Exploring the area around the Columbia River Gorge that separates Oregon from Washington…
Hiking in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest...
Where flowing water runs shallow...
Trillium Lake - watched over by Mt. Hood
Where I’ve Been Lately
July 30th, 2010Steady State Economics?
July 14th, 2010I know very little about economics, but since the onset of the Great Recession I’m beginning to wonder if economists trained under the standard paradigm(s) know much more about it. In any case, the BP oil spill has – for a few minutes, anyway – spurred me to mull over our conventional economic assumptions about the need for ever more growth (fueled, of course, by ever more oil until a more efficient and/or less dangerous energy source is developed). And I’ve recently discovered that attacking these assumptions is one of the main passions of Herman Daly, author of “Steady State Economics“. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 5, which I found here-
One of the most popular arguments against limiting growth is that we need more growth in order to be rich enough to afford the costs of cleaning up pollution and discovering new resources. Economist Neil Jacoby says, “A rising GNP will enable the nation more easily to bear the costs of eliminating pollution” (1970, p. 42). Yale economist Henry Wallich makes a similar point:
The environment will also be better taken care of if the economy grows. Nothing could cut more dangerously into the resources that must be devoted to the Great Cleanup than an attempt to limit resources available for consumption. By ignoring the prohibitionist impulse and allowing everybody to have more, we shall also have more resources to do the environmental Job [Wallich, 1972 p. 62].
No one can deny that if we had more resources and were truly richer, all our economic problems would be more easily solved. The question is whether further growth in GNP will in fact make us richer. It may well make us poorer. How do we know that it will not, since we do not bother to measure the costs and even count many real costs as benefits? These critics simply assume that a rising per-capita GNP is making us better off, when that is the very question at issue!
If marginal benefits of physical growth decline while marginal costs rise (as elementary economic theory would indicate), there will be an intersection beyond which further growth is uneconomic. The richer the society (the more it has grown in the past), the more likely it is that marginal benefits are below marginal costs and that further growth is uneconomic. That marginal benefits fall follows from the simple fact that sensible people satisfy their most pressing wants first, whether in alternative uses of a single commodity or in alternative uses of income. That marginal costs rise follows from the fact that sensible people first exploit the most accessible land and minerals known to them, and that when sacrifices are imposed by the increase of any one activity, sensible people will sacrifice the least important alternative activities first. Thus marginal benefits of economic activity fall while marginal costs rise. Were this not the case, our previous “economic activity” would not have been economic — less pressing wants would have to have taken priority over more pressing wants, and the level of welfare could have been increased by reallocation with no increase in resources used.
…Once we have gone beyond the optimum, and marginal costs exceed marginal benefits, growth will make us worse off. Will we then cease growing? On the contrary, our experience of diminished well-being will be blamed on the traditional heavy hand of product scarcity, and the only way the orthodox paradigm knows to deal with increased scarcity is to advocate increased growth — this will make us even less well off and will lead to the advocacy of still more growth! Sometimes I suspect that we are already on this “other side of the looking glass,” where images are inverted and the faster we run the “behinder” we get.
Again, I don’t know enough about economics to evaluate Daly’s argument here, and in any case, utopian thinking is always dangerous. The devil (or the angel) is always in the details, and dogmatic presuppositions must always be guarded against. But I do have a sort of intuitive grasp on what a steady-state economy would involve (maybe because I seem to have reached a sort of steady-state of economic well-being myself, though perhaps not an optimal one), and the question is this: would a steady-state economy – one that aims to supply each individual with an optimal level of well-being, however ‘optimal’ is defined – really be any more utopian than an economic system predicated upon the occurrence of never-ending growth (even in the most well-off societies)?
Start With The Ending
July 13th, 2010While David Wilcox can sometimes wax just a little too sentimental for my taste, he’s a remarkably clever songwriter when he wants to be. Here’s a nice rendition of his “Start With The Ending” (it’s the best way to begin)-
Are We Less Free Than We Were 30 Years Ago?
July 1st, 2010Since I focused on a foible of Minnesota’s Governor Pawlenty in my last post, it seems only fair to point out that our neighboring state to the west apparently has a rather bright Senator in Amy Klobuchar. I was impressed by her ability to quickly counter Senator Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) charge – made during the Kagan confirmation hearings yesterday – that the majority of Americans are very upset that they are less free than they were 30 years ago. (The following transcript of Klobuchar’s response is from the liberal website Think Progress)-
KLOBUCHAR: I was really interested and listening to Senator Coburn. … He was actually asking you, just now, back 30 years ago if you thought that we were more free. … But I was thinking back 30 years ago, was 1980. … And then I was thinking, were we really more free, if you were a woman in 1980? Do you know, solicitor general, how many women were on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980?
KAGAN: I guess zero.
KLOBUCHAR: That would be correct. There were no women on the Supreme Court. Do you know how many women were sitting up here 30 years ago in 1980?
KAGAN: It was very striking when Senator Feinstein said she was one of two women. I thought, how amazing. So, how many?
KLOBUCHAR: There were no women on the Judiciary Committee until after the Anita Hill hearings in 1991. Do you know how many women were in the United States Senate in 1980, 30 years ago?
KAGAN: I’m stumped again.
KLOBUCHAR: No women were in the United States Senate. There had been women in the senate before, and then in 1981, Senator Kassebaum joined the Senate. So, as I think about that question about if people were more free in 1980, I think it’s all in the eyes of the beholder.
(Klobuchar later corrected herself later to note that Kassebaum was already serving in the Senate at the time, having been sworn in in 1978.)
As I was watching Coburn’s speech on C-SPAN, before Klobuchar spoke I was wondering whether African-Americans would agree that they had lost a significant amount of freedom over the last half century or so, particularly since the passage of civil rights legislation in the 60s. But Klobuchar’s response was better than mine would have been, since a different conservative talking point has been that the freedom of the majority has been diminished by the growing freedom of minorities, as if freedom were a zero-sum game. [To be fair, some conservatives have further argued that the federal government has tilted the playing field in favor of minorities (instead of simply keeping it level for all), but evidence of such favoritism is seldom offered.] Klobuchar may have recognized that no one could plausibly claim that women constitute a minority in this country. Of course, there is room for debate concerning whether more opportunity for women – as indicated by having more of them in positions of power – implies more freedom for women, but I’d be much happier arguing for that position than for its negation.
The bottom line, it seems to me, is that government action can diminish freedom or it can increase freedom (by protecting citizens from restrictions that might be imposed on them by public or private entities). It all depends on the particular government action.
By the way, to get an idea of Senator Coburn’s self-righteous (and fundamentally misguided) views on the sorts of personal religious opinions a Supreme Court Justice should rely upon when deciding cases, see this post over at little green footballs.
Who Needs Public Universities When You Can Get iCollege?
June 22nd, 2010It was rather late at night when I watched Tim Pawlenty, Republican Governor of the great state of Minnesota, tell John Stewart that he would like brick-and-mortar public universities to disappear in the not-too-distant future, and while I was somewhat surprised (to put it mildly), I was too tired to blog about it. But the more I thought about it, the more troubled I became. Then I discovered that others had taken notice, including USA Today-
When Jon Stewart asked Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty last week for some examples of how he intended to administer “limited and effective” government, the Republican governor did not roll out boilerplate rhetoric on welfare or farm subsidies. Instead, he took square aim at traditional higher education.
“Do you really think in 20 years somebody’s going to put on their backpack, drive a half hour to the University of Minnesota from the suburbs, haul their keister across campus, and sit and listen to some boring person drone on about econ 101 or Spanish 101?” Pawlenty asked Stewart, host of “The Daily Show.”
“Can’t I just pull that down on my iPhone or iPad whenever the heck I feel like it, from wherever I feel like it?” he said. “And instead of paying thousands of dollars, can I pay $199 for iCollege instead of 99 cents for iTunes?”
This might sound self-serving, given that I’m a boring professor at a public university myself, but the idea that 20 years from now a student could get the same quality of educational experience through their iPhone or iPad as they can presently get by actually interacting in real time with fellow students and faculty is so far from reality that it makes me wonder just what Pawlenty has been smoking. I doubt that a few hits of pot would do the job.
But, come to think of it, maybe the sort of education Pawlenty has supported in the past – including the teaching of Creationism (under the guise of “Intelligent Design”) in public schools as a theory of human origins on a par with evolution – could be gotten on an iPhone app.
(Don’t get me wrong: I love technology and look forward to the day when we can inhabit something like holographic classrooms via the internet and interact effectively in real time without having to share physical space. But I believe that technology will not reach that level of sophistication for a long time, and that in any case public universities will still have to exist within that virtual realm to insure academic integrity).
Elizabeth Warren, Consumer Crusader
June 17th, 2010Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, is probably the most passionate and articulate consumer advocate since the young Ralph Nader. She’s done many interviews, and if you’d like to hear her views on the current wrangling over financial reform in the House-Senate reconciliation committee, I recommend listening to her recent interview on NPR’s “On Point”. But here she is in July 2009, in a self-produced 7.5-minute video, explaining without any interruptions why she favors setting up a strong Consumer Protection Agency-
For more video messages delivered in her official capacity as the Chair of the COP, click here.
Warren claims to have no political ambitions, which is understandable given that she is around 60 and has a very good job. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see her on a ticket someday.
Just Stay Calm
June 13th, 2010The Wisconsin Department of Transportation included the following graphic in the car registration materials they sent me. Apparently it is intended to explain how to use the new roundabouts in the area-
Somehow I doubt that this will put those uncomfortable with roundabouts at ease…
Who’s In Control Of Whom?
June 13th, 2010Here’s a rule that any dog would love-
Experiencing, Remembering, and Happiness
June 5th, 2010If you have a few minutes (20 or so), here’s an interesting segment of a talk by the Nobel prize winning inventor of “behavioral economics”, Daniel Kahneman. The topic concerns two types of happiness which can easily come apart: that of the “experiencing self”, and that of the “remembering self”.
The Wiouwash Trail 6/1/2010
June 1st, 2010First day of June, not a cloud in the sky, 80-some degrees, slight breeze… perfect conditions for a 25-mile ride (round trip) along the Wiouwash trail – a biker’s dream – between Larsen and Hortonville-
Featuring lovely wetlands-
And geese with rapidly growing goslings-
Not to mention some fetching flowers along the trail-
Happy summer, everyone!
Taichi Ch’uan: First, Invest In Loss
May 26th, 2010I recently began studying taichi ch’uan, an ancient Chinese practice that develops strength and balance, reportedly has positive effects on mental and physical health, and can be used (in its advanced stages) as a method of self-defense. A book my teacher recommended, “Master Cheng’s New Method of Taichi Ch’uan Self-Cultivation” by Cheng Man-ching, contains the following nugget of wisdom in a chapter entitled “Three Types of Fearlessness”-
Do not fear losing. The fundamental principle of taichi is: “Yield to follow others”. Yielding up your position to follow your opponent is, most decidedly, losing. … While listening to your opponent’s advance and attack, not only should you not resist, you should not even consider a counterattack. Simply adhere and stick to him, then you can lightly turn and neutralize. Moreover, a beginner cannot possibly avoid losing and defeat, so if you fear defeat you may as well not even begin. If you want to study, begin by investing in loss. An investment in loss eliminates any greed for superficial advantages. Greediness for petty advantages results in minor losses, while greediness for large advantages results in major losses. On the other hand, a tiny investment in loss brings minor benefits, while a large investment in loss brings you great long-term benefits.
A Google search for the phrase “Invest in success” came up with 33,000 hits. A search for “Invest in loss” came up with 7,340 hits, most of which were connected to sites associated with taichi or other Asian systems of thought. Of course, the point of investing in loss (at first) is eventually to benefit. But investing in success is direct, short term, and anything but subtle; investing in loss to eventually gain benefit is indirect, longer term, and subtle. It will be interesting to see which approach – and which culture – survives in the distant future.
The Culture(s) Of Entitlement
May 24th, 2010A headline story in The Northwestern today caught my eye-
MILWAUKEE (AP) – Wisconsin Republicans endorsed Ron Johnson in the U.S. Senate race Sunday after the Oshkosh businessman delivered a fiery speech in which he said it was time to end what he believes is the nation’s culture of entitlement.
This led me to wonder – rhetorically – about just which culture of entitlement Johnson delivered a fiery speech about. It seems to me that there could be at least three such cultures:
1) The culture that involves feeling entitled to survive from day to day – that is, having enough food, a few pieces of clothing, and some sort of shelter – while one looks for ways to improve one’s condition.
2) The culture that involves feeling entitled to decent education, decent health-care, and a decent retirement for those who are working hard, or who have worked hard most of a lifetime.
3) The culture that involves feeling entitled to become richer and richer, usually off of other people’s labor, and often without producing anything of value in the final analysis.
Republicans who criticize “the culture of entitlement” usually have (1) or (2) in mind. To support their disapproval of (1), they find examples of “freeloaders” who are living on the dole without putting any effort into improving themselves or their conditions. But for the most part, the feeling of entitlement here seems bound up with what some call a “natural right” to life, which, it seems to me, Republicans should feel uncomfortable criticizing. To support their disapproval of (2), they claim that we can’t afford to provide everyone with such goods. It seems to me that whether they are right about this depends on many factors that are rarely discussed in any depth: whether we can devise rational and efficient educational, health care, and retirement systems (the recent debate over mere health insurance reform showed just how difficult this can be); whether we need to support a military-industrial complex at the level we do (as a Republican president once wondered); and so on. However, it seems to me that the feelings of entitlement involved in (1) and (2) are at least as justifiable as those found in (3), a culture of entitlement that goes entirely unquestioned in mainstream politics, and almost entirely unmentioned by the mainstream media – an astounding omission, given the latest financial disaster.
On Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing
May 18th, 2010An article today in the New York Times reports that, in physics anyway, we are on the verge of discovering why there’s something rather than nothing… or at least why the Big Bang has produced more matter than anti-matter. It all has to do with “the behavior of particularly strange particles called neutral B-mesons, which are famous for not being able to make up their minds”-
They oscillate back and forth trillions of times a second between their regular state and their antimatter state. As it happens, the mesons, created in the proton-antiproton collisions, seem to go from their antimatter state to their matter state more rapidly than they go the other way around, leading to an eventual preponderance of matter over antimatter of about 1 percent, when they decay to muons.
Whether this is enough to explain our existence is a question that cannot be answered until the cause of the still-mysterious behavior of the B-mesons is directly observed, said Dr. Brooijmans, who called the situation “fairly encouraging.”
The observed preponderance is about 50 times what is predicted by the Standard Model, the suite of theories that has ruled particle physics for a generation, meaning that whatever is causing the B-meson to act this way is “new physics” that physicists have been yearning for almost as long.
Dr. Brooijmans said that the most likely explanations were some new particle not predicted by the Standard Model or some new kind of interaction between particles. Luckily, he said, “this is something we should be able to poke at with the Large Hadron Collider.”
Okay guys, get poking! But, of course, a new model that explains the matter-anti-matter asymmetry better than the old “standard” model won’t solve the Really Big Question that metaphysicians, like very young children, always have at the ready: why? Why has this (fill in any impressively predictive physical model you like) ever happened? It seems unlikely that any merely descriptive theory, no matter how useful, will ever satisfy those who find this question engaging. Of course, it’s easy to write the question off as presupposing a sort of anthropomorphism, as if a universe had to be designed for a reason or purpose. But I think the question goes deeper than that, because even if you recognize that expecting the universe to have a purpose or a raison d’être is committing a sort of logical error or “category mistake”, the question still feels sensible. Maybe such a feeling just indicates that one is banging up against the limits of the human mind… and maybe not.
Look At Me!
May 5th, 2010Says the T.V….
Television is a drug. from Beth Fulton on Vimeo.
Red Tulips And Black Maple Leaves
May 2nd, 2010I felt like giving words a rest and coming back to my senses this fine Spring day-
Red Tulips
Black Maple Leaves
Yet More Reasons To Hate Facebook
April 30th, 2010I’m always looking for more reasons to hate the mass marketing scheme known as facebook. Here’s a couple of good ones I hadn’t heard before:
First, facebook’s CEO confesses that he doesn’t really think privacy is important, or at least that most people don’t care about their privacy any more (and he’s quite happy about that). I think that most people on facebook are actually quite unaware of just how much privacy they are giving up when they think they are posting only for “friends”. (See also, more recently, this story).
Secondly, facebook hosts a 1,000,000 strong group praying for President Obama’s death. Should Obama supporters hold that against facebook? Why not? Other mass media – like tv and newspapers – are held responsible for their content, which is often supplied by others (like the wire services). Facebook similarly tries to make money on content provided by others, so why shouldn’t they be held responsible for that content?
Unreal Advertising From Equifax
April 21st, 2010I recently received this sales pitch from Equifax-
Here’s the second page-
Notice the warm and fuzzy testimony from folks just like us: an office manager, a high school teacher, a systems analyst, and the all-important small-business owner. No doubt that asterisk next to each comment directs us to a footnote which will inform us that these are real consumer comments, names on file. The footnote, in a font so tiny it’s almost illegible, is at the bottom of page 2. See it down there? I’ve highlighted it in yellow, just like the comments. Here’s what it actually says:
Now, doesn’t that just make you want you to run right out and buy security “from the nation’s oldest and most trusted name in credit”? (I know that this sort of fictionalization is normal in t.v. advertising, but somehow it seems more egregious and deceptive in print…)
Alan Watts On Transience
April 10th, 2010Alan Watts was in particularly good form when he gave a seminar called “The Mythology Of Hinduism”, available as a podcast on iTunes from The Electronic University. Here’s a brief excerpt on transience that will give you the flavor of his talk-
More Media Vapidity
April 2nd, 2010Jason Linkins over at the Huffington Post provides an excellent example of how the media reduces all policy issues to a sporting event between two teams, complete with the cheerleading mantras, like “drill baby drill”-
So, as most of you know by now, President Barack Obama came straight out of the blue this week with a decision to start up some crazy new offshore drilling campaign. I thought the decision was pretty strange myself — but, hey, it’s an opportunity to ask some pretty substantive questions.
For example: What changes can we expect in terms of our oil imports from the Middle East? Has the technology of drilling gotten better–are we less likely to experience the devastation of another oil spill? How is this decision going to affect the bottom line of oil companies? Will they reinvest this money back into America’s devastated communities? Will they reinvest in energy solutions that are sustainable? In solutions that promote further independence from foreign oil? Is this going to increase jobs?
These are the sorts of things that your 24-hour news media could maybe take up in earnest. Unfortunately, they all had much better things to talk about. Who will win the political debate? Will this help or hurt Democrats? Will this earn them Republican support, on anything?
Here are the video excerpts that accompanies the post. I can’t stand to watch the whole thing, but if you watch just a couple of minutes, you’ll get the idea-
Magnetism And Consequentialism
April 2nd, 2010‘Consequentialism’ refers to a family of prescriptive moral theories that hold that an action’s consequences are the sole determiner of its morality or immorality; intentions per se don’t matter. Utilitarianism – roughly, the view that the morally right act for agent A at time t is that act available to A at t that maximizes the amount of happiness in the world, and/or minimizes unhappiness – is a well-known form of consequentialism. Opposed to such views are moral theories that focus more on the agent’s intentions. A fascinating study out of MIT suggests that magnetic fields can bias moral reasoning in favor of consequentialism-
To make moral judgments about other people, we often need to infer their intentions — an ability known as “theory of mind.” For example, if one hunter shoots another while on a hunting trip, we need to know what the shooter was thinking: Was he secretly jealous, or did he mistake his fellow hunter for an animal?
MIT neuroscientists have now shown they can influence those judgments by interfering with activity in a specific brain region — a finding that helps reveal how the brain constructs morality.
Previous studies have shown that a brain region known as the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) is highly active when we think about other people’s intentions, thoughts and beliefs. In the new study, the researchers disrupted activity in the right TPJ by inducing a current in the brain using a magnetic field applied to the scalp. They found that the subjects’ ability to make moral judgments that require an understanding of other people’s intentions — for example, a failed murder attempt — was impaired.
…
The study offers “striking evidence” that the right TPJ, located at the brain’s surface above and behind the right ear, is critical for making moral judgments, says Liane Young, lead author of the paper. It’s also startling, since under normal circumstances people are very confident and consistent in these kinds of moral judgments, says Young, a postdoctoral associate in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.“You think of morality as being a really high-level behavior,” she says. “To be able to apply (a magnetic field) to a specific brain region and change people’s moral judgments is really astonishing.”
Professors teaching introductory ethics courses, take note: if you wish to discuss cases that bring out the importance of intentions in moral reasoning, you’d do well to make sure that none of your students are holding magnets – or cell phones? – next to their ears.