Paper, of course. Doesn’t need batteries. Nonproprietary. Graphological techniques can in principle be used to verify authorship. Machine readability is important to me, but 100 years from now I expect machine transcription of handwritten texts to be more widely available than CD-ROM drives.
Category: Uncategorized
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Quotebag #55
“How come the people who say they worry about SS going broke never worry about the US Armed Forces going broke? Because they WANT SS to go broke.”—Bill Wald
“You can’t ‘spend’ your way out of public debt but you can’t cut or save your way out of it either.”—Poor Richard
“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and rebellion.”—Oscar Wilde
“Everybody needs to make a living, and in our system, everybody needs to do so visibly and individually, which means we are all co-opted to some degree, trained to chase the various currencies of success (grants, papers, awards, accolades, sales, page views).”—Justin Podur
“Sure, you’ll tell me about the moral hazard of giving someone something for free — never mind the trillions we’ve given to banksters and other common thieves. And you’ll tell me how those people should’ve just gotten a job — never mind that there are 4.3 applicants for every open position.”—Michael Alan Miller
“The puppet hanging on the board is Paul Samuelson, iconic mathturbater and textbook author, whose Economics taught a generation of economists to bark like trained seals, ‘Lump-of-labor fallacy! Lump of labor fallacy!’ The mouth opens and closes; the arms and legs flap.”—Sandwichman
“We have the basic fact, pointed out by Adam Smith all those years ago, that the bosses will combine in order to lower wages just as readily as and with far greater ease than workers can combine to raise wages. Most capitalists will also be at pains to point out, in different contexts of course, that labour is a cost. We are nothing but a resource which it is in their interests to get as much out of for as little as possible. Hence the class antagonism created by the wage labour system.”—Phil Dickens
“My primary autistic problem is poverty.”—Laura Nagle
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Quotebag #54
“We have a two-party, one-ideology system of governance, and the ideology is one of economic growth at all costs.”—JP Hayes
“The problem of pimps is a problem of people. The problem is not merely that a few sociopaths exploit others for their own gain; the problem is that human beings come with built-in exploits, honed by evolution and primed by life experiences, that allow them to be exploited by sociopaths (who constitute at least 3% of the general population).”—Sister Y
“Hiding is futile. Our only path is sousveillance. Looking back.”—David Brin
“I have a terror of networking as a practice not only because of my autism but also because I always feel embarrassed when I observe these naked attempts to exploit festive occasions to meet the right people.”—Clarissa
“The dirty little secret is that the service economy sector with the greatest prospect of expansion is also the one in which the most efficient and least costly way of operating is for the customers to do it themselves.”—Sandwichman
“When the game of making human babies did not have a good opt-out (i.e., prior to around 1970 C.E.), participation in the wider information games was largely instrumental for better playing the breeding game. But with good ways to opt out of breeding new humans, the original game – the game of breeding to pass some of one’s genetic information into the future — is coming to be recognized as a small, rather pathetic subset of the total space of information games.”—Sister Y
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Another online ideology sorter
My new-found interest in psychometrics finds some nourishment in CBC’s Vote Compass, a purveyor of a two-dimensional political spectrum where respondents can compare themselves with Ontario’s four somewhat recognized political parties, in anticipation of the upcoming provincial election. It’s a 30-item Likert-scale questionnaire. Here’s a graphic of my result:
This survey instrument offers a second round in which one can assign a personal priority to each issue; a feature I am considering adding to the Agnostic Ideology Sorter, as it would be a practical application for what I call the maxhi schema. My profile after completing that part of the survey looks like this:
No surprise there.
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Guilty as charged
The question of whether we’re living in the best of all possible worlds is a question of optimization. Optimism and optimization are, of course, closely related words. I find the assertion that we’re living in the best of all possible worlds to be cause for extreme pessimism. I’m probably not the only person who feels that way, as Voltaire’s Candide is so often held up as a case study in gallows humor. A claim that we’re living in the best of all possible worlds can only be read as a defense of the status quo. I find almost as depressing the idea that we could be one simple step (say, radical deregulation) away from being in the best of all possible worlds. That claim is connected to the ideology of the market mechanism being the best of all possible optimizers, which I regard as a statement of faith (and even an attribution of omniscience), and is why I think the label “market fundamentalist” is entirely justified.
Assuming that a possible world is not a perfect world, assuming that a possible world is a world of tradeoffs, I assume we are assuming that the best [plural] of all possible worlds embody the most efficient tradeoffs. For example, if there is a tradeoff between unemployment and inflation (not that I’m saying there is), “stagflation” represents the worst of both worlds and is an indication that
- There is some third competing objective that’s being “paid for” in a currency called “misery”,
- The range of possible outcomes has become less appealing, perhaps due to GNP shrinkage, or even a slower rate of growth, given how much of a fucking treadmill economics tends to be, or
- We’re not living in the best of all possible worlds
The third possibility is the one I find most palatable, and therefore most plausible (being an optimist, after all). The first, while it represents how we rationally would like to think the world works, troubles me because it is consistent with (even though it does not imply) an already-optimal status quo. The second possibility is the most troubling, as the implication there seems to be that the painfulness of the tradeoffs is inversely proportional to the size of the proverbial “pie.” The trouble with this is that it seems to say “yes, Virginia, money (or “wealth,” anyway) is everything.” And of course, there is a one-size-fits-all panacea; in this case economic growth. I hate panaceas. I’m more into paradigm shifts. One I’d like to see is sociology replacing economics as “the physics of the social sciences.” But perhaps I should be careful what I wish for, as this preference is based mostly on feeling more “tribal” solidarity with the sociologists than with the economists.
About the plural use of ‘best’ in the second paragraph: Assuming tradeoffs between desiderata, there is a Pareto-optimal set, and either the status quo is a data point on that curve or it is not. In the latter case we are not living in the best of all possible worlds. In the former case, we are doing as well as we can for now, and there is the question of whether we can “push the envelope,” so to speak, or “expand the frontier.” I’m actually open to avenues other than wealth creation by which this can be accomplished. I’m not entirely opposed to accomplishing it through wealth creation, but I am sick and tired of the idea that wealth creators (a.k.a. entreprenoors and other marketeers) are the only class of people who deserve credit for any improvement in the human condition. The implication there is that the rest of us are simply along for the ride, and perhaps if a bunch of us got killed in (say) a train wreck, it wound’t be any big loss for humanity. I also happen to admire a lot of past and present figures on the human stage whose contributions have been more in areas like rabble-rousing and stepping on the toes of giants and things like that, and I want to believe I have at least some of them to thank for at least some of the progress we’ve enjoyed so far. I know, tribalism again. Guilty as charged.
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Update on the Agnostic Ideology Sorter
While far from finished, the project has jelled somewhat. All the pages except survey.php have been validated for XHTML 1.0 Strict, with survey.php validated for Transitional. I’ve prepared the downloadable zip file of the site source code, with some rudimentary installation instructions, copyleft notice, etc. There’s still no pigeonholing, but I’m now studying things like factor analysis and clustering. Considering that I didn’t know any PHP whatsoever before undertaking this project, there is hope. Oh, and I’ve learned that the “Likert scale” is the technical term for this all-too-familiar questionnaire format with responses ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly disagree.” The results pages (if we can call them that) in place so far compare one’s entries with those preceding it. This leaves high and dry the first few respondents. Since each is assigned a number, knowing that number allows one to revisit at a later time for comparison with subsequent respondents. For now, in addition to the “distance metric” from previous entries offered since the start, there is a page to compare any two profiles, and one to see how any particular survey item correlates with the others.
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Poor Richard has proposed re-wording some of the response items. I hesitate to do so, mainly because of concerns about statistical validity if profiles collected prior to the change were to be mashed up with later ones. But future plans definitely include enlargement of the questionnaire directly by visitors to the site. By all means, add proposed response items, future features and other proposed changes as comments to the present blog entry! -
If you could say anything to anyone without consequence, what would you say, and to whom?
Speech without consequences? What on earth would be the point? It would be completely and utterly pointless, would it not?
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Is price discovery lossless?
What exactly is implied by the claim that prices incorporate all information? How strong a claim is strong efficiency? More specifically, are price signals a form of lossless compression? In other words, is there a way to derive its input data from its output data? If so, I’m waiting to see a step-by-step method for doing so. If not, I’m anticipating possible excuses. Perhaps prices incorporate all information which is relevant to allocation. My own speculation is that strong efficiency might be a property of a perfectly transparent economy—but would also be redundant information under such conditions. More important to me than whether prices incorporate all information is whether there are more direct ways to uncloak information about economic production and distribution, and of course strategy. I can accept that this is an asymptotic goal, like the frictionless plane or perpetual motion. I have a harder time accepting that a free market (or even a freed market) would be the best of all possible worlds. I have a really hard time being expected to take it on faith that prices are all the information I need in order to make fully-informed economic decisions. If that is the implication of the theory, then it is entirely fitting that market advocates are called “market fundamentalists,” and it shouldn’t be intended as a compliment.
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Quotebag #53
“I am optimistic that in 100 years the world will find a new economic system. I am optimistic that this system wont resemble capitalism or socialism at all.”—Rohit
“While technology offers solutions to resource problems in theory, in practice it also favors greater stratification of wealth and power. If recent trends continue we may be faced with a future of corporate neofeudalism (privatized governance).”—Poor Richard
“Scarcity pricing tickets to an expert’s panel on a new beginning for communism takes chutzpah.”—Jack Crow
“Businesses, especially big ones, aren’t any more efficient or competent than government just because they have to pursue a profit margin. What gives the impression that they are is just that their decisions are made behind closed doors without them being subject to public scrutiny and complaining.”—Eric B.
“Instead of ‘the dismal science,’ economics might be referred to as ‘the dismal religion.’”—Buffalo14
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It’s. Not. Personal.
One of the emotional blocks to acceptance of the market paradigm is difficulty in viewing economic outcomes as impersonal. If, while “living off the land,” or otherwise not engaging in “trade,” I die prematurely because of failure in the struggle against Nature, I can at least find some comfort in the fact that It’s Not Personal. (I’m not one of those people who personify nature.) Just an example of, as Forrest Gump would say, “Shit Happens,” (or on broadcast TV, “It Happens”). Personal failure to carve out a niche, to support myself, to live at least a little bit on my terms—those kinds of thing I tend to take personally. And I am probably not justified in doing so, assuming that economics is an “emergent phenomenon” rather than (as is more comfortable for me to believe) a technology of social control. If aggregate demand is an aggregate of the demands of flesh-and-blood human beings, then if the Invisible Hand says my contributions are worth (say) seven USD per hour, that is the verdict not just of some metaphoric hand, but of my fellow humans. Gee, thankx a lot, jerks. But seriously, folkx, (hint hint to Crafters of Economic Policy) dialing down the frustration level of everyday life from, say, 99% to 90% could turn a lot of us relatively apolitical. It would be great public relations. Either this is outside the ability of the Crafters of Economic Policy (perhaps as a result of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) or they’ve already made their gated comminity arrangements for when the shit hits the fan. For now (if only for my emotional self-preservation) I remain an anagorist.
