Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

Savages with cell phones

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This is from Sultan Knish and the modern world of Government by Magical Thinking. People without a single technical skill trying to manage a modern economy is the disaster we have visited upon ourselves. Presidents until recent times actually had done something complicated before they took office. This article is definitely onto something about the incompetence of those we have now put in charge of our political fortunes where none of them have ever done anything themselves in their entire life.

Healthcare.gov, like ObamaCare, was going to work because it was ‘good’. Its goodness was by some measure other than result. It was morally good. It was progressive. And so the deity of liberal causes, perhaps Karl Marx or Progressia, the Goddess of Soup and Economic Dysfunction, would see to it that it would work. Karma would kick in and everything would work out because it had to.

This brand of magical thinking was once commonplace. It still is. And it’s why things so rarely work out in some of the more messed up parts of the world. But the sort of attitude that would once have made anthropologists shake their heads is now commonplace here. Savages in suits, barbarians with iPads are certain that things will work because they have appeased the gods of modernity with their fonts, they have made a website that looks like a functioning website. And like the cargo culters who built fake control towers expecting planes to land, they thought that their website would work.

Competence is built on the unhappy understanding that things won’t work because you want them to, they won’t work if you go through the motions, they will only work if you understand how a thing works and then make it work by building it, by testing it and by expecting failure every step of the way and wrestling with the problem until you get it right.

That’s modernity. It isn’t glamorous. You can see it in black and white photos of men working on old planes. You can see it in the eyes of the astronauts who first went to the moon. You can read it in the workings of the men who built the longest suspension bridges, laid undersea cables and watched their world change. They were moderns and their time is done. They have left behind savages with cell phones who make decent tinkerers, but whose ability to collaborate falls apart in large groups.

Philistines and ignoramuses

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The Australian Business Deans Council has in its preliminary report indicated that it would lower the journal ranking of History of Political Economy to a B which if it did would merely display, for all to see, what a Philistine bunch of ignoramuses they are. They are for nuts and bolts, debits and credits, tangibles and assets, not this academically philosophical, highly abstract historical economics kind of stuff, which is actually what a proper education consists of, including a business education.

For those as far from economics as a council made up of the deans of schools of business, this may seem a remote and unimportant area of study. The reality is that it is an area of study at the very forefront of economic theory. As just one example, one of the great monetary theorists in the world today, David Laidler, has just written an article on “Three Revolutions in Macroeconomics: Their Nature and Influence” going back over the historical development of three different revolutionary episodes in macroeconomics and in which he ends the abstract with these words: “some implications of this story for today’s macroeconomics are briefly discussed.” Nor is he the only major economist who has done important work in the History of Economics. Nobel Prize winners, including Paul Samuelson and George Stigler, have done extensive research in this area, not as a way to pass the time but as real and genuine contributions to our understanding of how economies work.

I have even written a book just this year on the crucial importance of this area titled, Defending the History of Economic Thought (Elgar 2013). This may be an area that is under-appreciated even amongst economists but when the moment of truth came in 2007 to remove the History of Economic Thought from within the economics classification, there was an uprising amongst economists in general, not only across the academic world but encompassing economists at every level reaching right through to the secretaries of every economics-related department in the Federal public service. It should therefore not be left to the tender mercies of the deans of schools of business to make such negative determinations about the value of journals in one of the most important areas of economics.

Tea drinkers are different, more refined

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Being a tea drinker from way back, the common experience in going out to coffee shops with my wife is that when they bring her coffee and my tea they almost always, if they don’t first ask, put the tea in front of her and the coffee in front of me. There is a latent categorisation by gender that runs deep in our cultural assumptions. But the evidence that tea drinkers are different from those coffee drinking types is now available, and not through some academic paper but from the evidence of the market where no more conclusive proof could possibly be found. This is the story.

Last week Starbucks opened a Teavana tea bar in New York City, the first step towards creating what it hopes will be a counterpoint to its enormously successful coffee locations. Before being bought by Starbucks last year, Teavana had primarily been known for retail shops that sold tea and supplies — but didn’t serve the drink. With the tea bar concept, Starbucks had to rethink some of the most basic elements of its successful formula for a different kind of customer — including the paper cup itself.

The paper cup. Oh the brutes who drink coffee, what do they care? They would lap it up from a saucer if that was all there was. Tea drinkers are, of course, different:

The goal was to make a cup that felt more like drinking from china than a flimsy, on-the-go piece of cardboard. Double-walled insulation was built into the cup itself, foregoing the need for the cheap cardboard sleeves Starbucks customers (and coffee drinkers everywhere) need to deal with. The texture of the cup itself is different as well; embossed paper is used to provide what’s described as a ‘feathery’ and ‘foamy’ feel. According to the report, the insulating design requires around 50 percent more material than is used in traditional Starbucks cups and sleeves.

“The new design has found quite a following inside the company.” I can’t say I’m even a bit surprised.

[My thanks to JIK for bringing this to my attention.]

Abiding by our way of life

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Let me return to that speech by Rupert Murdoch the other day to pull two other bits from it. First this:

But at the end of the day, the values that define Australia depend on more than good government and strong allies. They depend on sound and vigorous institutions especially private institutions.

You can’t have the rule of law if the courts aren’t free and independent – or if you have lawyers running amok as they do in the American system. We cannot allow the rule of law to become the rule of lawyers!

You can’t have a free democracy if you don’t have a free media that can provide vital and independent information to the people.

If the ALP is wondering why the Murdoch Press was a tad hostile to its re-election, they might wish to dwell on this. And this is not just Rupert Murdoch but a pretty sizeable proportion of the country who believe exactly the same. Who were people the likes of Rudd and Gillard to threaten these long-established traditions of freedom and the media? On that alone they needed to go not to mention the rest.

We are not yet overwhelmed by governments but have been moving rapidly in that direction. Our election may have saved us from even more. All governments want to spend so it will be hard to stop even our present incumbants from supporting their vision with our money. But at least there is the possibility that they will see it as their role to build the civic culture that Murdoch was discussing.

And then, from that same speech, there was this:

But for all this progress, there is still a strand among some parts of Australian society who seem to value every culture except our own. These people are gravely confused about what real multiculturalism is. Multiculturalism is not relativism, and tolerance is not indifference.

Australia has clear values and strong institutions. One key value is an openness to all comers – provided they are willing to abide by our way of life.

Australia is what it is because of who we already are. I have always been struck that we made a Jew our Governor-General in 1930. This is a country open to the talents. But it is not a country into which we can bring strings of takers who do not contribute or who do not wish to embrace the values of an open and tolerant society that have developed on this continent over the past 200 years. Never perfect, but it has always been the ideal.

The Murdoch vision

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Rupert Murdoch gave a speech last night to the Lowy Institute on “Let’s learn to thrive on disruption“. And what he means he says early on:

For Australia is on the cusp of becoming something rare and valuable in this new world: an egalitarian meritocracy, with more than a touch of libertarianism.

But we can’t wait for later.

In the past few years, we have all seen how advances in communications and travel have eliminated the tyranny of distance. The same might be said for size.

Think about Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. These are all small places, and hardly blessed with natural resources. Yet not only have they carved out a competitive position in the world because of their free, open and dynamic economies, they have become a source of inspiration for countries around the globe.

Australia can and should do better than all of them.

Australia is the best country in the world because we do have the great English traditions of free institutions, free markets and a willingness to accept and adapt to change. The US was once such a country but isn’t any more or at least may no longer be. We are such a country and are getting better. But what I found most astonishing in the speech was this:

Australia must be the world’s disruptive economy.

The economist Joseph Schumpeter once described the process of ‘creative destruction’ as essential to capitalism. The current fashionable word to capture that sense of creative chaos is ‘disruption’.

As soon as I saw the word “disruption” in the title I went looking for Schumpeter’s name. He is the economist of disruption, who sees that the role of the entrepreneur is not to behave in the way economic theory now teaches, concerned with incremental change with one more unit of some already-existing product leading to a change in revenues and costs. It is about individuals who do new things in new ways. Understanding the role of entrepreneurship is to understand the way in which the world betters itself by a continual introduction of new ideas embodied in wholly different ways of doing things.

It is the vision of people who look forward to the future, who want to engage with change because they know that change is coming, understand that change is often for the better and have introduced institutions that will allow such changes to be introduced, causing disruptions of course, but also with a relatively smooth transition to the new. This is how it has always been in this, the last-ever new frontier society in the world, and I too hope it will continue in just this way, building on our past and on into a future filled with unknown unknowns.

He was right to be wrong

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An interesting article by Walter Lacquer on Isaiah Berlin versus Isaac Deutscher titled, Better to be Wrong than Right? For some intellectuals, it all depends. I read both when I was much younger but of the two I can only think I have been influenced by Isaiah Berlin. The article ends like the title itself with a paraphrase of something Arthur Koestler wrote in one of his books about some Stalinist who believed, given the circumstances of the 1930s, that while it was wrong to have supported Stalin he had been right to be wrong. This is how it is put by Lacquer:

As the leftist French journalist Jean Daniel once put it: better to be wrong with Jean-Paul Sartre than right with Raymond Aron. Sartre might have been consistently wrong in his political judgment and his intellectual opponent Aron almost always right. But Sartre, like Deutscher, was pro-Soviet during the cold war while Aron, like Isaiah Berlin, was pro-American (and also, like Berlin, pro-Israel). And that settled the matter.

This is how reputations quite often develop in the world of ideas, and how they endure—an interesting issue itself, and certainly one in need of further investigation.

If you’re on the left, your reputation is impregnable. There is no need of investigation. There are almost no major leftists of the past whose names are mud. Not Stalin, not Mao although maybe Pol Pot who simply gets ignored except by people like me. That is just how it is and will remain.

Just put ’em away for a couple of months

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hocky and the f word

Having been at the front of the protest movement back in the 1960s, what always amazed me was how easily we won our various confrontations with authority. I went along because it was the thing to do, got to meet girls, could exhibit my morality in a public place and did mildly care about the issues. But over time the realisation grew that it was absolutely riskless. Nothing would ever happen to me as long as I just stayed in the pack. A few of my friends got busted occasionally but they were the loud mouths who drew attention to themselves. And they would be duly carted off and then join us in the morning for a coffee and a smoke.

I actually saw this demo pictured here as they wandered down Bourke Street after their festivities were over. The answer. Put a couple away for a month or two, the really violent ones, make it clear that there actually are risks to one’s health and safety from going beyond peaceful protest, and it will stop. The major idiots will still keep it up but we minor idiots will wander off and find something else to do.

Post Number 600

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I must be wasting a lot of time on this since I only finished Number 500 a few weeks ago and here I am at 600 already. And traffic is up so people are actually coming to this site which is both nice but also worrying. I still put up what I want but now I have to also think about whether I am saying whatever I say in ways that won’t come back to haunt me. But this is still mostly for me as a kind of passing diary of fleeting thoughts on what’s going on. And it is, of course, very much about the Law of Markets. And it is a way to communicate with my son. So hi there Joshi. And best to Beatrix as well. LtU.

Hating the rich

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Theodore Dalrymple on the most destructive emotion of them all:

Still, hatred of the rich, which people do not hesitate to express as if it were a virtue to do so, rests fundamentally on two human connected emotions, both of them unattractive: envy and resentment. It also rests on the primitive notion of an economy as being a cake of a fixed size to be sliced up according to some plan, just or unjust as the case may be. On this view, a crumb in one man’s mouth is a crumb taken from another man. Poverty is the result, therefore, of wealth: which is true enough if you define poverty as being a certain percentage of the average or median income, as is all too often done. If you define poverty as the lack of subsistence or even physical ease, it is quite otherwise.

There’s much much more at the link.

Evolution by natural selection is just incredible

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Just look what they’ve turned up now: “Biology is capable of evolving functional mechanical gears“.

Through a combination of anatomical analysis and high-speed video capture of normal Issus movements, scientists from the University of Cambridge have been able to reveal these functioning natural gears for the first time. The findings are reported in the latest issue of the journal Science [abstract].

The gears in the Issus hind-leg bear remarkable engineering resemblance to those found on every bicycle and inside every car gear-box. Each gear tooth has a rounded corner at the point it connects to the gear strip; a feature identical to man-made gears such as bike gears – essentially a shock-absorbing mechanism to stop teeth from shearing off.

The gear teeth on the opposing hind-legs lock together like those in a car gear-box, ensuring almost complete synchronicity in leg movement – the legs always move within 30 microseconds of each other.

Amazing. It’s almost as if someone had designed it. I also saw this the other day which was even more startling:

A paper by a dozen German biologists, while discussing new findings about an ammonium ion transporter, includes descriptions of the many actions that occur when the Venus flytrap snaps shut on an insect.

The traps open wide to the environment, exposing trigger hairs and attractive red leaves.

Electrical action potentials are established for the trigger hairs on the inner leaf surface.

The digestive glands remain quiescent till activated. Abscisic acid regulates their sensitivity, but is balanced by 12-oxo-phytodienoic acid (OPDA), which makes them more sensitive to touch.

A trigger hair on the inner leaf is touched. If only one is touched, nothing happens.

A second touch after a short delay, or touch of a second trigger hair, begins a cascade of events.

Anion channels open. The action potential collapses, activating the motor center.

Vascoelastic energy snaps the trap shut in a fraction of a second.

If the triggering substance was not an animal, the trap re-opens after a short period.

Escape movements by the trapped animal triggers synthesis of a touch hormone, and acidifies the trap.

The trap edge hairs wrap more tightly around the edges, preventing escape.

The trap seals hermetically around the prey like a “green stomach,” exposing it to densely packed glands and chlorine ions.

OPDA stimulates production of jasmonic acid, which triggers the glands to secrete an acidic cocktail with more than 20 ingredients, including chitinases to dissolve the saccharides of the exoskeleton, proteases to dissolve the proteins, nucleases to dissolve the nucleic acids, lipases to dissolve the fats, and phosphatases to isolate the phosphates. These only digest the prey, not the leaf. The proteins are hydrolyzed into their constituent amino acids.

The amino acid glutamine is deaminated into ammonium, NH4+.

Genes to make an ammonium transporter are activated, depending on the action of touch hormones and elicitors, so as to adapt to varying, prey-derived ammonium sources.

The cell membrane becomes depolarized, ready to accept ammonium, even though it is not activated by pH. Only activation of the genes prepares the transporter for ammonium transport.

The ammonium transporter increases uptake of NH4+ from the prey into the plant cells, satisfying the need for nitrogen in the nutrient-poor soils of the plant’s habitat. It is described as “a voltage-dependent high-affinity NH4+ transporter optimised for NH4+ uptake at the membrane potential of gland cells.” Counteracting the acidification of the trap, the transporter can “serve to counter the depolarising effects of electrogenic NH4+ uptake and help to maintain intracellular pH homeostasis.”

“At the same time, progressive acidification of the trap digestive fluid will allow optimal digestion of a wide range of protein and other substrates.” If the pH drops below 3, additional digestive enzymes are synthesized to benefit from the additional NH4+ provided by the insect’s haemolymph.

Upon successful completion of the digestive cycle, the trap re-opens, and action potentials are set up for the next capture.

The world is a mystery but some possibilities are more possible than others, much more possible.