselves to rigorously proving mathematics; the rest of us take their results for granted and just use it. Example: engineers use calculus all the time without having to learn the measure theory and real analysis that supports the validity of their results. We even use shortcuts that aren't perfectly rigorous. Example: we treat (dy/dx) as a fraction sometimes even though there's handwaving there.

Now, an example for religion. I'll talk about Hinduism since that's what I know best. In Hinduism have elaborate rituals, called yagnas. People are told growing up that if they do these yagnas then they will get good merits that will allow them to go to heaven (or get a favorable next birth). This supernatural explanation is, of course, not logically satisfying. For people who press, swamis will explain that the whole affair is 1) practice in self-less activity and 2) a visual symbol and reminder of the process of purification. First, to put a yagna together requires the coordination and cooperation of a lot of people. People are supposed to contribute what they have to the effort (labor, resources, energy) in order to pull it off, and they're supposed to give selflessly and willingly so that the yagna is a success. When we a do a yagna, then, we get a reminder to work in this "yagna-spirit" in all aspects of our life. Second, the yagna itself is an elaborate symbol. I'm not knowledgeable enough to go into the full details, but basically the idea is that we are burning our ignorance in the fire of knowledge.

So, in answer to Derek's question, yes, I do think you can choose to disbelieve certain (supernatural) aspects of the religion and still proclaim yourself a believer. The reason is that those explanations were not meant for you. And I don't think this damages the credibility of the religion itself because the supernatural parts of religion are secondary and periphery, and the core tenets don't (shouldn't) rely on these explanations anyway. I realize this isn't the way religion often presents itself. Christians, for example, will say believing in the resurrection is an essential component of Christianity—that it's what validates their beliefs. But I think if religion wants to serve the needs of a modern, scientific society, then it should adapt itself in this direction.

What then makes a believer? I don't think of belief as a static, binary state (either you believe or you don't), but rather as a grey-scale continuum. Religion is a prescribed path of study, and though you can start out a skeptic, or a disbeliever of the whole thing, your beliefs can change over time as you come (maybe) to embrace it. What matters whether you're a believer or not is, I think, whether you're applying yourself to that study.

Both of the commenters questioned my equating faith in science with faith in religion. To be honest, I don't think they're exactly the same, but I wanted to make a point that religion doesn't require blind faith in hocus-pocus. That's because I come from the "high"/"low" explanations school of thought, so when I'm dialoging with religion at my own level, then I find that faith in religion is not illogical. I believe that there are deep explanations for why we do the things we do in religion if we know where to look. Plus, not believing in supernatural stuff doesn't mean I don't have faith in my religion.

The difference I see between faith in science and faith in religion is this: because religion deals with a subjective, not objective, reality, its truths are not externally demonstratable. Even if these religious techniques make me fundamentally happy and satisfied, no one will be able to know the full extent of this inner change except for myself. That's the point where religion requires more faith than science.

I'll stop there for now. As a final mark, I'd suggest that people curious in religious philosophy should become well-versed in a non-Semetic religions. I think seeing an entirely new conceptualization of religion gives a better sense of what religion is really about, and what parts about it are important and which ones are not. Plus, there is actually a lot of overlap (in what's important) between Eastern and Semetic traditions—at least that's what Christians have told me when I try to explain what Hinduism is about.

Religion and Rhetoric

2011-02-06T00:50:00.012-07:00

[Recently I've been reading a lot of philosophical anarchism, which is all about questioning the authority of the state. Locke, Nozick, and others make sophisticated arguments to defend the legitimacy of the state's authority. No one seems to be doing the same for religion, though. This is my attempt at filling that gap. Comments are very welcome.]

Where does religion's authority come from? All religions proclaim to tell the Truth, but if you are to ask an average religious person why you should believe they'll say, because The Holy Book said so. If you question further they'll say, you just need to have to have faith. The discusion usually stops there. Intelligent people, who need to have good reason before believing in something, have naturally come to have totally written off religion.

I think people who offer these sorts of explanations do religion a large disservice. It's mispresentation, really. This answer is the child's answer, but for some reason it's still pretty much the only one offered to curious and skeptical people.

The adult answer grounds itself in the idea that religion is rhetoric. Religion is essentially an argument for a way of life, and like all arguments it needs to develop its logos, pathos, and ethos. The first two elements are obvious components of religions. It's the last one, ethos, that seems more elusive.

So where is the appeal to ethos in religion? The answer is that it comes from the same place that ethos always comes from: the identity of the speaker. What religious leaders so often fail to mention—and what holds religion together in the first place—is the credibility, respect, and trustworthiness of both the founder of the religion and the religious leaders who maintain it. If religious figureheads preach a standard that they don't live up to themselves, then thinking people will naturally reject that religion as false.

In Hinduism, there is a saying: When the student asks for guidance, the teacher tells her to go to the Scripture, and the Scripture tells her to go to the teacher. The idea is that the two are mutually reinforcing; the theoretical ideas of moral behavior find a living example in the teacher.

The purpose of religion is to make us better human beings. It's a system for self-improvement and inner development and transformation. Of course, people may become worse in the name of religion, but there are also lots of quiet but inspiring inner self-unfoldments taking place because of it too. Swami Chinmayananda, my own spiritual teacher, made the point that we can't judge religion by how bad religious people are, since after all if they had nothing to improve upon then religion would do them any good. Instead, he said, we should focus on the before-and-after, i.e. how much did they change by sincerely applying religious practices. That's the real test. In that sense, if there is even one person who has achieved significant self-improvement, then that validates the religion: it means that the religion, as a system for self-improvement, actually works.

Faith plays an important role in religion, but it's hardly anything more special than the faith we require to function in everyday life. In religion we need faith because we can't travel back in time to verify the accuracy of scriptures; because we have to trust our religious advisors; and, most importantly, because sometimes religious doctrine contradicts our intuitions. But we also have faith the same kind of faith in the science textbooks we use, in our spouses, and in our doctors and our medicines. It's nothing new.

Thus, choosing to follow a religion can be a very reasonable, considered decision. If I see that in history certain spiritual men and women have led unparalleled moral lives, and that they explain their thought processes, and that many people over the centuries have come to live great, inspired lives by following this system, then these present good reasons to me for trying the religion too. Why not? I can always test it out for a year, sincerely, under the direction of knowledgeable people, and see if it produces any results.

So where does religious authority come from? Consent, of course (the same place political authority comes from). We give religion our consent when we decide that sometimes religion knows what we want from life and how to achieve it more so than our own (faulty) intuitions do.

Hindu Syncretism

2011-01-27T23:55:00.001-07:00

What if Hinduism was brought from India to the West on a large scale? How would it change as it mixed with local cultures?

Ashok Krish supplies us with a potential answer. He's uploaded some shlokas (Hindu hymns) and gives a (humorous) sense of how they'd transform in foreign lands:

If, for example, Hinduism came to Mexico, then the classic Sri Venkateswara Subprabhatam—

—might sound like this instead:

Casa Venkatesa

And if Sonia Gandhi brought back the Mahishasuramardini Stotram...

...to Italy, then might it sound like this?

Mozzarellasura Linguini Stotram

Rethinking David Foster Wallace

2011-01-21T09:41:00.003-07:00

For personal friends and followers of the blog, it comes as no surprise that I'm a rabid fan of David Foster Wallace. He's not only my favorite writer, but also my intellectual hero for his unbridled sincerity and his unmatched attention to detail. So when my friends at The Desert Lamp, a blog about U of A politics and other miscellaneous stuff, shared this link to an interview with DFW about his nonfiction work, I, of course, gobbled it up.

Normally I read DFW interview super attentively—hanging on to every word and dumbstruck in the the face of what I see to be true, unequivocal genius.

This time, though, when I read the interview I started to see him in a more complete and mortal-like light. I became aware, for example, of his habit of disparaging his own abilities ("I'm not being very articulate. I'll be honest."), which is annoying for its own sake and also because I think I've picked it up too. He comes off as frustratingly unconfident. And, in an all too sad way, his brilliant and perspicacious analyses keep on falling into pessimistic and depressive ruts.

I don't want to be too harsh, especially when DFW was already (as always and of course) aware of these flaws anyway. From the interview linked above:

I think another reason why I'm not doing any more of these [non-fiction pieces] for a while is...there really was kind of a shtick emerging. And the shtick was somewhat neurotic, hyper-conscious guy, like, showing you how weird this thing is that not everybody thinks is weird.

I think we face a constant temptation to turn off our critical mind, to latch on to some source of Truth (books that fit our ideology, religion, Glenn Beck, etc.) and accept it unthinkingly. It's a really hard temptation to fight because you can succumb to it without even knowing you did so. But that's precisely what I did w/r/t DFW, which is supremely ironic, because it happens to go against DFW's entire style and ethos and creed. In idolizing DFW I made the mistake of idolizing everything about him.

I'll close with a quote from his famous commencement address that reminds us to be constantly vigilant over our own minds and highlights one of his particularly good parts—his hallmark trait, perhaps—sincerity:

Given the triumphal academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default-setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what's going on inside me. As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: "Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master." This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.

The Pecking Order of the Social Sciences

2010-12-22T20:37:00.000-07:00

The Google Books Ngram Viewer confirms it—there is a clear pecking order in the social sciences. Here we see graphs of how frequently the following words (case sensitive) appeared in 4% of all English Language books published in the world.

See larger version here.

It's hard to read, so I'll read it off: we have economics on top, followed by sociology, then anthropology, and lastly, political science. The people have decided which subjects are most worth talking about!

I'm not well versed in the history of these disciplines to explain any patterns that may appear in these graphs, but there are some features of it that catch my eye. I find it fascinating that even though all the keywords started out neck-and-neck in the late 1800s, they ended up diverging completely. I'm also surprised to see political science at the bottom; though, admittedly, most of political science strikes me as recycled and refurbished economics/sociology.

Economics, of course, is king. I've heard professors (indirectly) explain why this is by saying that economics provides a really powerful predictive framework. It's because of this power, for example, that economics has a habit of colonizing areas of research that were previously the domain of other fields (e.g. Becker's study of crime coopted the study of deviance from sociology).

But I think another less-discussed reason why economics is so dominant is that the allocation problem is the most basic and most fundamental problem of society. It's the academic discipline that rests at the bottom of Maslow's Pyramid, as it were: first we want food on the table, a roof over our head, a way to earn a decent living, and then we can talk about the subtleties of cultural sovereignty.

The Reading List

2010-12-22T01:00:00.000-07:00

In our continued effort to provide you with the foremost intellectual experience, we here at kmthinking.blogspot.com have come up with our latest feature on the blog: the Reading List.

Here we'll list our roundup of thought-provoking and/or generally worthwhile reading materials, accompanied by short reviews and synopses.

We hope you find something interesting here that you'd recommend to your friends. As always, we welcome feedback and suggestions.

Review: Black Swan

2010-12-20T20:02:00.000-07:00

I went to see this movie not knowing what I was in for, but that's probably the only way I would have seen it anyway: it's a real mind-f@#%.

The premise is simple: anxiety, tension, and rivalry in a NYC ballet company's production of Swan Lake. But the director, Darren Arenofsky, takes this simple story and makes it a deep and haunting and rich.

The plot goes like this: Nina (played by Natalie Portman) is a ballerina driven to perfection, and yearns for the lead role as the Swan Queen in the company's upcoming production of Swan Lake. She auditions for the role, and she gets it (not before the director tries to get some of her), but with the condition that she needs to fix the weakness in her performance. The Swan Queen part comprises two roles, the White Swan and the Black Swan; and though Nina plays the White Swan to perfection, she has trouble connecting with the dark, imperfect, sensual side of herself to play the Black Swan. At the same time, a new ballerina, Lily (played by Mila Kunis), has joined the company, and she has all the dark edgy qualities required of Nina. Nina's mind starts to buckle under the stress: she deliriously imagines that Lily keeps trying to take her place, and she begins to rebel increasingly violently against her controlling and suffocating ex-ballerina mother. The movie follows her journey into the dark side and her spiraling psychosis.

It's difficult for me to explain why the movie was so scary, but I think the main reason is that in this case the threat is internal. You can always run away from an axe-murderer, but you can never run away from your own mind. Plus, the visuals were really gruesome, and unrelenting. This wasn't a movie that had a rising action, climax, and denouement; instead, the tension only increased and increased as the film went on, until it released spectacularly at the end.

I try to come away from these kinds of heavy films with some lessons, and also I think this film, which is so clearly a glimpse into the mind's abyss, particularly invites it. So here's what I learned:

1. Suppressing any aspect of your personality is not healthy.

At the director's urging, Nina connects with her dark side. But since she had neglected it so much, once she begins to make that connection it overcomes her. Her personality swings to the other extreme and she loses control over her mental equipoise. She isn't able to handle the new ideas and emotions and thoughts that are engulfing her.

2. Perfectionism is an ugly trait.

The crowd that watches Nina's astounding performance only sees the final result, but through the film we witness what the cost is of the perfectionism that leads to that performance. It costs Nina her mental stability—paintings come alive and taunt her, blood stains her hands, she imagines stabbings and voices shouting "I'm not good enough." It costs her her relationship with her mother. It costs her her relationships at the ballet company, where she constantly feels alone and threatened. And ultimately, it costs her ballet: something she presumably picked up for enjoyment becomes mental torture and a death sentence.

Less philosophically:

1. Ballet can be quite vertiginous.

Arenofsky's cinematography does a good job of showing just how alive and quick ballet can be. I've seen a production, and it looks rather static-y and calm from a distance, but after watching Black Swan I realize the dancers themselves experience a quiet whirlwind.

The Geopolitics of Google Maps

2010-12-19T22:46:00.006-07:00

The Google Maps project started out innocently enough. When the company launched Google Maps, it made the following announcement on its official blog:

We think maps can be useful and fun, so we've designed Google Maps to simplify how to get from point A to point B. Say you're looking for "hotels near LAX." With Google Maps you'll see nearby hotels plotted right on a crisp new map (we use new rendering methods to make them easier to read). Click and drag the map to view the adjacent area dynamically - there's no wait for a new image to download...[read more].

But like with a lot of other things that Google does to simplify people's lives, this venture has also gotten the company embroiled in controversy: Google Maps, a project with purely geeky and cartographical intentions in mind, has become the latest frontier in boundary disputes.

Recently, this issue got a lot of attention with the Nicaraguan-Costa Rican flare up. When a Nicaraguan general was asked why his troops were stationed on the Costa Rican side of the border, he cited Google's erroneous version of the map, which showed his position to be on the Nicaraguan side. This led to the Costa Rican government to petition Google to change the map, while Nicaragua filed a counter-petition to keep it the same.

The incorrect Nicaragua-Costa Rica boundary

Even though the general's answer was completely disingenuous (it was just a pretense really—Nicaraguan troops stayed put even after the mistake become clear), it became an occassion to reopen this old controversy. The blog Ogle Earth, which is dedicated in fact to how "internet mapping tools like Google Earth affect science and society," has an excellent post that tries to get at the real historical motivation for the general's action.

The Google geopolitics problem is not just restricted to Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The Indian ministers have become savvy to what the media calls Google's "3-map policy" regarding the Indian border:

The problem is that Google shows three separate maps of India depending on which version you use. The Indian version shows India as Indians know it, but the Chinese version shows parts belonging to China, and the American version shows all those areas disputed. It seems, the reporter says dismissively, that Google is giving everyone what they want—which means a company like Google which tries to stay out of politics and keep everyone happy really can't win any which way.

I have a hunch that these controversies are only just starting. Border disputes have always been around, but now the stakes are much higher. Because Google Maps are the standard maps for most people around the world, border conflicts are no longer just about reconciling with the neighbors but also about protecting your national integrity and pride in front of the entire world. If Google's going to continue with its Maps project, than it should expect more angry phone calls, and should probably set up a Political Affairs department to handle them.

Understanding the economy from the bottom up

2010-12-01T12:43:00.007-07:00

Anthropologists have developed a framework that I think would be instructive to economists. The Livelihoods Framework, as it is known, was developed by scholars of development to compare the development status of two unrelated groups. But I think it offers general insights on how economies work.

For the Livelihoods Framework, the fundamental unit of analysis is the household. Households are socially defined, and include just the nuclear family or a large network of relatives, blood-related or otherwise, depending on the culture.

Households control assets. These are the bundles of goods/abilities/talents/resources that households use in order to survive, and meet their livelihood goals. Because these resources used for the purpose of gaining access to other resources, they are known as varying forms of capital.

Anthropologists have identified around six main forms of capital:

Natural capital: Resources/access that come from geography. This includes the land that a household owns, or access to river or forests.
Physical capital: The structures and equipment that a household may own. This includes a house, machinery, and wells, for example.
Human capital: The skills and abilities of the people in the household. This may be simply having access to labor, from the kids, or also the levels of education, street-smarts, or health that the members of the household may have.
Social capital: The ability to mobilize social connections to procure resources. For example, a family in tough times may be able to lean on their relatives, or their friends.
Economic capital: Financial resources. It refers to both the households' income stream, as well as the material assets it can sell in order to raise money.
Political capital: The ability to procure resources through the political structure. Political capital takes the form of well-connectedness, or access to political institutions.

Households operate within a specific geographical, historical, political, economic and cultural context. This context determines the kinds and levels of assets available to households.

Livelihood strategies are the way in which households mix and match assets to meet their needs and goals. The household's set of available strategies is constrained by the processes and structures which govern the society. These are the rules, norms, and institutions that direct households to act in a certain way.

As a result of employing strategies, households face outcomes. These outcomes refer to the goals that households seek—health, education, financial stability, security, a sense of place. These are the true measures of a household's success.

The following is a standard graphic summarizing the Livelihoods Framework:

What can economists learn from this model?

1. Economists should think of replacing the individual with the household as the fundamental unit of analysis.

Society is not just a collection of individuals trading and bargaining with each other. Rather, we are parceled into small, socialist blocs, called families, which govern and constrain our actions. Hayek also recognized the divide that exists between family life and social life:

...we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we were to apply the unmodiﬁed, uncurbed rules (of caring intervention to do visible ‘good’) of the…small band or troop, or...our families…to the (extended order of cooperation through markets), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were to always apply the (noncooperative) rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. (The Fatal Conceit, p 18; qtd. Vernon Smith's Nobel Lecture).

Thus the market isn't reducible down to the individual (nor, as Hayek argues, should it), as classic economic models assume. To be honest, I'm not sure whether this really makes a differences, since we can think of individuals in the market as representing the interests of the whole household, but I think it might, and it's worth exploring. Also, it's useful for us economists to ask ourselves why we are naturally averse to using market principles within families.

2. The assets that households hold are diverse.

I think we often think of money as the only way households can procure resources, but this model makes it clear that there are a number of other ways too. Economists should see the wealth of households in a more holistic light, and see beyond income flows. If, for example, a certain program increases household income, but decrease its natural capital, or its social capital, then we need to be able to recognize a potential net loss in wealth.

3. The importance of consumption is overstated.

This is an old refrain, but the model offers an alternative. Consumption is for the sake of fulfilling outcomes, and these outcomes should be the metrics we use to judge economic success. These other metrics aren't separate from the economy, but an integral part of it.

4. An economy is not only a distribution of resources, but also a distribution of livelihoods.

Economy is the way we live our lives. It's how we decide what careers we pursue, the places we live, the industries we establish, and the way we spend our leisure time. It's what we think our job is, not only in the market, but in life. These concepts are so fundamental to our being that we have a hard time adjusting to change. This is why economic changes are so difficult and, at times, heart-wrenching.

In The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs talks about his role in advising the Russian government during the transformation from communist planning to markets. His description of the challenges that Russia faced really illustrate this point.

The transformation would be the hardest in modern history because the gap between where Russia was and where it needed to be—for domestic peace, stability and economic development--was as vast as imaginable...People were literally in the wrong places. They were in Siberia, living in large secret cities that had been created for military purposes. They were working in heavy industries utterly dependent on the massive use of oil and gas reserves, as if there was no limit to those resources....No economic policy could be massive enough to relocate people, factories, and assets in a matter of days or weeks or even a few years. (pgs. 134-135)

That's why when we craft economic policy, we need to be very careful and judicious. We're pulling the strings of peoples' livelihoods.

Irrational Lawsuits

2010-12-01T10:30:00.001-07:00

From the New York Times, we have here a distinctly American litigation case: a New York judge has determined that a 4-year-old who accidently hit an old woman in a bike race with a friend can be sued for negligence.

Here's a quick overview of the story:

Juliet Breitman, 4, and Jacob Kohn, 5, were racing their bicycles, under the supervision of their mothers, Dana Breitman and Rachel Kohn, on the sidewalk of a building on East 52nd Street. At some point in the race, they struck an 87-year-old woman named Claire Menagh, who was walking in front of the building and, according to the complaint, was “seriously and severely injured,” suffering a hip fracture that required surgery. She died three months later of unrelated causes.

Her estate sued the children and their mothers, claiming they had acted negligently during the accident. In a response, Juliet’s lawyer, James P. Tyrie, argued that the girl was not “engaged in an adult activity” at the time of the accident — “She was riding her bicycle with training wheels under the supervision of her mother” — and was too young to be held liable for negligence.

[...] But Justice Wooten declined to stretch that rule to children over 4. On Oct. 1, he rejected a motion to dismiss the case because of Juliet’s age, noting that she was three months shy of turning 5 when Ms. Menagh was struck, and thus old enough to be sued.

Mr. Tyrie “correctly notes that infants under the age of 4 are conclusively presumed incapable of negligence,” Justice Wooten wrote in his decision, referring to the 1928 case. “Juliet Breitman, however, was over the age of 4 at the time of the subject incident. For infants above the age of 4, there is no bright-line rule.”

The lawyer blogs are abuzz with this story, and thousands of other laypeople have already given their opinions. At the risk of being redudant, here's my two cents:

In none of the blog posts and op-eds that I read did I find a discussion of whether litigation is even a valid means of redress. Since the money can't bring back life, these kinds of lawsuits seem to be principally about deterring people from acting negligantly by penalizing them for doing so. But even if we determine the child is fully negligent, lawsuits can't punish her in a meaningful way. Four-year-olds have no income of their own to be deprived of. They don't even know what "litigation" means.

This case is by no means an isolated incident of irrational litigation; the U.S. seems to be an especially fertile breeding ground for it. It's easy to chalk it up to some cultural flaw, but I suspect there's something deeper going on—I just haven't had the time to research it properly.

Blast from the Past

2010-11-11T23:15:00.000-07:00

Did you know that the New York Times maintains online searchable archives all the way back to 1851?

Here, for example, is an article I found while researching U.S.-South American trade relations:

It's funny to see how news from so long ago reads as if it were contemporary. At the bottom of the page, in small print, the publication date reads: May 24, 1914.

From the artist's rendering, it seems like the Plaza de Mayo has seen better days. For some reason the full-bodied trees shown here have been replaced with gangly palm trees:

The Mathematics of Social Life

2010-11-04T22:04:00.001-07:00

Introduction
We can think of a person's personality as a vector in Fⁿ. The dimensions of F represent the dimensions of the goals and interests that one might entertain—what one values, broadly speaking. Some people are more interested in pursuing money than others; some people have more an inclination towards spirituality than others; some people give more importance to their family than others. Thus, we can say that money, spirituality, and family represent some of the nearly infinite dimensions of this space (but we think of n as finite for simplicity). The zero vector would signify balance within all dimensions.

Like R, F is continuous, infinite, and contains postive and negative values; just as value traits come in shades of grey, have no known limits, and always work in pairs of opposites. Although personality doesn't just include values, they are its most important component. Values are what drive action and shape our life's trajectory, which is what we're interested in modeling.

These personality vectors represent a static snapshot of a person's personality. However, people's goals and interests are, of course, constantly changing: at any given moment, a person has a certain place she's at in life, and a certain place she'd like to go. This defines what we'll call a change vector in Fⁿ. The vector points towards the new personality vector one wants to have, and the magnitude represents the rate at which the change is happening. Continuing the previous example, we can say that a person with a penitant heart who wants to focus more attention on his family rather than on money would have a change vector that points 1) less on the money dimension 2) more on the spirtuality dimension and 3) more on the family dimension.

Over the course of our lives, the personality vector traces a trajectory through Fⁿ that describes how our goals and interests have changed. These trajectories are useful in describing, characterizing, and categorizing people's lives. When we say, for example, that someone has meandered through life, we may mean that the distance traveled along the trajectory is much larger than the distance traveled in Fⁿ.

The change vectors are first derivatives of our life's trajectory. At each moment in time, the vectors are tangent to the trajectory, and mark where we're immediately heading. Because our personalities have inertia, our life's trajectory follows the vector unless the vector changes: until we receive some new information, or have some new experience, our thought pattern will not change.

Society
A society is a well-defined set of people. Societies can be both big and small, ranging from small towns, to nations, to the entire world. Societies can also be defined in terms other than geography, such as national origin, occupation, or marital status.

Societies do not have a uniform distribution of personalities. Instead, they tend to cluster in certain regions of the space (this is where stereotypes come from). We can describe the distribution of personalities of a society with a density map on Fⁿ.

Not all people within a society are equally important to us; we tend to think that some have more of a claim on our consideration than others. A social network is thus defined as a graph of all social claims on oneself that one considers meaningful. The graph is organized as a series of concentric rings, with us at the center and each progressively farther rings representing more distant/less valued relationships.

Hypothesis on Nature vs. Nurture
When we are born, we have an initial personality vector in Fⁿ. This is the nature component, since it limits the possibility of our life's trajectory to within the neighborhood of that point. However, once that point is established, we can move in any direction. This is the nurture component.

An analogy is a cow tied by a rope to a tree: the cow can only move as far as the rope will let her, but within the radius of the rope she can move in any direction.

It's hard to say whether babies are born with change vectors as well, i.e. whether they have a conception of what they want to do with life. But even if they did, it would be almost inseparable from the immediate influence that the family exerts on the newborn.

Interaction
Interaction is comprised of two components: liking and influence. They are separate matters, since we are often influenced by people that we do not necessarily like.

We often gauge how much we like something or someone by how much it aligns with our goals and interests. That is, liking is a measure of the similarity between two vectors, i.e. the angle between them. An angle of 0 measures complete liking and an angle of pi measures complete dislike. If a vector is perpendicular to another, then it is neither heading in a similar direction on any dimension, nor is it heading away; perpendicular vectors thus signal indifference.

Note that we are talking about personalities, not genes. People with very similar personalities may look completely different, talk different, and manifest their goals and interests in different ways—but their goals and interests are similar.

Liking, like influence, happens not just through face-to-face encounters with other people, but also by learning about the work they produce. Our work crystallizes our personality in time, making it possible for distant, unknown people to like and be influenced by us, even without directly meeting. Reading the works of an author reveals the idea vector of the author at that time; learning about the social works of a great leader is a way of meeting their vector.

Influence is a question of what influences the change vectors. Since influence can occur to varying degrees, we can think of it as lying on a spectrum. One one extreme, we have complete influence, where both parties fully and equally influence each other. In complete influence, two people leave the interaction with the same new "goal" personality vector, one that is the sum of their previous individual personality vectors: components of the vector moving in opposite directions would cancel out, and components moving in the same direction would build on each other. However, because personality change is continuous, and occurs over time, the change in personality vector is not instantaneous. Instead, after the interaction, both parties leave with change vectors that now point towards their new goal personality vector. Over time, if these change vectors are unaltered, then their personalities will become the same.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have a complete lack of influence, where the interaction does not affect the change vectors at all. Most interaction is either of this latter type (since we can't afford to constantly reevaluate ourselves every time we interact), or somewhere in between.

Because individuals have free will, personality change is a stochastic event, and hard to pin down. However, we do know that a person is more likely to be influenced one direction or another based on the distribution of her social network within Fⁿ.

We can simplify the process of influence by thinking of it as a random event where a person chooses to be influenced from someone in her social network. That is, every t periods a person decides to be influenced. She samples someone at random from her social network and is influenced, let's say completely influenced. Because her social network is unevenly distributed, she is more likely to sample certain people over others, causing her to be more influenced in a certain direction. The family, as a child's first social network, has the first say in influencing the child's change vector. However, as the child begins her process of socialization within larger society, the familial claims weaken and other people gain stronger influence.

Social Life
When we find ourselves in good company, it is because the personalities of the people involved complement each other. Similarly, in tight knit circles of friends, the personality vectors are linearly dependent on each other.

Social cliques are subspaces of Fⁿ. These cliques are, by definition, closed and bounded, and represent clusters of a socially defined personality type.

Large social gatherings, such as parties, are also home to the formation of subspaces. Like-minded people tend to gravitate towards each other and form social circles, and at times these circles don't even mix. A good party, though, is one where the maximal subspace of the party includes every member, meaning that everyone has interest in each other.

History
We can think of all the people in the world as also representing a bounded region in Fⁿ. The edges of the space represent the boundaries of the present human experience. As people have interacted more and more throughout history, they have provided more and more opportunities for ideas to change, pushing personality vectors in new directions and expanding the human experience.

The region of high density of a density map on all of humanity is the zeitgeist of the era. It represents the certain general paradigm of thinking, acting, and being for people at that time.

Photoshop Lab, Volume 3

2010-10-31T21:59:00.001-07:00

I found a website with a lot of cool Photoshop tutorials (see here), which has inpired me to create the following new set of projects. Enjoy!

I used this tutorial for the elephant one and this tutorial (plus this one, for the background) for the boxer one.

Typography

2010-10-28T12:34:00.002-07:00

Much to my surprise, I'm finding that learning Photoshop hasn't just been about picking up some cool technical skills, but also about discovering this whole new world of graphic design, a world that produces all the visual media I consume all day everyday but which I've taken entirely for granted.

Today's latest discovery: typography.

typography |tīˈpägrəfē|
noun
the art or process of setting and arranging types and printing from them.

Typography has two parts to it. On one hand, it's about the design and creation of new fonts. This is, perhaps, the world's most underappreciated art form. I never thought of type design myself until I got into Photoshop and looked up the blog I Love Typography, where you see how the process of type creation involves all the trappings of traditional artwork, including sketches, concept drawings, and numerous edits. Typography is also perhaps the world's most useful art, since it's what drives all the blogs, advertisements, flyers, and other visual media that we use. It's nice then that typography has gotten a recent boost from the MacArthur Foundation, which recently awarded a grant to type designer Matthew Carter, known for fonts like Georgia (this one) and Verdana (this one).

The second side of typography is making pictures out of words. I've really taken a liking to it. Here are some of my favorite examples, collected from around the Internet:

You can find a lot more examples of stunning typographic artwork here. Here's my own attempt at the art form:

I based the design on what I learned in this tutorial.

Making Sense of Political Campaigns

2010-10-23T18:35:00.004-07:00

The mid-term elections are coming up in only a few weeks, which means our nation's ritual democratic exercise in absurdity—that is, political campaigning—is fully underway.

In trying to figure out why these campaigns always become so ridiculous (e.g. by running ads that compare the opponent to the Taliban, or start off with "I am not a witch"), it's easy to blame voter stupidity. It's tempting to believe that if only everyone were smart and educated, politicians wouldn't be able to confuse or fear-monger voters so easily, and, hopefully, we could have a less chaotic democracy.

However, William Riker, a political philosopher at the University of Rochester, argues convincingly that democracy can be inherently unstable. His analysis in Liberalism Against Populism, which I present below, applies Social Choice theory to democracy in a fascinating way. It's one of the most powerful theories I've heard.

Preliminaries
Riker employs a lot of technical vocabulary and notation, which I'll define here first.

X=(x, y, z, ...) represents a set of alternatives. Alternatives can be anything—bundles of goods, motions on the House floor, values, or candidates running for election.

Preference is a relation between two alternatives, with three possibilities: either xPy (x is preferred to y), xIy (x is just as good as y), or xRy (x is at least as good as y; this condition is also known as weak preference, with xPy representing strong preference).

Rationality requires that preferences be complete, reflexive, and transitive. Completeness means that a person should be able to come up with a preference relation for any two options. Reflexive means that an option x is at least as good as itself (this is to ensure people aren't schizophrenic, basically). Transitive means that if xPy and yPz, then xPz.¹

A Social Welfare Function (SWF) is a function that takes a set of individual preferences and gives an overall group preference. If, for example, I'm in a club with three members that has to decide on a name, and there are three names avaiable, then the SWF takes our individual rankings and comes up with a ranking for the group. For this ranking to make any sense, then we require it to follow the same rationality conditions that we require the individual members themselves—completness, reflexivity, and transitivity.

Condorcet Voting is a democratic procedure for choosing among three or more alternatives that involves taking simple majority votes on all pairwise alternatives. To illustrate, we have three people—A, B, and C—who are choosing among alternatives x, y, and z. They have the following preference orderings:

A: x y z
B: y x z
C: z x y

When we take pairwise votes we ask how many people prefer x to y, y to z, and z to x. In this example it turns out that on the vote x or y, x wins; on the vote y or z, y wins; and on the vote z or x, x wins. This gives us social preferences of xPy, yPz, and xPz, which together gives us a social ordering of x, y, z; x is the winner.

The Condorcet Voting Paradox is when individual preferences are such that the Condorcet Voting procedure doesn't yield a transitive social ordering, but rather cycles. If, for example, our three people (A, B, C) have the following preferences,

A: x y z
B: y z x
C: z x y

then we have xPy, yPz, zPx, or in other words, x beats y, y beats z, but z beats x! The social ordering is cyclical, x, y, z, x, which makes each option equally valid as the social choice.

Arrow's Impossibility Theorem
The formal problem is that we want a fair, reliable, logical, and democratic way of choosing from three or more alternatives. In other words, we want a democratic way of aggregating individual preferences that really reflects "the popular will."

The starting point for the analysis is Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which shows that there is no SWF for three or more alternatives that also satisfies "some reasonable conditions of fairness on the method and a condition of logicality of the result" (Riker 116).

This may sound rather abstract, but Riker takes this formal problem and applies it quickly to democracy by modeling democracy as a SWF: voters have certain individual ranking of candidates, and democracy amalgamates those individual preferences into a social choice.

The way the proof works is that first Arrow gives six basic, logical conditions that we can generally agree a SWF should have, and then shows how they contain a contradiction. This method is called axiomatic social choice theory, because the theories are built up from axioms, or conditions. The axioms are (following Riker 116-119):

Universal admissibility of individual orderings: People should be able to rank alternatives in any way they want, as long as it's rational.
Monotonicity: If a person raises the value of a winning alternative, it cannot become a loser; or, if a person lowers the value of a losing alternative, it cannot become a winnner.
Citizens' sovereignty or Nonimposition: An alternative x is imposed if it is the winner no matter what set of individual preference orderings are given.
Unanimity: If everyone preferes x to y, then the SWF should not choose y. Riker notes there are only two ways of violating unanimity: one, if the SWF is not monotonic, and two, if the method of amalgamation of preferences imposes x regardless of the set of preferences.
Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives: Adding alternatives to an original set of profiles shouldn't affect the SWF's relative ranking of the original alternatives. For example, if in the original profile (x, y, z) everyone prefers x to y, adding w to the list shouldn't make y somehow place higher than x. Similarly, subtracting alternatives shouldn't affect the relative ordering of the remaining alternatives. If everyone prefers x to y, subtracting z shouldn't cause y to beat x.
Nondictatorship: There should be no person whose preference xPy sets the social choice as x, regardless of what other people think.

The proof of Arrow's Theorem involves exploiting the Universal Domain axiom to allow for Condorcet Voting Paradox preferences, showing that these preferences contain a dictator for one alternative, and then showing that if we have a dictator over one alternative then he's a dictator over all alternatives.

When faced with this result, one's natural reacction is to question the necessity of some of the axioms. Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives seems particularly suspect, since, for example, it exludes all plurality voting systems. Nevertheless, these axioms are important. They ensure that the result of the aggregation process is not manipulable, and to remove any one of these is to open up the system to agenda setting, strategic voting, and other forms of manipulation.²

Double Peaked Preferences and Strategic Voting
Arrow's theorem only applies when we have cycles. When do cycles occur in politics?

In politics, our alternatives are almost always positioned along a spectrum, most commonly the liberal/conservative one. To model what cyclical preferences would look like in actual politics, we take our alternatives x, y, z to represent candidates from various parts of the liberal/conservative spectrum. The Condorcet Voting Paradox over these candidates would look like:

Both A and B's preferences make sense: the farther they move away from their preferred candidate, the less they like the alternatives. C, on the other hand, has strange preferences. As he moves away from his most preferred candidate, z, he likes the alternatives less and less. But after a certain point, as he moves even farther away towards x, he starts liking the candidate more!

What makes A and B's preferences sound is that they are single-peaked. When you graph the preferences on a political axis, they only have one peak, and as you move further from the peak preference only decreases. By the opposite token, what makes C's preferences illogical is that they are double-peaked. Double-peaked preferences come in many shapes, but they all have the property of increasing preference at some point as one moves away from the preferred alternative.

Why would double-peaked preferences occur? Riker argues they result from disagreement about the meaning of the political spectrum. Person C is probably not only be looking at the candidates in terms of the liberal/conservative axis, but also the environmental axis, the trustworthy axis, or even the good-looking axis. This transforms a 1-dimensional problem into a multi-dimensional problem. As long as these various axes overlap, then there will be no disagreement about the axis; but the more orthogonal these axes are, the more likely we are to see double-peaked preferences.

Critics of Riker have argued that studies show that Americans overwhelmingly agree on the liberal/conservative axis. That seems to save democracy from Arrow problems, right? Riker counters that even if society doesn't actually have cyclical preferences, individuals can vote strategically to create them. When we have cycles, we have no true social choice, which means the result depends entirely on how one sets the agenda and the voting system. Strategic voting thus allows for manipulation of the social choice.

Riker's argument is especially strong because he not only shows that it is theoretically possible to strategically vote, but also provides examples from U.S. history where he argues that it's happened, such as the repeated defeat of the Powell amendment to the federal education bill in the House of Representatives.

Chaos in Politics
Thus, when Riker claimed that democracy was inherently choatic, he was arguing that democracy is susceptible to cycles, and cycles allow for manipulation of the social choice.

I see Riker's argument applying to political campaigning in that campaign managers often design campaigns to shift the terms of the debate. Ads will come out that arguing "this election isn't about small government, it's about jobs"; or, as is more often the case, "this election isn't about policy, it's about who looks more presidential/American/empathetic/working-class." In Rikerian terms, campaign managers who find their candidates losing on the traditional left/right policy axis try to find other orthogonal axes to divide voters, which creates cycles and allows for maniuplation. Right now these other axes are stupid because we have stupid voters. But even if all voters were smart, there always exist new axes (e.g. freedom) that bisect the traditional left/right spectrum and divide even intelligent voters.

Endnotes:
1. We have good reasons to believe that these conditions make sense; if you need convincing, see Chapter 1 of On Philosophy, Politics, and Economicsby Gerry Gaus.

2. In fact, one very infamous and controversial paper, "Agenda Influence and Its Implications," exploits the fact that all voting systems have a weak spot. Levine, president of the local flying club, has to decide how to structure the voting for the club's new round of purchases. His problem is that his preferences go against what everyone else in the group wants. Levine turns to Plott, an economist, and the two of them devise a strategic voting system that sets up the votes in such a way that Levine gets what he wants—and he does! Not surprisingly, after the paper is publihed, Plott and Levine get a lot of flak for their "unethical" study.

Dance. Dare. Move. Soar.

2010-10-17T18:26:00.000-07:00

Here's my latest Photoshop project. I'm especially proud of how it turned out.

It's based on a tutorial that I found here.

[I've been getting so into Photoshop lately that I've been neglecting to do my homework. This reminds me of high school, when I'd regularly experience these transient obsessions (including calculus, computer programming, and playwrighting) that would literally make me forget the world around me. I don't know what to make of this habit of mine: on one hand, there's the exhiliration of discovery, the joy of passion, and it's truly a wonderful experience; but on the other hand, it's caused me too much guilt and too many unnecessarily sleepless nights...If only I could choose what my homework was based on my mood.]

Foray into Photoshop

2010-10-15T17:58:00.001-07:00

I've recently started to work on learning Adobe Photoshop. It's intimidatingly powerful software, which is why I've been reluctant to get into it before, but now I see it in a different light because I focus more on the amazing potential that this array of features has to offer me. Even after a couple tutorials I'm inspired to further explore a neglected creative side of me. Here are some of my first projects:

No rights reserved. Feel free to use them as you wish. This is not a political statement in any way—I'm just really excited to share what I've made.

The Berkeley Blog

2010-10-10T18:25:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

Here's another tool to help you in your lifelong quest for knowledge—The Berkeley Blog, a compilation of blogs from UC Berkeley professors:

http://blogs.berkeley.edu/

You can read up on a vast array of topics, from the humanities, to politics and economics, to science and technology, to health and medicine.

Enjoy!
Kunal

Why do we have music?

2010-10-02T10:46:00.010-07:00

I was listening to NPR today and heard a piece on Christoph Eschenbach, currently the conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra (pictured right). Indirectly, he gave what I found to be a very cogent answer to this question:

"Music can invade you totally, and can speak all the languages of emotion to you. You can express all the language of emotion with that music."

We writers often complain about not being able to fully trasmit our emotions. Music, it seems, can fill this gap which writing cannot. To say that writing is just the language of the intellect and music is just the language of emotions sets up a false dichotomy, but it also gives a good sense of their respective strengths.

Update (2hrs later): When I wrote this post, I didn't consider poetry, arguably the most emotional form of writing. Even still, I feel music has a superior fidelity for emotions. Music doesn't rely on words, or even concepts, and that allows it to speak to us from a place in our minds before words or concepts even form.

One Year of Blogging

2010-09-27T22:10:00.000-07:00

Anniversaries somehow have a way of sneaking up on you—I was flipping through some of my older posts and realized that I've been blogging for just over a year now. Already! I can't say that I feel anything but proud. This is one of the first projects I've sustained for such a long-term, and I think it's done me a lot of good. Since these types of occasions are normally marked for reflection, I thought I'd take a moment to step back from my writing and see how I've been doing over the past 74 posts. (This one will make it 75!)

Looking back on old posts makes me feel like an archeologist of my own mind. I can see how each post crystallized my state of mind at the time, forming a sort of mental fossil record that makes it possible for me, now, to contemplate the evolution of my thinking from the outside. Like the archeologist, I feel at once a strong connection and objective distance to the past, which gives my study a tinge of both nostalgia and curiosity. The main difference, of course, is that one year doesn't make ancient history. As much as I try to approach my old posts with the objectivity of archeology, I know I'm still attached to my old writing.

One of the first things that strikes me when I read my early posts is how clearly anxious this project made me. Right after finishing my first post, I wrote a second one worrying about how I'd find my own voice. About a month later, I wrote another post entitled Washed up?, where I wondered aloud whether I wasn't creative enough to come up with new posts constantly. Although my first instinct was to dismiss these posts as comical and childish (which they are), I now believe it's more important to recognize how much writing involves putting yourself out there, and becoming comfortable with that. That I can look back on my earlier posts with a kind of grandfatherly humor is, to me, a sign of real progress.

I'm happy to find that, one year later, I have some answers to the questions I was asking in the beginning. As I mentioned, I used to wonder how I'd find my voice. Now I don't—not that I understand my own voice any better, but I've learned to stop worrying about my writing so much, and to keep my focus on expressing myself as clearly and consistently with my purpose as possible. I also used to wonder how I'd constantly come up with topics. It wasn't until this post in August that I realized that my inspiration for posts came more from my interactions with new ideas outside of me rather than from some place within me. That took a big psychological burden off of me.

I'm also happy to find how impressed I often become when I read my old posts. On the whole, they tend to be quite good, and surprisingly insightful. [Actually, what I mean is that they turned out better than I remember; when you're in the midst of a flurry of edits and re-edits, it's hard to see anything but errors. That's why exercises like these serve as a helpful way of getting out of that constant self-criticizing mode.]

For the next year, there are some aspects of my writing I'd like to improve. First, I want to modify the way I process my writing. Currently, I think more about style, the way the words sound on the page, rather than substance, what I actually want to communicate. Sometimes I compromise on my ideas for the sake of getting a pretty turn of phrase. I find that, too often, I use turns of phrases without actually thinking about what they mean. I think it's time to change these habits. Style is not an end in itself, but rather a tool to better communicate one's ideas. When I think about what to write, I want to think about style not as separate from substance, but as a part of it.

In addition to communicating accurately, I'd like to start communicating more artistically. Reading journal articles and political economy books all the times has made me forget that the occasional well-crafted metaphor, simile, or image makes reading much more enjoyable. I appreciate that kind of beauty when I see it in other's writing, so I'd like to incorporate it in mine too.

P.S. If I were to hold an Oscars of my writing then my nominations for the category of "Best Sentence(s)" would surely be:

"The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin has compiled a complete list of the words DFW circled in his copy of the American Heritage Dictionary. Wallace scholars are of course using this list to glean some more insight into his mind and work, but I just enjoy birdwatching all these rare and exotic words that somehow show up in the English language." from What David Foster Wallace Circled in His Dictionary

"The thing—the problem, you could say—with epiphanies is that no matter how small they are, they bring such a burst of clarity that it's easy to forget how private and personal the whole experience is. You walk outside after an epiphany and the blue sky suddenly feels more blue and humanity seems somehow more enlightened and less hopeless. It's hard not to think of the experience as anything other than a leap forward for mankind." from Maybe Not a Leap Forward for Mankind, but At Least a Quantum Leap for Me

"And of course, the film is absolutely joyful to see, visually: a real treat for the eyes." from Avatar

DFW Calls Out Bullshit

2010-09-14T17:46:00.000-07:00

I was reading an interview of David Foster Wallace by Larry McCaffery, professor of English and Comp Lit at San Diego State University, when I stumbled upon this passage:

LM: . . . yeah, another commodity. I agree with Fredric Jameson and others who argue that modernism and postmodernism can be seen as expressing the cultural logic of late capitalism. Lots of features of contemporary art are directly influenced by this massive acceleration of capitalist expansion into all these new realms that were previously just not accessible. You sell people a memory, reify their nostalgia and use this as a hook to sell deodorant. Hasn’t this recent huge expansion of the technologies of reproduction, the integration of commodity reproduction and aesthetic reproduction, and the rise of media culture lessened the impact that aesthetic innovation can have on people’s sensibilities? What’s your response to this as an artist?

DFW: You’ve got a gift for lit-speak, Larry. Who wouldn’t love this jargon we dress common sense in: "formal innovation is no longer transformative, having been co-opted by the forces of stabilization and post-industrial inertia," blah, blah. But this co-optation might actually be a good thing if it helped keep younger writers from being able to treat mere formal ingenuity as an end in itself....[emphasis mine, obviously]

There were, perhaps, more polite ways of saying it, but still: who else has the balls to call out BS like that?!

You can find a link to the interview in its entirety here.

A Hypothesis on Poverty

2010-09-09T00:17:00.000-07:00

I recently read a paper for class entitled "Destitution and the Poverty of its Politics—With Special Reference to South Asia" by Barbara Harriss-White. Harriss-White analyzes destitition, the state of the poorest of the poor, and finds that it encompasses three aspects: first, "having nothing"—that is, old-fashioned economic poverty, or lack of access and control over assets; second, "being nothing"—having no political rights, being marginalized and outcast; and lastly, "being wrong"—having the law work against you.

As an economist, I was used to thinking of extreme poverty in terms of the first aspect, material deprivation. But these latter two caught my eye. The paper made me realize that true destitution (far beyond ordinary relative poverty) is not just an economic process, but also a social and political one; that is, market processes alone aren't enough to drive people to destitution—it takes people actively excluding others for such a dire situation to exist. As Harriss-White puts it:

Destitution is a process in political economy. It is not simply that the technical requirements for labor processes require some kinds of bodies to be denied access [...] It is not simply that revenue for social sector spending is simultaneously squeezed, and thus eligibility for social protection by the state will need to be restricted (Russell and Malhotra, 2001). It is also that the exclusion of people from exploitation is culturally legitimated; society actively allows oppressive practice and, it is argued here, the state is often complicit in this process.

If she's right, if societies do truly actively allow and legitimate exclusion, then why do they do it? My hypothesis is that it is a culturally evolved way of dealing with overpopulation: societies that have exceeded their carrying capacity exclude groups of people to preserve scarce resources. If the carrying capacity can only support 70% of the population, the social norms evolve to exclude the other 30% from competition.

The people who engage in exclusion obviously do not think in those terms. They think of morality, or personal responsibility, or not having to deal with addicts, or the "unclean." But these tensions only manifest themselves and get worse when people are pressed. I suspect that as societies become wealthier, they become more willing to include formally marginalized peoples, simply because they can afford to; the pretexts formerly used to legitimize the exclusion lose support, lose importance, and slowly drop away.

[The biggest problem with the hypothesis is figuring out what "overpopulation" means. How do we distinguish between "overpopulated" societies and those that are merely very crowded? What standard of living does each person in the society "need"? By whose standards?]

One of the Wisest Things I've Heard

2010-09-05T21:31:00.000-07:00

"The hardest thing in the world to learn is when to stop."

As in:

Enjoying food is nice, but not when we eat too much.
Enjoying someone's company is nice, but not when we cling on to them.
Enjoying power is nice, but not when we sacrifice all values to maintain it.

While enjoying something, to have the presence of mind to know that the enjoyment will end if we abuse it is a very difficult thing to learn indeed.

Sir, I have a bone to pick with you

2010-08-31T15:50:00.002-07:00

From the Economist's online edition comes this article about the Argentine government's offensive against Clarín, the nation's media conglomerate. After describing the Kirchner's efforts to "kick Clarín out of the ISP business" and "wrest control" of its share in Argentina's newsprint company, Papel Prensa, the author, D.P., makes the following conclusion:

By declaring war on Argentina’s most powerful opinion-former, the Kirchners are gambling with their political future. If they can bloody the company enough to make its management seek a truce, they could secure friendlier coverage of the 2011 presidential election. Even then, however, the strategy might backfire. First, it has made them look hypocritical: by trying to kill Fibertel, they have made the already-concentrated ISP market even more so. Moreover, they have given the fractious opposition a new cause to unite around.

For the first time, I actively disagree with the Economists' appraisal of the facts. Kirchner, I feel, is actually winning political points in this campaign against Clarín. No one I met there truly supported them. The left excoriated Clarín as a propaganda machine for the wealthy.¹ Moderates admitted that it attacked the government more than necessary, and preferred to read La Nación. Above all, almost everyone felt uneasy by Clarín's near-monopoly status over print, radio, and television media.

The backdrop of President Kirchner's actions, which the Economist article strangely omits, is the push to pass La Ley de los Medios (The Media Law), whose explicit intent and purpose is to trust-bust Clarín's monopoly. Although the law is controversial (like everything in Argentina), it enjoys broad popular support. Here, for example, is a snapshot of the turnout for the rally in favor of La Ley de los Medios outside Congress in Buenos Aires in late April:

Most people I talked thought the law was a good idea. The professor who taught my peronismo class, someone who struck me as an intelligent and consummately careful scholar, opposed it, but only because she thought it was badly crafted. The law would simply replace Clarín's monopoly with a government monopoly, she said, but she didn't disagree that something had to be done about Clarín.

So I don't know why D.P. feels that the Kirchners are "gambling with their political futures." Perhaps the issues of Papel Prensa and Fibertel, both of which developed after I left Argentina, have created new opposition or turned the tide of opinion. But I doubt it.

Update (Sept. 1, 11am):
Another point, which I forgot to mention—The article, entitled "Pressed," portrays Clarín as a poor victim of government abuses. I think the abuse really goes both ways. In any case, I don't think anyone feels sorry for Clarín.

Notes:
1. I've heard people claim that Clarín has fabricated facts, grossly misrepresented inflation, and engaged in all kinds of journalistic malfeasance; but in Argentine politics there are so many claims and counterclaims flying everywhere that it's difficult to assess their veracity.

Bonus Feature!

The article offers this link (available only in Spanish) to a government report on business dealings with the Papel Presna company. The report is full of account balances, citations of laws and decrees, and other boring details, but in true Argentine fashion that doesn't stop the authors from proclaiming this issue as a matter of the most profound human rights. The excerpt from the Acknowledgments section reads (with my translation):

We thank especially those people who, having been participants in these acts, through their testimony permitted us to reconstruct an era of history in which were carried out the most dark and horrible acts of of physical, moral, and psychological violence that human beings can suffer.

It should be highlighted the interest demonstrated in the search for the Truth, shown by all the institutions, organizations, and people who, in one way or another, and from their respective places, helped with their contributions so that this present report would illuminate a part of history that tried to be submerged in darkness until it fell in negation, lies, and oblivion.

They're obviously referring to El Proceso, the brutal internal genocide that took place during the military dictatorship of the 70s. Many of the incidents of this report probably also take place during the 70s, and I'm sure that the business dealings they describe are pretty messy, and probably involve violence—but there's no way it can compare to the torture, murder, and rape of the era they are so strongly evoking.

What Makes the Dollar Special?

2010-08-30T19:23:00.004-07:00

One of the most jarring things about America after returning from Argentina was seeing so many dollars bills everywhere. I remembered sitting in my Monetary Economics class at my university in Buenos Aires, listening to the professor drive home the point that Americans use the USD as local currency. They don't see anything special about it!, he exclaimed, wide-eyed and emphatic, as if it were an utterly preposterous idea.

And he's right, of course; we Americans look out and see the plurality of currencies and assume ours is just another member of the ranks.

Argentines, however, have an entirely different point of view. Argentina has what they call a "dual currency," which means that dollars are just as standard a medium of exchange as the Argentine peso. For example, most restaurants have a sign on the door that indicates the rate at which they exchange dollars and euros. Apartments are bought and sold in terms of dollars, not pesos, which means Argentines maintain dual accounts of pesos and dollars. I saw wealthy Brazilians vacationing in Patagonia with a stack of crisp $100 USD bills in their wallets, and I even saw Argentines with large sums of USD, even while they were traveling within their own country.

So then, what makes the dollar so special? Why does it hold such a privileged status in other parts of the world?

Most of all, because it is highly stable. Inflation is usually very low, America has never defaulted on a loan, the US Federal Reserve is highly disciplined.

That may sound incredibly boring, but it is enough to get an Argentine who's lived long enough teary-eyed. Just over the past 30-40 years alone, the Argentine monetary authorities have dropped about 13 zeros off the currency; prices were rising so fast during the hyperinflation of the 80s that grocery stores couldn't relabel their items fast enough; and in the 2001 economic crash the dollar exchange rate jumped from 1:1 to 4:1 overnight.

In response to such a high degree of instability, Argentines have sought refuge in the dollar. Highly durable goods, like apartments, are priced in dollars to protect against wild, transient fluctuations. During hyperinflation, even school kids as young as 10 had come to learn that as soon as they obtain extra spending money the first thing they should do is invest in USD.

Even in stable times, like now, holding pesos is still inferior to holding dollars. The exchange rate may say 4 pesos = 1 USD, but in all practicality the two are not equivalent. Having four Argentine pesos is just not as good as having one small dollar. The reason is that although the peso may be stable today, there is no guarantee it will stay stable tomorrow. The fragility of the Argentine market means that holding pesos always carries with it an implicit risk of devaluation.

By the same token, holding dollars carries with it an implicit guarantee from the US government that the currency will preserve its value over time. Because Latin American governments have a history of irresponsibly financing extra spending by printing more money (i.e. inflation), their central banks maintain a reserve of dollars to keep their populations' anxieties at bay. The idea is that if anyone loses faith in the local currency, they can simply swap it out for dollars.

Note how the dollar acts as a monetary guaranteer of the last resort: when people lose faith in all currencies, they turn to the dollar. Thus, what makes the dollar special is that everyone in the entire world trusts in it. It also means that the United States is not only underwriting the monetary stability of its own citizens, but also that of the entire world financial system. Everyone assumes that in a panic at least they'll be able to salvage their savings by converting them to dollars.

The USD is therefore not just another currency, but rather a promise. A promise that in this fiat world of meaningless paper bills, your savings actually mean something.

Paradigm Shift

2010-08-27T18:07:00.003-07:00

When I arrived on campus this semester I noticed a marked difference in the way I thought about the university compared to when I first arrived. As a freshman, and even as a sophomore, I'd think of the university as a separate entity from me—an institution that runs by the grace of other people, with programs designed and run by other people, and a culture set by other people. I'd evaluate the university as an outsider would: What are U of A kids like? Are the clubs run well? Do they offer fun programs and activities?

Now that I'm a junior, neck-deep in activities and programs, I realized that I'm no longer on the outside looking in. The incoming freshman class must be evaluating the university the same way I did (What are U of A kids like? Are the clubs run well?...), but now I realize that whom they're judging is really us, the upperclassmen. The questions I used to ask of others are now directed at me—What are we like? Do we run our clubs well? Do we come up with new, fun, and innovative programs and activities?—because in your junior year you realize that there's no one else who make the university run but ourselves. Our culture is the university's culture. Our brains are the university's brains. Our drive is the university's drive.

Here's an example of what I mean. Currently the International Studies program offers a colloquium series on various regions of the world. It's an innovative idea, most of all because the colloquia are taught and designed by undergraduate students who have visited the regions they discuss. As a freshman or sophomore, I would have thought it was the university who was giving the opportunity, and students were simply receiving the benefits. However, when I learned that the colloquium was actually the brainchild of a student here at the U of A, I saw the student-university relation in a broader light: The university may provide opportunities to students, but students can also provide opportunities to the university. The plethora of programs and activities that we have exist because of someone, and continue to exist because someone is working to maintain them.

Every part of the university is supported by the students that form it. On a more day-to-day basis, take for example the tutoring center. If I were a student who came for help and had a bad experience, I would think that the university had a bad tutoring center. I'd tend to interpret the faults of individuals as the faults of the university. But since I work at the tutoring center, my thinking goes the other way. The quality of the university's tutoring center becomes partly my responsibility when I realize that students anxiously waiting for help at the tutoring center are relying on meto do a good job.

I think this personal shift in thinking also represents a broader sociological principle. Although we like to think of institutions as formal, abstract concepts, when you get into the details, as in this example, you realize that everything about an institution remits back to the people who form it. Some people are, of course, more involved than others, and that seems to influence the degree to which you identify yourself with the institution. But everyone plays a role, whether they realize it or not; and perhaps the bigger the stake that everyone has, the more successful the institution will be.

I'm still here

2010-08-25T11:45:00.000-07:00

I haven't forgotten about the blog. The reason why I haven't been publishing the last couple weeks is that I've been hard-pressed to find a complete, meaningful thought to write about.

Now that I'm back at school after this long break, I'm really appreciating how much it stimulates new thinking. Just in the past two days of classes I've already faced ideas that have forced me to reconsider my judgments, convictions, evaulations, and beliefs. As I continue to reflect, the precipitate should manifest itself in some new blog posts in the coming days.

What I Learned From Argentina

2010-07-31T22:50:00.000-07:00

1. We all have our roles to play.

Watching the behavior of others, I soon realized that some people have more of a right to a seat on the bus than others—and that as a young, healthy man I'll be the last one to sit down. Even if a seat opens up right in front of me, I learned I should always give it to the pregnant woman or old man standing next to me first. At first it annoyed me that I had to do this, especially when I was tired, or in a bad mood, or just didn't want to have to stand for the hour long bus ride. Over time, though, I came to realize that the tiredness I felt could just be a fraction of the tiredness that the people I gave my seat to must be feeling. I'm not old enough yet to understand what it's like not to be young and healthy, but I should at least be sensible and realize where I fit in in society. In life we find that we've been giving certain roles, sometimes by our choosing (husband, father, friend), and sometimes not (young, healthy, man). Life needs people in all types of roles, and once you recognize the role you're cast in, the right thing to do is play it properly.

2. People don't necessarily have to have similar mindsets to appreciate each other's company.

In Argentina you describe people that make good company by saying they have "buena onda," which literally means "good waves." Someone with buena onda doesn't necessarily share the same values as you, may use more swear words than you would normally approve of, or may have different interests. But that doesn't matter. All that matters is that their heart is in the right place, that they like to enjoy themselves and they like to see you enjoy yourself, and that they're sincere and genuine. Don't worry about the faults (just like they don't worry about yours), since after all we're all just trying to get along.

3. I'm a vegetarian.

Since I was raised in a vegetarian household, I always took my vegetarianism for granted. It was just the natural state of affairs at home. In Argentina, however, staying vegetarian meant I had to actively refuse to participate with everyone else; I had to mark myself in opposition.

All my life I've grown up surrounded by a meat-eating culture. I would see my friends eating meat, and me not, and not think anything of it, reasoning simply that we were just brought up in different ways. But now I'm no longer able to say I'm a vegetarianism simply because of my upbringing. I'm free to choose, one way or another. To stay vegetarian means I must sincerely believe that it is a better way of living, and that meat-eating is worse.

4. Simply recognizing someone's presence can mean a lot.

In the US we have the bad custom of tending to ignore people we don't know in a crowd. I was really glad to find that Argentina didn't have it. If I was talking with a group of kids from class, and another kid came to join the conversation, he would say hi to me with the same friendliness that he would show to everyone else in the group. When you're in a foreign land, insecure about your language skills, lonely, not having many friends, small gestures like that can mean a lot.

5. Things take time.

I went to Argentina assuming that if I gave enough effort, I could leave 5 months later speaking Spanish like a native. Obviously that didn't happen. I tried as hard as I possibly could, but even at the end of my trip I found that if I didn't speak Spanish for a couple days I would start to lose the hang of it. It took a couple weeks before I made any noticeable improvements in the language in the first place. I now realize I can't rush it. To truly speak like a native requires multiple years of immersion, and neither sweating more nor growing unnecessary gray hairs will speed up the process.

Wilderness of Suburbia

2010-07-21T06:26:00.000-07:00

I lay adrift upon a raft

In a sea in my backyard;

Nine feet of water lay pristine beneath me

And a vast blanket of stars covers the night sky.

Here on my raft I am a pioneer daring

The wilderness of suburbia.

I am solo, caught between two expanses:

The abyss below envelops me,

The heavenly mantle above transcends me,

And the two swallow whole my insignificant ego.

Comparative Advantage and Education Policy

2010-07-21T06:22:00.004-07:00

In an earlier post I postulated that not all comparative advantages are equal, reasoning that since technology and inventions are more prized than other specializations, they consequently confer more power. Here's a consequence of this comparative advantage framework that I hadn't considered before:

You'll have noticed that politicians are always talking about expanding and improving math and science educations in K-12 schools. They argue that it's crucial for "staying competitive in the 21st century." In more direct words, I think that means: we need to constantly advance our math and science to maintain our dominion over the realm of inventions. I used to think that emphasizing math and science education was just about helping kids find jobs in their local markets. That's true, but at the same time the bigger picture is that inventions and technology are vital to tipping the balance of power in our favor. In the end, it's about ensuring continuing U.S. hegemony.

Thus, to expand on the conclusion of my earlier post, just as technology and inventions are about power, so are the academic disciplines that produce them. All knowledge is power, true, but math and science generate economic power, and that's the type of power we've deemed most important.

[As a side note, just take a stroll around your local university campus and notice how it's not a coincidence that the math and science buildings are the fanciest and the most well-maintained.]

Med School

2010-07-04T07:41:00.016-07:00

Recently I fell sick, and since it was the first time I had to take care of myself, I quickly realized that I didn't know what to do. Should I take fever-reducing medicine or not? Do I just have a cold or something worse? How can I tell? Will it just pass with time or will it just get worse?

Conventional wisdom says that when in doubt just go and see a doctor, but that can't be practical, and plus it's very expensive. We may leave the real medicine for doctors, but we shouldn't be so helpless that we have to rely on them for everything. It strikes me as strange that we have a system of societal organization where the knowledge most essential to our own well-being is also the most outsourced and divorced from our control. I feel the complete asymmetry of information in the doctor-patient relationship is dangerous, because a clueless patient has no way of defending herself against an insincere, mistaken, or scheming doctor.

That's why I think it would make a lot of sense to teach medicine in K-12 schools. Why not? After all, it's the most practical thing to learn. Teachers spend all of elementary school trying to convince us that math is useful, but the benefit of learning medicine is self-apparent. If there's any guarantee in life it's that every man, woman, and child is going to fall sick.

We already offer general health courses here and there that educate mostly about nutrition and STDs. This can just be another component. There's no need to pass the MCATs to be able to understand that a viral infections go away with time whereas bacterial ones don't; or that a nice hot, ginger tea works well for clearing out mucus and wet coughs.

Such was life

2010-06-30T06:18:00.000-07:00

Here's a funny anecdote from the economist Kenneth Rogoff about the intellectual climate of the 80s. If there's anything I love, it's irony:

There are more than a few of us in my generation of international economists who still bear the scars of not being able to publish sticky-price papers during the years of new neoclassical repression. I still remember a mid-1980s breakfast with a talented young macroeconomic theorist from Barcelona, who was of the Chicago-Minnesota school. He was a firm believer in the flexible-price Lucas islands model, and spent much of the meal ranting and raving about the inadequacies of the Dornbusch model: "What garbage! Who still writes down models with sticky prices and wages! There are no microfoundations. Why do international economists think that such a model could have any practical relevance? It's just ridiculous!" Eventually the conversation turns and I ask, "So, how are you doing in recruiting? Your university has made a lot of changes." The theorist responds without hesitation: "Oh, it's very hard for Spanish universities to recruit from the rest of the world right now. With the recent depreciation of the exchange rate, our salaries (which remained fixed in nominal terms) have become totally uncompetitive." Such was life.

The anecdote was presented at an IMF research conference lecture about the influence and brilliance of Dornbusch's overshooting model, which is based precisely on sticky prices. You can read the full lecture here.

America, The Teenage Pop Star

2010-06-25T06:53:00.120-07:00

Uno de los cuentos más populares de Gabriel García Márquez se llama "Los funerales de la Mamá Grande." Además de tratar, obviamente, los funerales, también incluye una gran crónica del reinado de la Mamá Grande, una figura matriarcal que maneja todo el poder del pueblo. Ella pasa los días en su mecedor de bujico, mientras que su sobrino Nicanor se ocupa con la resonpsabilidad que inevitablemente viene con tanto poder.

Una interpretación de la Mamá Grande es que en ella encontramos una imagen de Colombia: su reinado es una dictadura, su poder viene de herencia, su único trabajo es coleccionar arrendamientos, y, sobre todo, se está muriendo. Es el resumen del sistema de poder agobiante y opresivo de Colombia.

Una línea de pensamiento para entretenerte: Si bien Colombbia se puede caracterizar como una vieja Mamá Grande, cuál imágen escogerías para tu propio país (en mi caso, los EE.UU.)?

Es bastante divertido—y difícil—pretender clavar la esencia de la vida política y social de tu patria con un solo personaje. Pero creo que mi respuesta será: los EE.UU. son como un Teenage Pop Star.

Por un lado, los pop stars, como los EE.UU., tienen mucho glamour, mucha buena fama, mucha popularidad, muchos afanes. Siempre se habla de ellos, siempre llevan las modas más nuevas, tienen los cuerpos más codiciados, las vidas más interesantes. Se piensa que tienen lo mejor de todo (una vez un muchacho argentino me contó que le sorprendió la pobreza que vio en Denver, Colorado, como no esperaba que la encontrara en el "Primer Mundo"); son admirados por muchos (los commentarios que he oído de los argentinos incluyen, por ejemplo, ¡qué estable! ¡qué creativo! ¡qué disciplinado!); y tienen una presencia cultural omnipresente (todo el mundo conoce tanto a los pop stars norteamericanos como la cultura general norteamericana, desde los Simpsons y películas hasta el football y música).

Fíjate que este es el discurso del exterior. Adentro, nosotros ciudadanos no solemos ver el país como un gran milagro sino una larga serie de problemas para enfrentar: una economía temblante, gran recortes en los presupuestos estatales, el terrorismo, la inmigración, la jubilicación de los baby boomers, un sistema de salud terrorífico, y un racismo intransigente, entre otros. Esta "realidad interior" se parece al hecho de que la vida privada de los Teenage Pop Stars es bastante cotidiana. Tendemos a olvidarlo, pero los pop stars son personas también, con las mismas frustraciones, las mismas ambiciones, los mismos deseos, y las mismas preocupaciones que tenemos todos. Igualmente, los EE.UU., por más poderoso que sea, es a la vez sólo un país más.

¡Ya te toca a tí! ¿Cómo describirías a tu país? Deja un commentario con tus ideas.

Orwell and Huxley

2010-06-19T05:42:00.000-07:00

This may be a comic strip, but the analysis is very, very, very astute. I think it's right on the money:

http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death.html

On a related note, I've heard that one of the hardest things to learn in life is when to stop.

Scene from the Subte

2010-06-05T14:12:00.000-07:00

I know her lips are pursed, but it still looks like she's puckering up to kiss me. Maybe she would if she had a chance. After all you don't wear leopard print and pumps at 55 for nothing. I try to inch away, but it's rush hour—

—so the best I can do is pivot a little closer to the open window, close my eyes, and submerse myself in the click-clack of subway tracks and the constant screeching of brakes.

Not All Comparative Advantages Are Made Equal

2010-06-04T08:31:00.002-07:00

One of the foundations of international trade theory is the old idea of comparative advantage. However, in light of Latin American history, I'd like to make a tweak to it.

Quick overview of comparative advantage
Countries have a certain amount of productive resources (land, labor, capital, etc.) and they use them to produce goods and services. When resources are channeled towards a certain good or service, that means that they can't be used for something else; that is, there's an implicit trade-off every time something is produced. Different countries have different resources and are able to channel them in different ways, which means that different countries give up different amounts of other possible production when they produce the same good. When Country A is able to produce a good without having to give up as much other production as Country B, we say that Country A has a comparative advantage in that good over Country B.

Comparative advantage forms the basis of the argument in favor of trade specialization. Countries should specialize in those things in which they have comparative advantages, and trade for the rest. That way they can have more than what they could have produced individually.

Something's not quite right
After reading about the history of Argentina, and relating it with the history of all the other Latin American countries that tried Import Substitution Industrialization, it's clear that Latin America's experience in specializing in agriculture didn't work out too well for them. Indeed, these countries seem to have been (and, to some extent, still are) rather like leaves tossed about at the mercy of economic winds. At the diplomacy table, they've never had much stature either; rather, it was always the industrial powers that were naming the rules of the game.

Why is it that Latin America found itself in such a weak position? The theory of comparative advantage doesn't give preference to one type of specialization over another. It treats them all as equal. Then why was having a comparative advantage in agriculture such a disadvantage?

Technology and Comparative Advantage
I think the answer to these questions lies in the existence of a technology gap between different types of production.

Some countries are producers of inventions, and some countries are consumers of inventions. For some reason (which I leave to future research) the number of countries that produce inventions has always been small, and the number of countries that rely on those inventions is large. Because the invention-producing countries (currently known as the "developed world," or the "first world") have something that it is rare, and something that the whole world relies on, they gain power. In short, developed countries have a natural monopoly on inventions, and inventions are the most valuable thing humanity has to offer.

To illustrate the point, let's take the case of Argentina and Great Britain in the early 20th century. Great Britain was Argentina's biggest customer of agricultural products, and with the foreign currency that Argentina received in the trade it imported manufactured goods from abroad. Great Britain traded with Argentina because it was convenient; if necessary it could have imported from any other country in the world (because all countries have agriculture), or, at worst, it could have produced its own food. Argentina, however, depended on Great Britain. It needed the foreign currency to buy manufactured goods from Great Britain and the United States, which it wasn't able to produce on its own.

Thus, trading bananas for computers is not an innocent, equal trade; it implicitly signifies a power and dependency relationship.

Conclusion
If economics were only a story about stuff, then the old Ricardian comparative advantage idea would be just fine. But economics is also—and perhaps even more so—a story about power, and that obligates countries to develop the capacity for self-sufficiency.

Perspective

2010-05-30T17:34:00.008-07:00

Yesterday I met an Argentine woman who worked for a while in a hostel in El Calafate, a small town in the deep south of Patagonia. Even though El Calafate is so small that it doesn't have a movie theater, it attracts tourists by the busload because of the spectacular views of the glaciars:

As part of the conversation (in which I participated very enthusiastically, since I'm planning on visiting la Patagonia soon), I asked her which groups of people would pass through the hostel. Depends on the season, she said, and continued to describe the tourist seasons with seasoned experience. Brazilians, Uruguayans, and Chileans all the time; Israelis in the spring; Europeans in the summer, generally, etc., etc.

One of the biggest groups was the Spanish. Apparently they can take a full year of paid vacation, so many of them decide to take world tours in that time. (This is such an outlandish benefit that as I'm writing this I'm worried that I heard wrong.) The most annoying thing, she said, was how the Spanish kept on asking at the hostel if they had any discounts—not because they were poor (since, after all, they came with Euros, which were at least 5 to 1 here), but because they were taking such a long, grand trip that they wanted to make the money last. Little did they realize that the person from whom they were requesting a discount had a hard enough time making a good wage at the job they have, let alone taking a year off like that to travel the world.

This story reminded me of a saying: "I used to complain that I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no legs."

Cuando cerraban la puerta

2010-05-17T10:31:00.000-07:00

Este es un cuento corto que escribí para mi clase de literatura. Sugerencias o cualquier feedback de forma constructiva son muy bienvenidos.

Es frustrante cuanto los padres desconocen del mundo. Les tienes que explicar todo, y aún entonces no te creen. Cada noche, cuando me apagaban las luces, les explicaba, más racionalmente como podía, la situación:

—Cuando me cierres la puerta van a salir monstruos, y me van a querer comer.

—No seas ridículo.

—Mamá

—Tu madre tiene razón. Eres perfectamente seguro.

—Papá

—Se acabó el asunto. Duerme bien, mañana tienes escuela.

Así, con un suspiro, mientras cerraban la puerta, yo ponía mente de guerrero. Mi cama quedaba justo en el centro del cuarto, como una fortaleza en una península rodeada en tres lados por la oscuridad. Normalmente les tomaba un minuto o dos para darse cuenta de que me tenían a solas; y cuando se dieran cuenta, salían. Del armario, del estante, de la alfombra, se veían dientes brillantes y ojos rojos y amarillos saliendo de las sombras—las únicas cosas, además de un frío visceral, que delataban una presencia ajena.

Debajo de mi almohada siempre tenía guardada una espada de plástico. Era justo lo que necesitaba porque el plástico mata a los monstruos. Al verla, reflejando la luz de la luna y de sus ojos, se quedaban en sus rincones. Porque los monstruos, aun por ser monstruos, no son brutos.

Este era el tema cuando tenía ocho años, pero no siempre era tan fácil. La primera vez que vi los dientes y los ojos era también la primera vez que pasé la noche en mi propio cuarto, y lloré y grité de tanto miedo que tuvieron que volver mis padres. Cuando abrieron la puerta, por supuesto desaparecieron los monstruos, porque son monstruos y no ladrones, y así se estableció mi locura.¹

Justo cuando cerraron la puerta otra vez, los monstruos volvieron a salir. Salían y empezaban a cercarme, con tanta hambre, dejando una senda de baba. En vano me hundí en las sábanas y me hubieran comido, porque estaban casi encima, si no fuera que por mis gritos mis padres volvieron y abrieron la puerta y permitieron que pasara la noche con ellos.²

Se les había recomendado a mis padres que instalaran un night light en mi cuarto, pero como con todo el tema de los monstruos, éste tampoco pude explicar. Les dije que por ser la luz del enchufe y no la de la llave de luz, los monstruos saldrían igual. Mi padre me respondió diciendo que no iba a volver, no importa cuánto gritara, y yo sabía que seguramente cumpliría.³ Ignorando mis protestas, mis padres se fueron.

Algunos son valientes naturalmente, pero para la mayoría, como yo, son valientes porque las circunstancias nos obligan. Yo no estaba dispuesto a morir: todavía tenía mucho para lograr. Por ejemplo, estaba justo en el medio de construir la torre de Lego más alta y más impresionante del mundo, y me gustaba mucho jugar con mis amigos o leer libros. Por todo esto tomé coraje:

— ¡Yo sé que están y yo no les tengo miedo!

Mi ropa estaba empapada de sudor y mi corazón me ahogaba en la garganta.

— ¡Vengan, yo no les tengo miedo!

Me puse de pie en mi cama, pensando frenéticamente. Mis ojos recorrieron el cuarto. Empezaron a cercarme.

— ¡Mamá! ¡Papá!

De lejos: “¡Cállate!”

Corrí para la puerta pero una mano me agarró la pierna y me caí. Luchando con la mano, giré para liberarme, pero en la oscuridad sólo vi los dientes y los ojos, redondos como los de una araña, clavándome con su mirada penetrante. Intenté pegarle a la mano que me agarraba pero no la podía encontrar. Parecía de sombra, de la misma noche, una parte de la densidad opresiva de la oscuridad. Yo golpeaba, daba patadas en todas direcciones, pero no daba con nada—y de repente un dolor tremendo en el costado, ya sólo vi la mitad de los dientes, y en la luz de la luna se veía que a la plata tradicional se sumaba un brochazo de rojo vivo, y los ojos rojos y amarillos corriendo, corriendo por mi cuerpo, y yo golpeando y sollozando.

Me desperté en el suelo, a metros de la puerta, con un dolor atroz en el costado y la fuerza chupada de todos mis músculos. Todo el resto del día quedé como un somnámbulo. En la escuela sólo oía el ruido de los dientes rechinando y entre mis Legos sólo veía los ojos, mirándome. Intenté salir de allí, pero mis padres no me hicieron caso. Era mi suerte que ellos creyeran en el amor duro.

Pasé la noche siguiente como un cordero sacrificial.⁴ Y la noche siguiente y la noche siguiente. Cada vez que me despertaba a la mañana me sentía más y más débil. Creo que me hubiera muerto si no hubiera descubierto la espada. Fue por pura casualidad. Estaba luchando, como siempre, porque aunque ya sabía qué era mi destino, como el fin de una obra teatral que un actor vuelve a repetir todas las noches, mi fuerza vital no me permitía que me vencieran sin una lucha. Así, una noche mi mano se encontró con la espada de plástico, que me había regalado mi abuelo de la feria, y tan pronto como di mi primera cuchillada sentí que me soltaban y oí un viento mientras todos los dientes y ojos se huían para los rincones. Allí quedaron, aún con hambre, pero ya con miedo también.

Nunca me había sentido mejor.

Ya tengo mi rutina y los monstruos la suya. Me imagino que esto va a continuar hasta que yo me pudra también, y me olvide de todo, y me haga un adulto como mi padre, ⁵ quien estará preguntándose como es que su hijo resultó ser uno de los más cobardes que ha visto en toda la vida.

1 No me gustan los psicólogos.

2 Una de las grandes injusticias del mundo es que los monstruos tienen una predilección para el sabor de niños y no de adultos. Supuestamente, los adultos saben a podrido.

3 Mi padre siempre cumplía, aun si le llevara a la muerte. Era una locura que heredó de su propio padre. Siempre me decía: “No cumplir es peor que morir.”

4 Por supuesto, los monstruos, como los humanos, tienen hambre todas las noches.

5 El destino fatal, se dice.

What David Foster Wallace Circled In His Dictionary

2010-05-14T10:55:00.000-07:00

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin has compiled a complete list of the words DFW circled in his copy of the American Heritage Dictionary. Wallace scholars are of course using this list to glean some more insight into his mind and work, but I just enjoy birdwatching all these rare and exotic words that somehow show up in the English language:

http://www.slate.com/id/2250784/

Enjoy! No matter how well-read you are, I promise you'll learn at least a new word or two.

The Supermarket

2010-05-09T06:40:00.000-07:00

When I need humbling I go
to the supermarket and I see lined
perfectly on the shelves
the glorious work of millions.

And I imagine these people must
have mothers and brothers
and children to feed just like
my parents work to feed
me, so we’re really all the same:
I’m part of their family
because they help feed me
and when I eat I help feed them
and so we are all, unsuspectingly,
united by livelihood and food.

Below the Belt

2010-05-07T08:28:00.002-07:00

Among other things, Buenos Aires is surely the lingerie capital of the world. Walking down Avenida Santa Fe, I'm sure to find at least one lencería per block, sometimes more. The majority have the same basic layout—two display windows exhibiting their selection, with a passageway in between that leads to a small intimate shop—and in every lencería I pass by I'll almost always see a couple customers on the other end of the passageway, or a woman stopped to peruse the offering at one of the two display windows. Clearly, there is a lot of demand for lingerie here.

If, for some reason, you can't make out the duo display window floor plan too well—say, you're on a bus—then at the very least you can't miss the large billboards of beautiful women reposing in lingerie that sometimes hang above the shops:

Seeing these billboards, I can't help but feel that they're exploiting my natural instincts. I find myself feeling just a little more carnal, slightly more lustful. It becomes more difficult to not think of women as objects, or to control all the other thoughts I know I should control, not only because they're undignified but also because they're irresponsible. For some unfortunate evolutionary reason, we men ended up physically stronger—and like all power, that extra strength demands extra care and caution in how we think. This marketing, however, isn't helping: it's a punch below the belt, in more ways than one.

In the Kitchen

2010-05-07T07:25:00.000-07:00

The stew is confused
and the pilaf is blushing
my stove won't acknowledge me
and the vegetables are hiding
in a corner of the refrigerator.
The pots and pans are calling for medical treatment
and all our hungry stomachs are calling for our heads.

But it's OK — there's still the cake
and the cake is just right.

The Politics of Football

2010-04-17T19:44:00.000-07:00

Football clubs are organized like corporations. They collect funds from their season pass holders (socios), and in turn these socios have the right to vote on the principal decisions of the club. The dynamic is very similar to that of shareholders in a company.

The main difference is that investors can buy more than one share in a company, whereas a football fan is usually only a socio for himself. That would seem to imply that all socios have equal influence. Not true. In big and important football clubs, there are a group of socios who have tremendous power and influence. In Argentina, they're known as the barras bravas.

The barras bravas are the violent sector of the football club's fans. They are the ones who yell vulgar insults, or the ones who beat up the other team's fans after losing a match, or the ones who place bullets in the front seat of the players' cars after a poor performance. The barras bravas are especially notorious for their practice of cuidacoches, which involves extorting money out of people who park their cars at the stadium so that they can "take care of their cars" (i.e. have them not steal it).

Among the barras bravas, there are one or two leaders (never more, for reasons we will see later), who are probably the most powerful figures in the club. Their power stems from their ability to round up large numbers of votes among the barras bravas, either because they are charismatic, or because they are well-known in the neighborhood, or because they have a lot of contacts through trafficking goods. As a result, even if the leader just has one vote himself, through this process of rounding up votes he effectively makes himself a majority stakeholder.

The leader of the barras bravas is a key player in the internal politics of the club. For example, if the club hires a technical director that the other directors don't like, they can have the leader move the barras bravas against the technical director and get him ousted. The president himself can encourage the leader to have the barras bravas put bullets in the players' cars during practice if they don't perform well.

To keep the leaders of the barras bravas on their side, the presidents of football clubs buy them off: all-expenses paid travel with the team; access to all practices; 300 tickets, to be sold at 30x the retail price—being the leader of the barras bravas is clearly a lucrative business. There is a reason, though, why the barras bravas only ever have a few leaders at a time: there is so much money and power at stake that the leaders use any means necessary to maintain their position. Threats, blackmail, and murder are all part of the gig.

The grass of la cancha is so clean and immaculate. It betrays nothing about the people who work to put the spectacle together.

Maybe Not a Leap Forward for Mankind, but At Least a Quantum Leap for Me

2010-04-05T18:23:00.001-07:00

I don't know about you, but I don't find myself learning, as they say we should, one new thing everyday. I try to keep my mind open for learning at all times, but alas the actual act of learning seems to be more the providence of Fortune and the Gods than me—for as much as you may struggle to understand something, there's no guarantee that the concept will sink in, that it will penetrate the soft, fleshy cerebral membrane and become part of your bones (I have a deep conviction that all true knowledge resides in your bones; the rest is fluff to impress, or soups of facts that we regurgitate mindlessly).

That is to say, my knowledge doesn't seem to grow gradually and steadily, but rather in quantum leaps of tiny epiphanies. The thing—the problem, you could say—with epiphanies is that no matter how small they are, they bring such a burst of clarity that it's easy to forget how private and personal the whole experience is. You walk outside after an epiphany and the blue sky suddenly feels more blue and humanity seems somehow more enlightened and less hopeless. It's hard not to think of the experience as anything other than a leap forward for mankind.

Well, in true postmodern fashion, I think I've had an epiphany about epiphanies, and this one (unlike the others, which were more like lighting bolts of Zeus) can be pinpointed back to its source: writing this blog.

I'd always be on the lookout for topics for this blog (which, for some reason, always seemed to come to me in the shower), and the little epiphanies I had seemed like exciting and worthwhile stuff. But when it came to putting those thoughts to blog, I'd always have a problem of recreating that excitement and novelty of discovery. I'd work it around, try this or that, but it'd just end up sounding like common sense, nothing knew, stuff that everyone knew, constantly begging the question: what took you so long?

I don't think this necessarily reflects on my writing skills, but rather shows how the epiphanies that I thought were news for humanity were in reality just news for me (I hear a unison chant from the world of "what took you so long?"). But you know, that's fine. The thrill is still the same, and I still see the sky more blue.

P.S. The astute critic may have noted that this blog post itself seems to treat this epiphany about epiphanies as news to the world; which would make it seem as if I haven't learned my lesson after all. I assure this critic that my purpose is no longer didactic but confessional and self-disciplining, and if it benefits anyone else, all the better. (But to be truly honest, that didactic bug is hard to shake off.)

Hare Krishna!...en Argentina?

2010-03-28T09:33:00.000-07:00

Si no supieras la dirección de antemano, creo que pasarías por el templo de ISKCON en la calle Ciudad de la Paz sin darte cuenta alguna. La entrada es sólo una puertita dentro la pared blanca, fácil de no ver, que no delata nada del mundo que esconde detrás. Pero, por curiosidad o por coincidencia, si acabas pasando por la puerta, ten en cuenta que ya te has transportado al otro lado del mundo.

Yo fui por pura curiosidad, y por una curiosidad específica. En Arizona tenemos también un templo de ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness, popularmente conocidos como los "Hare Krishna"), pero su base consiste en inmigrantes de la India, es decir hindues de nacimiento, y la pequeña población de convertidos que tenemos es muy marginal. Pero acá, gente de la India no hay para nada (en un mes recorriendo todo Buenos Aires, una capital supuestamente cosmopólita, ni siquiera me he chocado con uno), lo cual significa que son todos convertidos y lo cual me hizo preguntar: ¿por qué estos argentinos quieren hacerse hindues, rechazar su propia cultura para adoptar la nuestra? Y además: si son todos convertidos, ¿cómo sabemos que no lo hacen todo mal y equivocado, que no distorsionan el hinduismo?

Así, sospechoso y curioso, pasé por la pared del templo. Primero, me encontré en una plaza. En frente había un edificio bastante alto, de alrededor de tres pisos, y a la izquierda había otro de un piso, con un subsuelo también.

De las escaleras del subsuelo estaba saliendo un monje, llevando un dhoti y con la cabeza calva salvo un mechón al fondo. Me saludó con "Hare Krishna!" y me llamó "Prabhu," y después de darle el recíproco saludo, le pedí que me mostrara el templo.

Resulta que no había mucho para ver, pero en lo que había me fijé intensamente, siempre juzgando en el fondo de mi mente. La primera sorpresa fue ver saliendo del alto edificio a tres o cuatro mujeres y a algunas jóvenes, todas llevando salvar-kamiz. Adentro había un tipo de guardería, con unos cinco chicos y algunas jóvenes y mujeres cuidándolos. En la televisión se había puesto una película ilustrada de la Ramáyana (acá se prenuncia como Ramayana) y en frente de estantes llenos de muñecas hindues decorativas los chicos y las cuidadores se entretenían con juguetes.

A lo largo de la gira, mientras el monje me iba mostrando lo demás del tempo, todo se volvía en un torbellino de "rica comida vegetariana," cuadros de Radha-Krishna, harmonium al lado del altar, y más y más gente en ropa hindú, todos llamándome "Prabhu" y platicando en español (una lengua que ni siquiera se conoce en la India)—y mientras yo estaba mudo, pretendiendo comprender porque es posible encontrar este simulacro de la India acá en la Argentina.

"Mirá, mirá," dijo una de las jóvenes de la guardaría, sonriendo, vestida de una salvar-kamiz rosada, con un niño con ojos rojos en sus brazos. "Él se puso a llorar por la Ramayana, se asustó de Rama. Ja ja ja ja..."

Una de mis grandes interrogantes fue como mi guía, argentino de sangre criollo y católico, llegó a dedicarse a esta vida totalmente ajena. Verle en el lugar donde estaba significa que no sólo rechazó el mundo católico que lo habría rodeado, sino también que había desarrollado fé y convicción en una religión acá totalmente desconocida, pagána, de miles de dioses de miles de manos, con rituales extraños y costumbres absurdas—sin mencionar el tener que dejar de comer todo tipo de carne! No lo podía creer.

Así, como una especie de antropólogo mezclado con psicólogo, me empeñé en entender a este monje a lo largo de la gira, como si estuviera estudiando la biología de un insecto. Instictívamente, me daba vergüenza esta actitúd, pero no al punto de que me parara en insinuarle preguntas que le hicieran confesar su historia. Pretendiendo disimular mis intenciones, le preguntaba, balbuciendo e incómodo, cómo es que llegó a ser monje, por qué dejó el mundo argentino atrás, pero nunca logré una respuesta satisfactoria. Contestaba en oraciones directas y breves y sobre temas que son típicos de convertidos (por ejemplo, algo como "Acá encontré las respuestas que quería") pero sus respuestas no me satisfacieron.

De hecho, al contrario de lo que esperaba, la conversación volvió a enfocarse en mí. Él me preguntó si yo tenía un guru, si leí la Bhagavad Gita, si yo practicaba sinceramente mi religión. Él se hizo el investigador y yo el sujeto, y yo acabé defendiéndome mientras le tocó a él explorar mi identidad. Me recitó frases de la Bhagavad Gita (a lo cual respondía cansadamente que sí conocía, y sabía lo que querían decir) y me regañó por no ser constante en mi práctica.

Esta inversión de papeles me reveló la arrogancia que tenía en creerme juez de los hindues del mundo. En primer lugar, si yo creyera (como pensé que creía) que la filosofía del hinduismo habla de la Verdad, y que trasciende la nacionalidad y la raza y el tiempo, no me debería sorprender que les atraiga a algunos argentinos, tal como me atrajo a mí. Asimismo, si entendiera la Bhagavad Gita (como pensé que entendía), recordaría que dice que no importa la manera en que rezas sino la devoción y la pureza que uno tiene.

No es nuestra prerrogativa elegir donde nacemos, pero sí tenemos el derecho de dirigir nuestra vida. Aunque todavía no me caen bien todas las prácticas de los Hare Krishna, no me debe importar si nacieron hindues o no. Nosotros todos buscamos respuestas, de una manera u otra.

Game Theory PSA

2010-03-28T09:09:00.000-07:00

This post is a sort of PSA for all those students out there that are just getting to know game theory and find themselves utterly consternated and dismayed that game theorists seem to assume we're all just selfish, ruthless, back-stabbing bastards.

The deal is this. One of the biggest fallacies in game theory is that people get too caught up in the story. Really speaking, in game theory the numbers (payoffs) don't just represent money/years in prison/etc., but rather all relevant consequences of the decision. That means the payoffs are supposed to have already factored in potential guilt, or charity, or altruism, or social norms, or shortsightedness. If someone finds that people don't play Nash Equilibrium because they feel guilty about screwing other people over, they tend to believe that "all of game theory is wrong;" but really, it's just that the payoffs didn't take everything into account, and so weren't valued correctly. This means, of course, that the payoffs are super-subjective and super-difficult to quantify. Game theorists can use deviations from the cold, ruthless version of Nash Equilibrium (e.g. only caring about money) to try to understand what emotions influence cooperative play, but they never think that the players themselves are violating all theory. Then what's the point of the theory? The theory tells me, given a certain ranking of outcomes, how I can and should maneuver. But I have to come up with the rankings first, and that's entirely up to me.

Buenos Aires, In Idiosyncracies

2010-03-02T08:09:00.002-07:00

They say every city has a personality, so as I'm getting to know my new home for the next half-year, I thought I'd document its idiosyncracies—the features that make Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires. Here's my first impression:

1. On almost every city block you will find:

A newspaper stand

A kiosko

A pizzería

Someone with a cigarrete in their hand

2. For 30 pesos, you can get a burger, fries, and a drink at Burger King. For 45 pesos you can eat decently (though also a little thriftily) at this fancy restaurant with linen and a waiter.

3. The Abasto shopping mall seems like one of the fanciest spots in town, with rows and rows of designer stores, like YvesSaintLauren.

In apparent contradiction to its upscale atmosphere, the mall also has not one but three McDonalds: one big one on the ground floor, one in the food court on the third floor, and a kosher one on the other side of the food court. The mall also has an indoor kids carnival called "Neverland," but no one seems to wince but me.

4. Every restaurant serves the same food: pizza, pasta, milanesa (breaded meat), tortilla, omlette, tarta, empanada. Even Acapulco, a Mexican restaurant on la calle Lavalle, can't help itself from putting pizza and pasta on the menu.

5. You can find kids swimming in the fountain in front of the Congress building.

6. A number of cities have lots of grafitti, but only in Buenos Aires is the majority of it political.

"Gane que gane pierde la gente - no votes"

"Basta de mano dura contra el pueblo pobre"

"Los Kirchner a la carcel"

7. It's possible to go a supermarket and not find beans.

Why Profit Doesn't Work in the Media Business

2010-02-08T16:46:00.000-07:00

Although I'm generally supportive of the profit incentive, I think the following clip shows one example of how it can go entirely wrong:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Moment of Zen - Roger Ailes Defends Fox News

http://www.thedailyshow.com/

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

The basic defense of the profit incentive is that you're almost always likely to getter better results when you incentivize good behavior than when you force it. Profit supposedly sets up an incentive system that induces businesses to serve the public interest as much as possible (of course, no system is perfect). Ideally, if a business makes a product that creates a lot of value for people, then that business makes a lot of profit, and investors come in to supply money to the company so that it can continue to finance its society-benefitting ways. Customers get what they want, and the business reaps the reward of going through all that effort. Everybody's happy.

Of course, this system isn't foolproof; for it to work, a couple key things must happen (at least). First, consumers need to be able to represent an effective check on business. If people in general can't tell that they're getting duped, or swindled, or cheated, or they have no alternatives (i.e. monopoly), then businesses can gain profits without actually benefitting the public. Second, it must be the case that if individual consumers are getting what they want, then society should also be better off. In other words, individual interest can't be opposed to a broader, collective interest.

The problem with profit in the media business is that neither of these criteria are satisfied. First of all, for the average American citizen getting blasted with a veritable fire hose of media all day, it's very hard to tell what's what. As David Foster Wallace puts it, in attempting to grapple with the Total Noise, we find ourselves "dealing with massive, high-entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; [the alternative to narrow arrogance and pre-formed positions is] continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help." Because the facts can be so gray and ambiguous, and because everyone needs help figuring the truth out, news organizations have the opportunity to simultaneously pose as a guide through this media mess and produce a narrative of its own. Fox is especially good at this, which is one of the reasons why, as Mr. Ailes put it, Fox is "winning." Fox News runs such a weasely operation that it holds journalistic credibility with enough people to put the "Fair and Balanced" graphic on air with a straight face.

In a lot of cases, though, Fox News viewers know that they're hearing only what they want to hear. In fact, that's precisely why they watch it. It's called "infotainment." The problem is that in a democracy infotainment poses a serious externality. It results in polarization, passion-driven protests, and, worst of all, a crippling inability to have a serious discussion about hard choices. Our country is worse off—not better off—if millions of Americans decide they'll watch the version of the news they like the best.

Now comes the point where, after critiquing the existing system, I'm supposed to do the responsible thing and supply an alternative. Unfortunately, though, when the execs are so unapologetic about their business strategy there's not much you can do. I can't conceive of a system that would actually incentivize "fair and balanced" reporting, and companies will just find ways around regulation (which is subject to all the terrible terrible pitfalls described in Public Choice Theory). It seems that the only viable solution is to somehow effect a change of heart in the way the media execs see their business. Somehow someone has to convince them to temporarily forgo the large profits they gain from the status quo in order to change for the common good. We need a call for a higher standard, a call to service and stewardship and morality.

Creative Writing 101 by Kurt Vonnegut

2010-01-21T16:40:00.000-07:00

[I'm posting this here for my own personal archives. I think both writers and readers can benefit from this advice, and plus it's fun to read in and of itself.]

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.

Source: http://fictionway.com/2009/03/22/creative-writing-101-by-kurt-vonnegut/

The Power of Corporations

2010-01-15T09:28:00.000-07:00

Google has announced it will exit China unless the government stops censoring its search engine, and now everyone's talking about it (see, for example, these good articles at The Economist, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal).

Google's actions come in response to hackers who attempted to breach the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Now human rights activists around the world are celebrating. To show solidarity, many Chinese have laid flowers outside Google's office.

What strikes me about this development is that it dramatically demonstrates how corporations can function as powerful political actors. We're already very familiar with the rapacious-political side of corporations, but Google's case suggests that there also exists a principled-political side. Whether or not Google is truly acting on principle, as it claims, is besides the point; the move still forces China to confront its human rights problems, which is really more success than U.S. diplomacy can speak for.

Thus, in this incident we see how corporations can pick up where states fail. The U.S. government can wheedle and reprimand and scold the Chinese government indefinitely, but when it comes to business, money talks. Plus, corporations are more politically agile than governments, which are weighed down by treaties and concerns over trade relations.

In the coming decade, I expect corporations to play a larger role in internatinal affairs. They have weight and power and they can use those for good as well as for ill. Please, corporations of the next decade, don't be evil.

More Drama In Argentina

2010-01-11T17:36:00.000-07:00

I used to think that modern-day heads of state operated within the basic confines of their constitution, but that was before I read Mary O'Grady's article, "Constitutional Showdown in Argentina," in the Wall Street Journal.

In what seems to be traditional Argentine autocratic fashion, the president, Cristina Kirchner, has sacked the central bank president, even though the constitution specifically forbids it. She has issued a decree to amend the bank's charter to force him out legally, but the court system is ruling in favor of the central bank president. Here, as O'Grady puts it, "the constitutional battle lines were drawn."

This development is very serious. What little economics I have studied has repeatedly emphasized the importance of maintaining the independence of the central bank—lest it be exploited by the government for easy money, which is exactly what has happened throughout Argentina's rocky history, and exactly what President Kircher seems to be doing now. Just as Argentina is getting its wind back after the financial meltdown of 2002-2003, President Kirchner seems to be poised to repeat the mistakes of the past.

More fundamentally, it seems Argentines have a hard time figuring out constitutional democracy. Military governments have suspended the constitution numerous times as they've come and gone. Perón came up with his own constitution when he came to power. Between 1999 and 2003 Argentina went through 5 presidents. In their press conferences, you can see that Argentines demonstrate an overt concern with following democratic principles; they talk about democracy in the abstract, as a set of values to live up to, in a way that reminds me of a recovering alcoholic who talks about the virtues of sobriety after hitting rock bottom.

Amidst this institutional fragility, a "constitutional showdown" is the last thing the country needed. Let's see how they pull through.

[For those who understand Spanish, you can find a video of President Kirchner defending her actions here.]

Avatar

2009-12-31T12:59:00.000-07:00

I think one of the reasons why Avatar has enjoyed such popular and critical success (top critics give it 94% at Rotten Tomatoes) is that it speaks to many of the major tensions and anxieties of our time. The story takes place on Pandora, an alien planet where a greedy corporation has sent up base to mine Unobtanium, which sells for $20 million a kilo on Earth. The problem is that one of the largest deposits of Unobtaium lies under a giant tree where the native Na'vi population lives. Jake Scully, our hero, is a crippled Marine who, through advanced future-age technology, is able to have his mind transfered to a Na'vi body grown in the lab (an Avatar). His assignment is to find a "diplomatic solution"—that is, convince the Na'vi population to leave their home before the corporation comes and razes it anyway.

Within this framework, Mr. Cameron weaves story lines that prove cathartic for our blood-stained and embarrassing history. A good chunk of the middle part of the movie functions as a dramatic reenactment of The Trail of Tears; the way the military and the company work as one unit in the film is reminiscent of the United Fruit Company's exploits in Latin America; and the military commander's callous contempt of and insensitivity towards the Na'vi has echoes of the US military's attitude towards the "gooks" in the Korean War. For those of us familiar with US history, the film forces us to confront our past, learn from our mistakes, and serves as a precautionary warning for the path we must not travel again in the future—an especially timely message as we continue the Iraq War and prepare to escalate in Afghanistan.

Alongside its political message, Avatar also voices what I think is a general anxiety of our society's spiritual decline. The Na'vi are a very spiritual society, in the way of the Native Americans or the Orient, and believe in the oneness of all living beings. The film yearns for a simpler life, connected with nature and other living beings, living in harmony instead of opposition. David Denby of The New Yorker calls this sentiment nothing "more than a whiff of nineteen-sixties counterculture, by way of environmentalism and current antiwar sentiment" and ultimately dismisses it as "sentimentality," but I think he fails to realize the reality and legitimacy of this spiritual need.

And of course, the film is absolutely joyful to see, visually: a real treat for the eyes. What makes these effects worthwhile is that they're not effects for effect's sake, but rather a way of absorbing you into this rich and astounding fantasy world that Mr. Cameron creates. This film has clearly delineated good guys and bad guys, and for that to work the film has to tie you up emotionally with the good guys. By introducing us to the Na'vi's world, and by making us fall in love with it, Mr. Cameron succeeds in making the struggles of the Na'vi meaningful and close; in the end everyone in the theater was openly cheering for them.

Some critics complain that the characters are too simplistic or that the story line is too trite, but I think there is a place for war-of-good-and-evil tales and this movie does a fantastic job of representing the genre. The visuals are stunning; the plot is absorbing (for those who aren't too cynical at least); and after you walk out of the theater you have something to think about. Certainly worth seeing.

Bah, Humbug!

2009-12-25T15:20:00.000-07:00

University of Pennsylvania economist Joel Waldfogel has written a book called Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays. The book is apparently 186 pages long, and backed by a big name publisher (Princeton University Press), but really all it's about is what everyone knows anyway: gifts are often wasteful because the receiver hardly ever values the gift as much as the giver paid for it.

Though the rest of the world doesn't seem to care about all this waste, Mr. Waldfogel certainly does. As he puts it in his introduction to the book, "If you discovered a government program that was hemorrhaging money—say, spending $100 billion of taxpayer money per year to generate a benefit of only $85 billion—you would be outraged. You might even email your elected representatives to demand an end to the wasteful program." To wit, Mr. Waldfogel even offers a proposal to help us make the holiday season more efficient: instead of traditional gifts, he says, we should have "gift vouchers that are designed to expire after a set period of time, with unused balances going to a charity of the giver’s choice" (The Economist).

As an economics major, books like these dismay me to no end. They're the reason that economists are seen as nothing more than miserable little bean counters (and rightly so, it seems).

Mr. Waldfogel misses the point of gift-giving completely. It's not about the stuff, it's about people. People appreciate gifts not because it saves them the time of going out to buy it themselves, but rather because it shows that the other person values their relationship. This is what is meant by "It's the thought that counts." Thus, Mr. Waldfogel has ended up writing a whole book on the inefficiency of transactions that may not even been inefficient after all. It just requires a change in perspective to realize that although people may not have spent much money on the gift themselves, they can still value it as much as (or even more than) the purchase price simply by virtue of it being a cherished gift.

Books like these make me worry about how materialist we're becoming. If we (like Mr. Waldfogel) care primarily about getting the most bang for our buck out of gifts, then it seems we're forgetting where their true value is supposed to lie.

Uselessness

2009-12-23T16:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I stumbled upon a book by Richard Sennett, an American sociologist, called The Culture of the New Capitalism. In it, Sennett looks at how our constantly evolving economy shapes the way we live—how we attempt to manage the constant uncertainty; how we try to adapt to a life of "migrating from job to job, task to task, place to place;" how we make efforts to live up to a new cultural outlook on talent and merit and ability; and how we fail at all these things.

One of Sennett's most engaging ideas is what he calls the "specter of uselessness." Depression-era photos still disturb us, Sennett argues, because the specter of uselessness still continues to haunt us, though it's character is different in the modern age. Now the uselessness we face takes the form of the jobs that are being shipped overseas; or the hyper-intelligent automation systems that are making human labor cost-ineffective; or the emphasis on fresh skills and new talent versus experience and seniority that threatens the job security of the ageing.

Stated after the fact, it almost seems like common sense. After all, our higher education system is built entirely around innovation and discovery; our politicians constantly talk about "remaining competitive" and "staying ahead;" our TV shows are all about finding the next star; our companies are always racing to outdo each other...and while everyone is marching ahead, how will there not be anxiety about being left behind?

But I think that this "specter of uselessness" is not just peculiar to modernity, but rather a part of the human condition. I think Adi Shankaracharya put it best (that is, starkly and plainly) in his Bhaja Govindham:

यावद्वित्तोपार्जनसक्त्तस्तावन्निजपरिवारो रक्त्त:।
पश्चाज्जीवाति जर्जरदेहे वार्तां कोऽपिं न पृच्छति गेहे।।
As long as there is the ability to earn and save so long are all your dependents attached to you. Later on, when you come to live with an old, infirm body, no one at home cares to speak even a word with you!

I don't read this verse as a lament, but rather as a sober recognition of the way relationships work. Humans relations involve give and take: we give our attention, our affection, our time, and our effort; and in return we expect money, affection, wisdom, love, intimacy, interesting conversation—something. There comes a time though when we no longer have anything to give, and at that point these relationships naturally dissolve.

In this spirit, I have heard that our job in life is to learn to enjoy our own company, to be at peace with ourselves, to figure out what to do with ourselves before the world has no more use for us. The specter of uselessness will always loom, but it becomes less scary when we confront it directly.

Marriage

2009-12-12T13:05:00.000-07:00

If you think about it, marriage is a funny institution. Two young people decide they want to spend the rest of their lives together. This is a very momentous decision, of course, so they think long and hard about it. They consider all aspects of a person: their looks, their personality, their wit, their charm, their earning potential, their character, their goals and beliefs. Of course different people place emphasis on different things, but mostly the decision comes down to the fact that there is something about the other person's body, mind, or intellect that's appealing.

The irony here is that these people are making supposedly permanent decisions based on entirely temporary things. When they make their decision they're at the prime of their lives. They're young and fit and sharp and as attractive as they're ever going to be. From there they have some years of youth left and then, for most people, it's all downhill. The body sags, potbellies form, the intellect dulls, the mind gets set in annoying habits, moods become more irritable—in other words, their spouse no longer become the person they married. If they were to reevaluate their spouse 10 years later, they probably wouldn't marry them.

This may sound like a sad thing, but I think it gets at the essential beauty of marriage. They say a true friend is one who knows your faults and sticks around anyway. I think that's the point of marriage. When you grow old and no one else is willing to put up with your bodily noises and forgetfulness and all the other problems of aging, at least you can have your spouse; and, likewise, they have you.

Wisdom for the Ages

2009-12-12T12:52:00.000-07:00

This is a copy of David Foster Wallace's commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005. It changed the way I look at the world, and in the off chance that others find it meaningful too, I'm posting it here.

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

If at this moment, you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude—but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real—you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues." This is not a matter of virtue—it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

People who can adjust their natural default-setting this way are often described as being "well adjusted," which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphal academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default-setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what's going on inside me. As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: "Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master." This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in, day out" really means. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home—you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job—and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day-rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.

Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etcetera, etcetera.

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid g-d- people.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth...

Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do—except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am—it is actually I who am in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line—maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept. who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible—it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important—if you want to operate on your default-setting—then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship...

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already—it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race"—the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness—awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

[Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html]

Fascination of the Abomination

2009-12-04T16:25:00.002-07:00

"In some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him—all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination—you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate."

- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

The horror, the horror:

The cast of MTV's new reality show, "Jersey Shore."

I'm not joking; here's a review of the first episode.

The Paradox of the Middle Class

2009-12-01T01:19:00.002-07:00

From the New York Times, an article whose subject seems to get at the essence of growing up in the middle class—Tips for the Admissions Test...To Kindergarten:

Test preparation has long been a big business catering to students taking SATs and admissions exams for law, medical and other graduate schools. But the new clientele is quite a bit younger: 3- and 4-year-olds whose parents hope that a little assistance — costing upward of $1,000 for several sessions — will help them win coveted spots in the city’s gifted and talented public kindergarten classes.

The article goes on to describe how the kindergarten tutoring business is taking off (the Bright Kids program featured here is just one of many) and why (many parents figure a couple thousand for tutoring is cheaper than private schools).

Although the whole affair seems outrageous and ridiculous at face value, it's difficult to resolve the issues here. If you ask people how we should distribute scarce rewards in a society fairly, most of them will say that they should go to the people who work the hardest (there is, in fact, research to back this up: q.v. Chapter 11, "Distributive Justice," in Homans, G.C., Social Behavior. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Janovich, 1974; and also work by Guillermina Jasso). But you put that principle into practice and you end up with situations like these, which seem, frankly, dehumanizing.

There are a number of other issues entangled here (like what it even means to be "gifted"; whether such ability is innate or acquired; whether differentiating education is worthwhile/necessary/inevitable; what it means to provide equal opportunity; the extent to which education figures into the American Dream, etc., etc.), but what makes the article jump out at me is that it shows how hard we, the middle class, are competing. It's like we're fighting tooth and nail for our very survival, even though fighting for survival seems unnecessary in modern society. Desperation amidst plenty: this, I believe, is the paradox of the middle class.

One Good Thought for Sunday

2009-11-29T13:48:00.000-07:00

Once Buddha was walking from house to house begging for alms with his disciples. The disciples were young and inexperienced, but full of enthusiasm and reverence for their teacher. Buddha told them that as monks their duty was to be content with whatever the householders offered them, so they did as he said.

Sometimes they were fed generously, other times they received little, but they were always treated with respect, or at worst indifference. One time, however, the man who opened the door lashed out in insults. He called Buddha a useless leech, a fraud, a cheat, a despicable bastard, a whole host of other terrible things, lambasted the entire monk profession, spat on the ground, and slammed the door. Unfazed, Buddha merely turned around to leave for the next house, and, as always, the disciples followed suit.

But for the rest of the day the disciples could not get that incident out of their mind. Their minds were ablaze with rage. How dare he treat our master with such contempt! What a great insult! What arrogance! On and on and on it went, but they did not say a word to their teacher. In this way the whole day passed.

At nightfall they stopped at a spot to rest. It was a long and tiring day so one of the disciples got some water and started to wash and massage Buddha's feet. The rest sat nearby and ate their food. Buddha looked around and noticed that they were eating their food a little more violently than usual. What's wrong?, he asked.

Then it all came gushing out. That man who insulted you, they said, he is such a scoundrel, such a fiend, such a...

Once they were done, Buddha looked around and smiled. He only said: If someone gives you a cow, and you refuse to take it, to whom does it belong?

Ego Slayer

2009-11-24T17:43:00.000-07:00

[Here I have, finally, a new poem. Constructive feedback is greatly appreciated, as it is always on this blog.]

Ego Slayer

I.
Renounce
the grandeur and vanity that
come from small victories
rare though they be
and recognize your best
as merely the not worse of a certain geographical vicinity
a coincidence in spacetime
circumscribed by a certain set of minds that laud
and applaud out of ignorance
no more
of a larger more infinite more grand reality.

II.
Johnny, who made the apple tree,
the apple farmer or the apple seed?
Remember that all the sweat and toil in the world
do no good for barren land.

III.
The Pharisees
delight in knowing that they know
and showing that they know and
cloak the worship of their ego
as the worship of Their God true knowledge
and intellectual progress and truth and whatever
—but of course the false idols of today
will fall in the dustbin with those of yesterday
as all cheap useless rubbish goes.

Watch the Pharisees
as they relegate themselves to the small history
of vain struggles, forgotten strife, and petty men
not knowing—or fathoming—true devotion
the ascetic life of
confronting constant falsification
whittling down the possibilities
slowly
and growing confident in one’s ignorance.

Knowledge is an almighty God,
but it requires ego as its constant sacrifice.

Castillos de Arena

2009-11-22T15:55:00.001-07:00

[As a stopgap way of breaking the hiatus, here's another one of my old Spanish poems. Please post comments, positive or negative.]

Castillos de arena

Vivimos nosotros a la orilla del mar
cuyo vaivén inexorable va destruyendo
nuestros castillos de arena.

Aunque sea un castillo más grande que el Alcázar,
él también, un día, caerá.

Pero esto no es una lástima;
la única lástima es llorar por castillos de arena.

Sand Castles

We live at the edge of the sea
whose inexorable tide keeps destroying
our sand castles.

Even if it is a castle bigger than the Alcázar
it too, one day, will fall.

But this is not a sad thing;
the only sad thing is to cry over sand castles.

The Stag Hunt

2009-11-08T11:15:00.001-07:00

Last week I was at the local grocery co-op buying some avocadoes and tomatoes. At the checkout line, the cashier, a Jamaican man with dreads, started making some small talk. What do you major in, he asked. Oh, economics? Hey, what do you think of the Fed?

I don't know much about the Fed, really, so I said I didn't wade much in political debates (which I don't) and that I thought they employed decent enough people. I prefer going through life assuming the best in people, assuming that the world isn't rigged against me, I said. The Jamaican man turned serious: But sometimes things are rigged. Sometimes things are rigged, and you have to fix them.

Hm. In my conversation with the Jamaican man, I got the sense that he believed things (the economy, the state of the world, etc.) were messed up only because someone was there to mess it up; that he felt that if only people were cooperative (i.e. "give peace a chance"), the world would be a great place. And this seems a really natural position to take, since, after all, our problems are human-made. But it turns out that our society doesn't work like that. The startling and fascinating conclusion of game theory is that we can end up in sub-optimal outcomes even if everyone would like to cooperate.

How is this possible?

The story behind the game goes back to Rousseau. Imagine, he said, a group of primitive people who had a choice between hunting stag and hunting hare. Hunting stag would, of course, be the best option because it would yield lots of rich meat, but the problem is that it requires everyone to work together to take the stag down. On the other hand, they could hunt hare individually, but the reward wouldn't be as great. In game form the story looks like this:

The numbers in the boxes represent how the players (in this case, an individual vs. the rest of society) value the outcome. Thus everyone hunting stag is the best outcome (3), both hunting hare is second (2), and getting screwed is the worst (1), because you not only waste your time running after the stag, but you don't even get any food.

In other words, these people are as cooperative as you're going to get: They would like to work together and they don't like to take advantage of each other. And yet it's still possible for these primitive people (and us possibly less primitive people) to get stuck in a Hunt Hare/Hunt Hare equilibrium!

The catch here is that it matters not just what players want to do, but what they think others will do. Everyone would like to hunt stag, but only when everyone else hunts stag. So if people think others are inclined to cooperate, they'll cooperate too; but, on the flipside, if everyone is scared of getting screwed over, then they're likely to not cooperate.

Notice that the basic fact that all these people are cooperative hasn't changed. It's just that they don't know that they're all cooperators. And this uncertainty causes all the problems: cooperation is risky, it leaves you vulnerable, and people aren't willing to gamble too much. [Indeed, this game is also called an Assurance Game, because if players were assured that the other was a cooperator, then they would cooperate too.]

This is my long comment to the Jamaican man's remark. Yes, Jamaican man, sometimes things are rigged. But sometimes we can end up in all sorts of social problems even when no one is at fault.

For more information on the Stag Hunt and cooperation and such, see Brian Skyrms' book: The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure.

Capitalism, In Essence

2009-10-30T16:42:00.001-07:00

1. Consumers use money to get what they want.
2. Sellers are rewarded with money for giving consumers what they want.
3. Money in hand, sellers turn into consumers and get what they want./To get more money, consumers turn into sellers and give people what they want.

4. Repeat—ad nauseum.

Meanwhile, everyone knows of course that people shouldn't always have what they want.

Vino con vino

2009-10-29T19:05:00.000-07:00

[Updating content regularly is more difficult than I thought. While I'm working on my next post, here's an old Spanish poem of mine for those who haven't seen it yet.]

Vino con vino

Vino con vino.
Vino vino y se bebió todo.
¡Todos borrachos!
Vino vino y venía tristeza
Sigilosamente a esta fiesta

Mas no importó.
Nada nada sino lo divertido.
¡Vino más vino!
Debajo del techo, jaleo alegre,
Mientras venía la calma Muerte.

Vino con vino.
Vino vino ya se fueron los padres.
¡Casa de mozos!
Vomitó uno y vomitó dos,
Se echaron a reír, locos locos.

Trepaba al techo,
Alto alto subía el joven.
¡Tantos los gritos!
De la tierra volaron distante
Incitaciones –¡Adelante! ¡Adelante!

Vino con vino.
Vino vino derramado al suelo.
¡Choque penoso!
Césped rojo y voces temblando,
Trajo el vino ¿Para que? ¡Para nada!

Yikes!

2009-10-19T21:43:00.000-07:00

Here we have commodity fetishism at its worst:

When people care more about things than their relations (and not even distant relations, but really really close relations!), the world is pretty much doomed. Don't tell Marx about this ad or he'll die a second death.