Thanks again to Jason Kottke for pointing out an interesting thing I might have missed: Obama has apparently read Michael Pollan and taken him seriously (…full Time interview with Obama here. A book excerpt and Pollan interview here ).
My dear sweet mother has been telling me all my life that “they’re messing with the food”. As a kid I already knew her theory that chemical additives and cheap substitutions were causing the rise in childhood allergies. I took it seriously, even when I was skeptical (in fact maybe I owe my skepticism to her).
It’s the same old story of Prometheus that we get into with every new technology, isn’t it? Ham-fisted attempts to take the benefit of a new idea ignore the dark side of tinkering with nature and suddenly you’ve got high rates of cancer in your neighborhood, or soft cadmium leaching into your bones - and you don’t know why.
But that’s okay - they assure us - it will all be fixed in version 2.0… I’ve got as much enthusiasm for new technology as the next guy, but it does seem to be a youthful obsession - I could be losing my grip on it. And, technology is mute on the problem of risk management and quality assurance - those things are up to us. Which takes me right back to externalities and the temptation to cheat for higher profits. And the need for us to all make these decisions together. One of the effects of profit is to abstract away all those externalities, making them seem not to be anyone’s fault in particular.
The Pollan article is right up my alley: It’s another angle on the Peak-Oil Problem. I just wrote a big thing on inflation last night, then spent part of this morning editing it, and it just occurred to me that cheap energy will naturally worm its way into everything we do. I see an analogy with money bidding up derivatives in lieu of raising consumer prices: Supply and demand operating on ingenuity. But, the ingenuity is only in plentiful supply because the raw inputs are so cheap. Pull that pin out of the machine, and the whole thing could fall apart. If cheap energy boosts the process at every stage, then prepare to see the process decidedly unboosted.
This is all to remind us that economics is not just about money. Much of the theory of economics has developed in recent centuries, long after money hit the scene. To live life obsessed with money is to ignore the processes by which wealth is actually created; It results in all manner of streetcorner hustle - no matter if you’ve got a three piece suit and a downtown office suite.
It also emerges that people will play some dangerous games with nature when they’ve got their eyes on the dollar. Well intentioned folk come up with reasonable standards for the mass market, then ingenuity strikes: Every loophole is exploited, studies are commissioned to find the minuscule benefit in an additive. From Pollan’s book “In Defense Of Food”:
Yet as a general rule it’s a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound “whole-grain goodness” to the rafters. Watch out for those health claims.
Posted in politics, economics, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:23:00 GMT
Among the other books I am reading right now, I started re-reading David Hackett Fischer’s “The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History”. I wanted to consult it after reading some of the Floyd Norris Blog at the New York Times this afternoon. I read “Great Wave” a couple years ago, and I suppose I am instinctively looking for background material in making sense of the current economic situation. Here’s a little gem from the introduction:
“The economic consequences of decelerating population growth are[:] slowing demand and downward pressure on prices throughout the world, which lead in turn to severe financial crisis in economies that were organized on expectations of very rapid growth.”
This cuts right to the heart of the matter: ”expectations of very rapid growth”. If we are having trouble because of our expectations… Is there anything we can do?!?!
Posted in books, economics | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 26 Oct 2008 03:45:00 GMT
Check out “Inspired Reading” on the Goodness Blog.
I asked a group of outstanding graphic designers the following question… Please recommend a book that you have found particularly inspiring or meaningful to your development as a creative person? The one restriction: Please no books on graphic design.
They came up with a few of my favorites on there, but Stella Bugbee chose two of my favorite books: “All Consuming Images” and “Ways Of Seeing”.
How well do these things transfer? I don’t think of myself as primarily a graphic designer - It’s one of my marginal skills, and just one of many interests. It’s something I can’t afford to ignore. Truth be told, a book like “Ways Of Seeing” might violate the restriction - but just barely. The interesting thing about the question is the crossing over from idea to image.
Posted in books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 20 Oct 2008 02:35:00 GMT
Hunh… It sounds like more “Small Is Beautiful”:
STEVEN MILLHAUSER - “The Ambition of the Short Story”
I particularly liked: “The novel buys up the land, cuts down the trees, puts up the condos. The short story scampers across a lawn, squeezes under a fence.”
Posted in books, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 13 Oct 2008 03:12:00 GMT
Okay, I’ve only browsed the book, never really sat down to scrutinize it… But one of the things I remember that they say White People Like is “Not Owning A Television”. Mainly for the purpose of bragging that they don’t.
We’re headed into an uncertain future for television, perhaps: I know people who watch TV on a cell phone. Not, you know - a lot of people like that - but all the same… I can watch some shows on my laptop - not too shabby. Meanwhile, ever larger flat screen plasma or LCD or whatever they are come on the market - screens so big you might not have a big enough wall to hang them on… And, watch out for tight turns in stairways: once I got a couch stuck in mine.
I was deliberately unplugged for a time in the 90’s. When my sister and I first moved in together, we watched a lot of dinnertime Simpsons episodes on the tiny B&W I salvaged from my childhood. Then she dropped it. The tuner knob was busted. I took it as an omen… but later on I discovered that a pair of pliers could tune it just fine. I left it on UHF and discovered a channel with lots of foreign films and newscasts. After that, I inherited first one bulky Zenith, then the Sony from my dad - a man with plenty of televisions. Coincidentally, also the only person who ever mentioned “Stuff White People Like” to me, despite having worked for a bookstore when it came out and having reported it many weeks as a best selling item.
Such a short period of time - such a brief experiment in… well, what would you call it exactly? Am I more overwhelmed by culture because I have a more developed critical sense, and can’t let anything upsetting slide, or is that all just a load of crap? I must have something of the spirit of the intellectual - even if I haven’t really done much with it.
All of this is prelude to something I just read in “Nixonland” this afternoon. The same paragraph that just had me fussing about the “eggheads”…
(Nixon went on television to defend himself against calls to resign as vice-presidential candidate in 1952…) There weren’t all that many televisions in America then, though the number of sets was growing exponentially, as part and parcel of America’s postwar economic boom. These were the types [the eggheads] who took pride in themselves, already, for not owning them… They saw themselves as the guardians of American decency.
Incidentally, I see myself in a similar relation to mobile phones: As the market for these things was still approaching saturation, I had a lot of disdain for all those people who didn’t seem to have anything worth communicating. It felt like a poor use of the airwaves, and a sure sign that the resource was not being priced correctly - no doubt the management of those airwaves was the reason. Anybody who complains about their cell phone bill now is an idiot: it could be a lot more expensive, and they could be using it for only the most urgent needs. But that’s off-topic.
There are probably going to be many waves of technology with the same effect: inspiring a backlash of conservatism from all corners of the political spectrum. Take the book - now in danger, but once the world changing new technology that humbled manuscripts, papyrus, and stone tablets.
I have to wonder now… Over the course of a few paragraphs, Perlstein has really stirred up my mind:
The liberal capitalism that had created this mass middle class created, in its wake, a mass culture of consumption. And the liberals whose New Deal created this mass middle class were more and more turning their attention to critiquing the degraded mass culture of cheap sensation and plastic gadgets and politicians who seemed to cater to this lowest common denominator - public-relations-driven politicians who catered to only the basest and most sentimental emotions in men.
You know who else catered to the basest and most sentimental emotions in men?…
Study well the man at Nixonland’s center, the man from Yorba Linda. Study well those he opposed. The history that follows is their political war.
Posted in politics, media-studies, books | 1 comment | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 12 Oct 2008 23:56:00 GMT
One of the last books I bought at Olsson’s was Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland: The Rise Of A President And The Fracturing Of America”. Admittedly, I have a minor obsession with things that were happening in history around the time of my birth, but maybe as I think about it, this is just an illusion. The time of my birth is simply a convenient benchmark when trying to understand what lead us to this moment - continuous processes all, to be sure.
Richard Nixon: I’ve heard the name tossed about all my life. It was just too soon for me to think of him as history until lately. As I embark on Perlstein’s account of the man, I see that there really was somebody standing at the imaginary point so many changes appeared to pivot around. Silly me… This must be yet another illusion: identical to the cosmological problem of every point in the universe appearing to be the center from which the whole thing is expanding. But I’m not so sure. Let me tell you what I’ve got so far.
In Jonathan Chait’s “The Great Con”, which I read last summer, I discovered something about how the Conservative wing of the Republican party was ousted. John McCain is in some ways trying to reclaim that territory, but perhaps none of those voters will trust him after so many years of playing along with the neo-conservatives. It doesn’t matter how many times Sarah Palin says “Maverick”. If you dream of a time when Republicans were truly conservative, you’re also dreaming of balanced budgets and racial segregation - Eisenhower apparently thought tax cuts were irresponsible fiscal policy. Instead we get Reaganomics and the Laffer Curve - dubious in the long term, but guaranteed to rev things up in the short.
One more distant point of reference here is Jefferey Scheuer’s “The Sound Bite Society”, which seemed to say: Television favors arguments that are easier to express quickly; You’ll run out of time trying to map out the nuances of a more complicated policy. This is how we got Bill Clinton: A guy who understands all the subtle gradations will only get so far in politics without charisma. Hey - he’s the only Democrat in the White house since Carter. Maybe Obama will clinch it when McCain implodes. Not exactly an attractive trait. Hmmm… remind me that there is an important thread here for later.
Nixon came along at the right moment to pass himself off as a “regular guy”. In contrast to the establishment “eggheads”. A striver among elites. A striver suppressed by the elites. Plenty of people could identify - people who don’t want some smug bastard at the helm. The elites were correct when they complained about Nixon pandering to baser sympathies - but that just made them look even worse.
Posted in politics, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 12 Oct 2008 22:22:00 GMT
WETA is showing Wall Street tonight. I’ve always wanted to watch it. More so now that the real Wall Street is getting into trouble.
Small Is Beautiful
When I was in India, I bought a copy of E.F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful”. It’s a book that relates well with the Peak Oil school. I’ve read some criticism of Schumacher somewhere along the way, but I don’t expect every author I like to be 100% right, all the time. Do you?
Let’s just say for the sake of argument that we are headed into an energy scarce future. Survival in that future will not be easy - not just because there will not be enough easy wealth to go around (is there enough now?), but because not enough people have the skills they need to survive it.
Say what you want about Malthus, but I think he is going to be our guiding star once more, should we actually live long enough to see it. This many people extracting what they need to survive is not going to be viable. If we are successful, it’ll be hell on the planet, and if we fail… well, that’s a bit dark for this discussion.
I’ve mentioned price as a negative feedback mechanism before, right? It’s no different from the electrical feedback that stabilizes an amplifier - at the cost of reduced output. Did you want stability or maximal output? That’s a matter of taste, I guess. Like strapping a rocket on your car to go faster, but then, always in danger of being blown to bits.
High prices are a signal. They say: “Use Less”. If prices are kept artificially low, then people do not use less. It’s business as usual.
My feeling about “Small Is Beautiful” - and I think it deserves to have me defend it - is that the lesson applies at all scales. Big isn’t necessarily bad - size should be sensible relative to the goal. We see it now in space exploration: Small companies are getting into the launch business. We have NASA precisely because we needed an escape valve for all our excess wealth. In many ways it was a good investment, but I wonder at the cost of it all. How dearly did we purchase the benefits of the space age? Did we perhaps lose opportunities to do something better with that money? Things that we simply failed to imagine?
Maybe it’s just human nature to want to gamble with the whole wad - take stupendous amounts of surplus (even when the surplus is a temporary illusion and the next disaster is on its way, unbeknownst to us) and blow it on that one big spectacle. This may be why we also developed a brain. Maybe human nature was leading us astray so often that only the smart survived - those people who could prudently circumvent their human nature when it was most advantageous.
There is this presumption that solving the problems of each little individual is not worthy of our attention. Especially when we can have something flashy that no one person could have paid for. Credit and Banking are certainly necessary - I would never claim that there is nothing big worth doing - but, bigness for its own sake is misguided. The larger the goal, the more we need to be in agreement about whether it is worth pursuing. But, this doesn’t stop the scoundrels, who pervert the real good Capitalism does in creating wealth, satisfying needs, and improving the lives of all.
Who decides what is worth doing? And, for how much? Once again, it’s the price. If you create the illusion that gasoline is cheap, then people will drive like there is no tomorrow. If you structure a mortgage so that a poor guy with a family thinks his payments will always be that low, he will buy a house he cannot afford, then be unable to interest anyone in buying it at half the price later. And, if we allow Wall Street players to create bizarre investment vehicles where nobody can gauge the real risk - because it makes rich people so happy, chances are those things weren’t priced correctly.
Wall Street is a hell of a lot more complicated some 20+ years after the fictional Gordon Gecko, but I know GG is still the guiding light.
Henry Ford
I use Henry Ford as my code word for a particular factory scenario. Whenever I tell people that I can’t unravel this issue, they tend to treat me like I’m an idiot. I, on the other hand (and I accept that I might just be missing something, in an intellectually obstinate fashion…) think that they are all just afraid to question the sources of received wisdom.
Henry Ford thought he could sell more cars if he paid his workers enough that they could also buy one. And, apparently it worked.
Every time I look, I see the factory, taking land, labor and capitol to transform some amount of material into some number of finished automobiles. You have fixed costs of setting up the factory (buy the land, build the shed, take delivery on the equipment, and pay the industrial designers), then you have variable costs to transform inputs to outputs (rubber, wood, and metal as the materials; electricity to run the machines; paychecks for the workers) What comes out is more valuable that what goes in, otherwise there are no profits. Economies of scale allow you to produce enough units to amortize the fixed costs as a small fraction of the variable costs. With their paychecks, the workers can afford to buy a car that they just participated in manufacturing. But all the workers together cannot buy all the cars - it takes them some time to earn enough for one, and during that time each worker probably contributes the equivalent effort necessary to build hundreds (hard to gauge with specialization, but it’s in there). The cars bought by workers are not going to be much more than 1% of the total. The other 99% are bought by people who are not employees. So paying your workers enough to be able to afford one of your cars is a bit of a red herring, if you ask me.
Going back to price… I think that profit may only be possible in cases where an input is undervalued. And, can you see now why the idea of paying the workers more sets of an alarm bell for me? If workers are so undervalued that you can pay them more and still profit, then what other input is being undervalued? The factory is “getting away with murder” - some externality that subsidizes the cost.
One of the things you notice in Open Software projects is that people will contribute effort without pay. They are being ‘paid’ in other less tangible ways. This translates to other workforces… Any time you can inspire people to take part of the full monetary value of what they do as something non-monetary, you’ve got a shot at success: Any worker can be proud of what they help accomplish - all the more so if it’s a tangible output. And, the bigger the better: “Hey, I put five rivets in that jumbo jet! - It wouldn’t fly without me. I was integral to the success of this great thing.”
Posted in economics, film-and-TV, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 05 Oct 2008 02:58:00 GMT
I have posessed a copy of Sir Peter Hall’s “Cities In Civilization” for quite some time now - the hardback was published in 1998, and I must have bought it within a year. It is quite the resource on comparative urban studies - he saw that there was a piece missing in the analysis of what made certain cities at certain times great. I’ve been nibbling at this thousand-pager a bit here and there, and it seems like a nice compliment to “The Riddle of the Modern World” - so many of those same issues are addressed by Hall. Any good remarks on economics are a special treat for me, and so the following bit about ancient Greece struck me:
“[The citizens of Athens] saw wealth as good and desirable, even necessary for the life of the good citizen. But its function was not to provide a base for more acquisition; it was the very reverse, to liberate the citizen from economic activity and concern.
Posted in books, economics | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 05 Oct 2008 01:43:00 GMT
When I talked to my friend (and Olsson’s coworker from long ago) Troy, I told him that my choice of the wood-grain design for the Olsson’s Testimonial page was an attempt to capture a feeling I had about the wooden bookshelves. His reply was “and, it’s like a coffin, too!”.
Yes, well…
Soon we were off on a tangent: Because of that page, and the necessity that someone moderate the comments, I have been doing it. I didn’t see a setting for allowing all comments, and frankly, I wanted control over the nonsensical - like botnet spam or incoherent ravings. To which Troy replied “you mean, like a Sarah Palin speech?”.
Not… exactly.
So that was weird, but in “The Drunkard’s Walk”, Leonard Mlodinow reminds us not to be fooled by patterns we think we see in random events. Sarah Palin is obviously in the news, so for someone to mention her name the same day I was just looking at a Sarah Palin interview parody is not weird at all. Nor is it weird that the very same book about randomness should talk about Markov chains, which are the method that generates those fake Palin speeches.
And Markov chains are the mechanism I couldn’t recall that generated the text in that old program we had on our Mac when I was a teenager (what was that thing called?… I found it fascinating). I started to think about how to reverse-engineer that program recently, and came up with a sketch of associative arrays in Perl, or the essentially identical hash object in Ruby. If you think about it, Markov chains are just the framework - probability for any word showing up after any other - and, that means a couple of things, at least: 1) You have to have one program component learn these probabilities from existing texts, unless you want completely synthetic results (I can’t help thinking about music synthesizers vs. music sampling). And, 2) you might need a lot of memory to store a probability for each ordered pair of two words. This gets worse if you plan to extend the concept to what word will follow a particular combination of words - the so-called ‘memory’ of the chain. This is what suggests associative arrays in the first place - they’re more efficient for large but sparse matrices.
If you take a look at the Wikipedia page on Markov chains, you’ll notice that there are a lot of equations. One of my high school physics teachers was convinced that normal people just ignore the equations in a text. Therefore, good science/math writing has to explain everything well, but I love equations because they save me the trouble of wading through so much descriptive text. It’s the same issue with computer code, like when I wanted to tell those guys on the bus the other night about how the politicians should shut up and show me the code revisions they were proposing.
If you’re not going to look at the equations with me, just remember this: The probabilities in that article are context dependent - Every different Markov chain is like a chart with values for those numbers filled in. The numbers are a kind of ‘signature’ that we experience subjectively as uncanny reproductions of Sarah Palin speeches, or scholarly journal articles. Every different generator (i.e. set of those probabilities) applied to a specific vocabulary falls on a point in a multidimensional phase-space - an inherent product of the vocabulary itself (this is referred to as the ‘state-space’ on the Wiki). Even if you consider a two word ‘vocabulary’ like the Heads and Tails of a coin toss, the Markov chain concept implies a continuous space of different actual Markov chains for that vocabulary. Texts generated from those mechanisms are going to feel subjectively similar if the points in phase space are close - i.e., all the probabilities are close enough. This is fortunate, because an exact point in that space can only be estimated in practice: We estimate it by analyzing the texts we want to imitate.
But rest assured, I’m often exhausted by equations like the ones in that article. I have a threshold for what equations I can comfortably examine while reading, too.
I feel a bit relieved by all this: If I ever want to take a break from blogging, at least I know that I could write a Markov chain generator and train it to the previous posts. How long would it take for people to decide that I wasn’t just writing in a self-conscious imitation of my own style?
Posted in politics, programming, books, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:49:00 GMT
I’m going to bundle some quick reminders for myself here…
I went over to Reiter’s Books today because I’ve been coveting a particular statistics textbook. I was tempted by a couple other books that were new to me, but for the price - and with the thought of the groaning shelves back home - I managed to fend off temptation.
Well, I got a second book anyway: Another book that I had noticed on a previous visit: “Advanced Windows Debugging”. I didn’t pick it up then because it’s very technical, and I wanted to research it first… I’ve been very frustrated with Microsoft Windows. The other day, I saw an article with screenshots of the next version. I don’t know about you - perhaps I’m concerned with different matters - but, I couldn’t care less about the design of the graphic user interface - I thought those could be altered quite easily. I care mainly about system internals. Why do I see so many books that instruct me on how to use an interface that hasn’t changed fundamentally in years? Likewise, I think I remember how to drive a car, but I don’t know much about fixing them.
Presidential Debates
Friday I went out to the bar to watch the presidental debate. Those Octoberfest beers will be gone before you know it, and somehow it feels like an American tradition to talk politics with strangers in a bar. More than that, it’s possibly one of the foundations of democracy. One couple next to me was voiciferous - or at least the woman was. I heard some good, insightful heckling from all corners of the room.
But as the debate wore on - did it have anything to do with the beer? - I started to lose the thread.
Posted in books, programming, politics | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 28 Sep 2008 00:46:00 GMT
