We used to be awed by our accomplishments. The pyramids, the colossus, the metropolis, the moon landing. The sheer scale of these shared works inspired awe and pride. A feeling that we, or our rulers, must be doing something right if this is what we can build. Sparked with human toil the feeling one gets staring into a naked night sky or down a canyon.
Today we are awed by our problems. The sheer scale of runaway warming, racial animus, hunger, sadness, death. The fact that all of our great acts have not changed a basic truth about our lives and our race - that we all die and suffer along the way not in spite of but because of one another.
We are cowed into a listless silence. Standing at the base of the pyramid of skulls we don't speak. We don't act. We look away. And yet there are so many simple steps to take.
Eva Brann here identifies two concepts of the will that are unhelpful to live with:
1. A super-human or sub-human will, a will with no human agent, that will deliver an inevitable future that we need to accommodate ourselves with.
2. And the idea that if any of us is to be successful, we need to act swiftly and that decisive action is the manifestation of the will.
The second midwives the first. We are hasty, "intuitive", unreasoning in our desire for action. The document requires quick "iterating" (tl;dr). The pace of our give and take in our working days has left no time to weigh options and make a reasoned choice. Instead we let intuition guide our moves, hoping that quick action will stop disaster. But in quick action lies all the enemies of reason - our biases, our blindness, our unspoken fears, our basest wants that our reasoning, moral mind would check.
And so in quick action we give life to the invisible hand. Capital loves the swift action of unthinking masses. It is the key to "revealed preference". Rational markets are a lie but the mass market capitalist just needs us to make our will manifest, even if through a billion thoughtless clicks. We create that super-human will that brings us our future - all our unthinking has a mind of its own. And this will builds pyramids of skulls and we gawp.
Self-help is creeping towards solutions. Marshall Goldsmith's Triggers is a modern day take on Socrates' call to build yourself a character and a life that cannot help but do good. Habit-forming apps encourage us to make small commitments first, and work our way up to big changes.
We can't stare at the pyramid of skulls and say, "I can't do anything to fix the world without destroying this pyramid of skulls first." It takes simple, personal steps. Take your eyes off the massive problem and cast them on the ground in front of you. Your complaint that what you do doesn't matter is an arrogant, bullshit cop out. What you do is all that matters because if enough of you do it, we won't have these yawning pits of hopelessness all around us.
I will slow down, reflect, and act deliberately. That is my reasoning mind made manifest. And if that action only serves to grow my knowledge or deepen my relationships with those I love, then that is meaningful to me, and it hasn't burned another drop of oil or sent another child to a sweatshop for my pleasure.
Wednesday, September 2, 2015
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Taking reality down a peg
When you have an adversarial relationship with reality, as leaders of the Republican party so often do, it becomes paramount to cast aspersions on anyone offering a glimpse of the truth. The latest target appears to be the CBO -- the non-partisan referee who makes all of the budget estimates for Congress:
House Republicans are in a pickle: One of their new rules says that new legislation must be paid for. But the health-care bill reduces the federal deficit by more than $100 billion over the next 10 years. Luckily, they've figured out an answer to their problem: They've decided to simplyexempt the repeal bill from the rules. That means they're beginning the 112th Congress by lifting their own rules in order to take a vote that will increase the deficit. Change we can believe in, and all that.
Republicans are aware that this looks, well, horrible. So they're trying to explain why their decision to lift the rule requiring fiscal responsibility is actually fiscally responsible. Majority Leader Eric Cantor got askedabout this, and he returned the reporter's serve with a volley of nonsense. "About the budget implications, I think most people understand that the CBO did the job it was asked to do by the then-Democrat majority, and it was really comparing apples to oranges,” Cantor said. “It talked about 10 years' worth of tax hikes and six years' worth of benefits. Everyone knows beyond the 10-year window, this bill has the potential to bankrupt this federal government as well as the states."
Aside from being factually incorrect about the accounting for health care reform, or more accurately "a lie", Cantor's argument also implies that the CBO can't be trusted -- that it simply follows the whims of the party who controls Congress. But now his party controls the House, and has this rule that nothing can go unpaid for, a rule that the CBO, presumably, has the responsibility to check. I assume he'll want us to trust the CBO's projections from now on.
When you subvert those who are trying to understand and describe reality, it makes it easier to win an argument by shouting louder than your opponent -- a specialty of the Tea Party movement.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Yeesh
Obama Liquidates Himself
A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?
It’s appalling on every level.
It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)
It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.
And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”
Now, I still cling to a fantasy: maybe, just possibly, Obama is going to tie his spending freeze to something that would actually help the economy, like an employment tax credit. (No, trivial tax breaks don’t count). There has, however, been no hint of anything like that in the reports so far. Right now, this looks like pure disaster.
Krugman, amping up the shrill. And I feel like I'm right there with him ... A "freeze" feels like nothing but a gimmick. It doesn't do much to change the deficit, and it sends all sorts of terrible political messages. You know what does cut the deficit? The health care plan! If voters don't know about key provisions of reform, like the ban on denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions, they sure as hell won't know about the benefits for the deficit (especially given the false information that some have spread). But the White House has done an absolutely abysmal job in educating the public, and now he has to resort to Republican gimmicks to make it seem like he cares about a deficit that, just a month ago, his signature health care reform was poised to cut by over $100 billion over the next 20 years.
Friday, January 22, 2010
The domestic political landscape boiled down to three short paragraphs
Heuristic-Driven Public Opinion
My view of the public is that it doesn’t have strong views on policy matters. But most voters do have strong views about famous politicians. A large minority of voters really like Barack Obama, for example, and if he tells them something is good they’ll assume he’s right. Another large minority of voters has strongly negative feelings toward Obama, and toward the Democratic Party writ large, but has positive views about the Republican Party and its leadership.
Then there’s another, smaller faction that takes a dim view of both parties and of politicians generally. But even though this group is small, it’s centrally located on the opinion spectrum. And it tends to assume that if elite leaders from both parties get together and say something’s a good idea—like George Bush and Dick Cheney but also Hillary Clinton and Tom Daschle and John Kerry and Dick Gephardt say we should invade Iraq—that it’s probably a good idea. On the contrary, if only one party will support something then it’s probably partisan and bad and probably the party pushing the idea didn’t try hard enough to reach a sensible compromise.
Therefore, almost anything that an opposition party succeeds in mounting unanimous opposition to—Bill Clinton’s 1993 budget, George W Bush’s 2005 Social Security privatization push, Barack Obama’s 2009 health reform push—will wind up polling poorly.
This is exactly right. And it's why the problems that face policy-making are much deeper than the super-majority requirement in the Senate.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Past Decade Warmest Ever, NASA Data Shows - NYTimes.com
The agency also found that 2009 was the second warmest year since 1880, when modern temperature measurement began. The warmest year was 2005. The other hottest recorded years have all occurred since 1998, NASA said.
via nytimes.com
Wait, but it snowed in October in Boulder, and was really, really chilly. Like seriously cold. A lot of the time. Therefore, my experience of local conditions trumps worldwide temperature observations, and global warming's a hoax!
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Yes, we are essentially parasites
"We’ve known for some time that men need marriage more than women from the standpoint of physical and mental well-being,” said Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and research director for the Council on Contemporary Families, a research and advocacy group. “Now it is becoming increasingly important to their economic well-being as well.
via nytimes.com
Aggressive, loutish, self-satisfied parasites. It was a good run, guys.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Que? (En Espanol)
Plastic Logic Creates the ‘Paperless Briefcase’
By BRAD STONEPlastic Logic
After a year of slowly dribbling out news about its plans, Plastic Logic has finally unveiled the Que proReader, another rival to the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook in the growing market for electronic reading devices.
The Que proReader, a slender, lightweight touch-screen device the size of an 8 1/2-by-11 piece of paper, is designed primarily for mobile business professionals as a replacement for bulky printouts. The device was created with the celebrated Silicon Valley design firm IDEO.
“We are not creating a paperless office, or like the e-book world, trying to create a paperless bookshelf. What we are driving on is the paperless briefcase,” said Richard Archuleta, chief executive of Plastic Logic.
A decade-old spin-out from Cambridge University, Plastic Logic has raised more than $200 million in venture capital to build a factory in Dresden, Germany. The company wants to enable a new generation of electronics with flexible, robust plastic displays instead of glass and other heavier materials. The Que is its first product, but the company wants to license its technology to other companies and types of devices.
“We are going beyond an e-reader, creating a whole new category,” Mr. Archuleta said.
The Que will connect to user’s e-mail accounts and calendars and, with Wi-Fi and AT&T 3G connectivity, wirelessly reach books from the Barnes & Noble online store and a variety of newspapers and periodicals. That development gives the publications the same look and feel as the print version. Barnes & Noble will also sell the device in its stores.
But it’s awfully expensive. There will be two models of the Que. The first, with 4 gigabytes of memory, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, will sell for $649. A premium model, with 8GB of memory and AT&T’s 3G connectivity, will cost $799. The devices will go on sale in April. The similarly sized Kindle DX today costs $479.
The Que will also suffer some of the same drawbacks as other e-reading devices (no video, no color), particularly with a new generation of versatile color tablets hitting the market soon.
But Plastic Logic believes black-and-white e-ink on a plastic device is better suited to professionals weighed down by documents. “At Plastic Logic, we really celebrate black and white,” Mr. Archuleta said. “Ink on paper – e-ink on plastic. It’s the key to readability.”
Not really sure I get the utility of this product ... You can view Office docs so you can annotate them? If you really need to produce on the go, wouldn't you just want a a laptop? I guess it's best for a manager who can annotate a bunch of documents and send them to her minions to make changes ... Guess that justifies the price point -- definitely not minion-sized.
Monday, January 4, 2010
Making Yemen-aid out of Yemenis
A headline looking for a story about increased US aid spending in Yemen. Make it happen.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Enough said
From Igor Volsky.I find it very hard to believe that kill-billers can construct an argument by which the expected social return of waiting for the next reform is higher than passing this bill. On the plus side, the next reform could be more comprehensive, but that seems easily outweighed by a much, much lower likelihood of success, and a higher cost today in terms of lives lost as we delay needed implementation of the pre-existing condition change.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Monday, November 30, 2009
Don't invest in mutual funds
Mutual fund charts of the day
Post a comment (3)Posted by: Felix SalmonTags: investingFama and French have a very long blog entry (over 5,000 words) about the latest version of their paper on mutual fund returns. As you might expect from research sponsored by an index-fund company, it shows that active mutual-fund managers fail to outperform the market. But at least it does so with pretty charts.
Here’s what happens when you compare actual before-fees returns from mutual-fund managers (the blue line) with what you’d expect if no managers had any skill at all, and the returns were simply distributed by chance (the red line).
On the left hand side of the chart, you see actual fund managers significantly underperforming what you’d expect by luck alone. On the right hand side, however, it seems that if you’re skilled at manager selection, there is a glimmer of hope that you might find a little bit of alpha. Not a lot, but something statistically significant.
Unfortunately, all that alpha — and then some — gets eaten away by fees. Here’s the chart for after-fees returns:
The red line, remember, is the distribution of returns you’d expect if all mutual-fund managers had an alpha of zero. The blue line is actual returns. Fama and French conclude:
For the vast majority of actively managed funds, true α is probably negative; that is, the fund managers do not have enough skill to produce risk adjusted expected returns that cover their costs.
Which comes as no surprise, but it’s still good to see some relatively solid empirics here. Anybody wanting to make an intellectually-credible case in favor of investing in actively-managed mutual funds is going to have to attack this paper head-on.
... succinctly summarizing one solid piece of advice I have gotten at literally every level of economics education -- high school, college and b-school.
This seems perfectly reasonable to me
— Updated: 1:44 pm -->Chicken Little cometh
Readers of classic science fiction may remember the “character” of Chicken Little in Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants — a giant hunk of vat-grown meat from which slices were periodically removed to feed the masses.
Via Crooked Timber, it’s here:
SCIENTISTS have grown meat in the laboratory for the first time. Experts in Holland used cells from a live pig to replicate growth in a petri dish.
The advent of so-called “in-vitro” or cultured meat could reduce the billions of tons of greenhouse gases emitted each year by farm animals — if people are willing to eat it.
So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time.
Yum.
Monday, November 23, 2009
The world still exists
A Blast at Last at Huge Particle Collider
Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesScientists at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, during the restart of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva.
via nytimes.com
Or our alien simulators paused the simulation, spent 18 months offline writing code to fix the "Hadron collider bug," spliced the code into the universal physics model, and reverted to the saved simulation from November 23rd, 2009.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Naughty Bernanke
Let me remind readers that, according to the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve's chief policy mission is:
[C]onducting the nation’s monetary policy by influencing the monetary and credit conditions in the economy in pursuit of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.
Emphasis mine. Clearly something here is badly amiss. The Fed has given up on easing further despite the fact that unemployment is approaching its highest level in 80 years, and despite the fact that prices are not stable but are declining.
via economist.com
Every Fed challenge team in the country better be arguing for more monetary easing. We're still looking at zero/negative inflation (deflation), and rising unemployment, and it's clear that fiscal policy won't step in (because people think the Treasury department should be run like a family budget, or something). Therefore, more aggressive monetary policy, please.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Nonsensical
“A lot of it is sentiment-driven and there the dollar is getting a vote of no confidence,” Mr. Dolan said. “The massive borrowing by the U.S. government is undermining confidence in the longer-term outlook for the dollar.”
Investors appeared to be directing their focus to riskier equities and turning away from the currency markets. The dollar is considered a low-yield investment, given the historically low interest rates in the United States. Last week, the Federal Reserve gave no indication that it planned to raise interest rates anytime soon, leaving investors to reroute their funds toward the stock market, oil and gold.
via nytimes.com
These two paragraphs don't make much sense to me. A vote of no confidence in the government would result in long-term interest rates on US bonds to shoot up to compensate investors for inflation. That isn't happening. In fact, as the next paragraph states, interest rates are historically low.
I'm no expert on currency markets, but it doesn't make sense to me that a wise bet against the dollar in currency markets (driving the dollar lower) wouldn't also be a wise bet in bond markets (selling Treasury bonds and driving long-term interest rates up). It sounds to me like people don't have much faith in American economic growth over the next 10 years, which explains both trends, and could actually be remedied by additional deficits (stimulus spending). See Brad DeLong for more: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/11/a-joyless-recovery.html.>
Distressing
Politico reported that you told colleagues, “There is now a pro-life majority in the House.” Is that true?
I don’t remember saying that, but it’s not inconsistent with what the votes say. That’s been the situation.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
ZOMFG WTF!!!!! 9.5% THIRD QUARTER PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH NUMBER!!!! - J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with All Eight Tentacles
ZOMFG WTF!!!!! 9.5% THIRD QUARTER PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH NUMBER!!!!
I WAS EXPECTING A 6% PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH QUARTER, BUT THIS IS RIDICULOUS!!!
Productivity increased 9.5 percent in the nonfarm business sector during the third quarter of 2009 as unit labor costs fell 5.2 percent (seasonally adjusted annual rates). In manufacturing, productivity increased 13.6 percent while unit labor costs fell 7.1 percent...
Back in the 1930s there was a Polish Marxist economist, Michel Kalecki, who argued that recessions were functional for the ruling class and for capitalism because they created excess supply of labor, forced workers to work harder to keep their jobs, and so produced a rise in the rate of relative surplus-value.
For thirty years, ever since I got into this business, I have been mocking Michel Kalecki. I have been pointing out that recessions see a much sharper fall in profits than in wages. I have been saying that the pace of work slows in recessions--that employers are more concerned with keeping valuable employees in their value chains than using a temporary high level of unemployment to squeeze greater work effort out of their workers.
I don't think that I can mock Michel Kalecki any more, ever again.
How long can this productivity growth continue? At some point, businesses will run out of ways to squeeze more production out of their current workers ... But will they be able to meet demand with productivity growth alone?
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