When I think of Hillary Clinton, I am reminded of Bob Dole.

They don't look much alike, but they share at least three things:

1. They are obsessed with the game of politics.



2. Both, when campaigning, repress their true selves.



3. And just as Bob Dole had little chance of getting elected, Hillary's chance is severely limited from the start.

Hillary's problem is the perception of her among the majority of the electorate: that she's a cold liar. Her husband was a warm liar. A lot of people liked him even when they knew he was just putting on an act. Hillary has none of her husband's charm. Understandably, many hate her even more than they hate her ex-Prez spouse.

Bob Dole's sole charm was what his strategists considered his biggest problem: he would occasionally blurt out unexpectedly, saying the darndest things. Sometimes these things were darn close to the truth. They were also, often, hysterically funny. (I especially enjoyed his characterization of a meeting of three former presidents, Carter, Ford, and Nixon? See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Evil.)

But remember his campaign against Bill Clinton? What a hopeless cause. You could tell he was being handled a mile away.

Same for Hillary. Any real ideas she may possess lie deeply buried under a mound of careful rhetoric and positioning. What's her slogan in Iowa? Let the Conversation Begin! No. Let it end. Until she can speak honestly.

(This is not to say that her recent joke at her husband's expense wasn't funny. It was indeed reminiscent of Dole at his witty best. But if you read the spin her campaign puts on it, it suonds almost like it was a planned joke, something written by a staffer.)

But do you remember Bob Dole's campaign slogan? I had to look it up: The Better Man for a Better America.

Well, Hillary can't use that. And unless Condoleezza Rice runs, she can't use "The Better Woman for . . ." What? The government employee unions?

On an alternative campaign site, votehillary.org, the slogan is Dolesque and boring: Bold Leadership for a Stronger America. Bleech.

Presidential politics is American politics at its worst. In that sense, I think, Hillary's the right person for the campaign. But if she gets the Democratic nomination, the Democratic Party has shot itself in the foot.

If you're a Republican, you might say that's good. But for most of us, we'd rather see better candidates. Wouldn't we?

Ah:

Boot time needs to be zero -- you turn it on and it's on, Lazowska said.

That is indeed a good goal for an o.s. I mean, if it's doable. We are impatient creatures. Why wait?

And yet, I use a Mac running Panther (Tiger next week!), and the turn-on of using a Mac isn't its turn-on time. While the computer warms up and before the login shows up (login security is important), I arrange my chair, my blankets and scarves (cold office), my Diet Coke . . .

Why a Mac? Why OS X? It's the beauty, ease of use, stability (bye-bye OS 9!), and common-sensedness of it. I'm not at all interested, really, in the new vistas after Vista. I've got OS X.

After writing a note on metaethics, earlier today, I went back to read more of Mill's classic, Utilitarianism. And just a bit further down from the passage I had quoted, Mill placed a very astute argument about first principles and their place in science and philosophy:

The truths which are ultimately accepted as the first principles of a science, are really the last results of metaphysical analysis, practised on the elementary notions with which the science is conversant; and their relation to the science is not that of foundations to an edifice, but of roots to a tree, which may perform their office equally well though they be never dug down to and exposed to light.

This statement could be commended to those Austrian economists who talk so much about reasoning a priori. This passage from Mill is very astute, and I think it might provide the key to understanding what subjectivist economists in the Austrian tradition are really up to when they talk about a priori principles.

Further, I am reminded of Herbert Spencer's insistence, in his work, of making sure that each argument be put in both a priori and a posteriori forms.

Edmund Burke wrote a book in his youth, A Vindication of Natural Society, that later came to embarrass him. He said that this treatise on anarchism was irony. Later anarchists never quite believed him, and they printed the book and praised its insights. They regarded the mature Burke as a traitor to his youthful good ideas.

Many readers have never been quite sure whether Burke changed his mind or was, from the beginning, an ironist.

But I know what it feels like to be an unsuccessful ironist. Sometimes I write what I intend to be an ironic piece, and find that it is taken utterly earnestly. Does this make me a poor writer or the reader a poor reader? Probably it depends. In the case of Lem Bingley, I want to believe the latter, but it's almost certainly a case of the former.

Years ago I came across a scientific term, and wrote about it on Instead of a Blog, in a piece entitled The Good Word: Deconvolve?

Mr. Bingley used the word on his blog, recently, and apparently a reader excoriated him, using my blog as back-up. Later, in a column, the author writes that I had asserted that scientists arrogantly use the word deconvolve when they mean untangle or unscramble. I came across this and was puzzled. The definitional talk I remembered. But arrogance? I saw the word as jargon, and then wrote a short essay containing what I thought was a pretty obvious clue to its irony. (I devoted most of my attention to the evolution of Herbert Spencer's terminology for evolution. It turned into a flight of fancy, about the evolution of deconvolve in a Spencerian direction, not its current meaning. And then I used the very word in the course of not recommending its use.)

I guess I was wrong. As an ironist, I failed. One of these days I'll have to go to the Instead of the Blog article and add a cautionary note.

I guess my readers couldn't see my odd subtext: I love the word. I've used it since. I've even learned to use deconvolve with some precision! (One website puts it this way: In simplest terms, convolution is the smearing of a data set by a given instrument response function. Deconvolution is the procedure of undoing that smearing in an effort to see what the data would look like had the instrument perfectly rendered it.) Ah, the perils of the English language.

The context for all this is pretty clear. Scientists who use words that are technical confuse non-scientific readers. This leads to all sorts of vexation. In my goofy little essay (most of my old Good Word essays were intended to be a bit goofy), I wrote: So when Brown and Trujillo write that they could deconvolve the data, they might also have written that they could unroll, or (better yet) untangle, their data. They would have gotten their idea across to non-scientists, yes. And had they written, once, the definition of the term in their study, they surely would have taught non-scientists. They could have written, for example, that the data, unscrambled from noise introduced by our instruments -- in a word, deconvolved -- etc. and been quite clear.

But modern scientists do not write for laymen, usually. This is not the 19th century. This is the age of specialization (which is one reason I brought up Spencer; it was not an irrelevant bit of playfulness on my part; or so I thought.) Besides, when you have a precise word, run with it. In my original squib, I wrote But with deconvolve available, why use anything so common as untangle? Bingley rightly notes: for precision. I would add: for the sheer joy of it.

I deal with this in economics all the time. Economists use terms with precision (well, most of the time), and non-economists take those terms and make of them very different meanings. (When I helped edit a magazine, I was often given the technical papers to help put into more readable English. This led to many editorial squabbles, and I often unsuccessfully lobbied to include original jargon.) This divorce between the professional and the non-professional is not limited to economics, of course. I bet every scientist has dealt with it. I'm not sure every scientist is prepared to deal with it, though.

I remember watching Bart Kosko on Politically Incorrect. Kosko was pushing fuzzy thinking (fuzzy logic) at the time. He meant something very precise by it. And he had a good point, about vague sets, fuzzy sets . . . well, good ol' shades of gray. But the other participants of that episode Bill Maher's tough-talking issues program used the term in a standard pejorative way. And used it repeatedly. You could almost see Bart writhing in his chair.

Is it a coincidence that Bart's current book is about Noise? (His discussion of convolution is on page 121.)

Failing at irony is something I will have to live with. The only thing that bothers me about Mr. Bingley's criticism of my squib (other than discovering that I'm a source for stupidity, no small thing) is one word he chose: arrogantly. It's not arrogance I see in the desire for jargon. It's not a sense of superiority (though that may come into it) but a need for separateness. (To use a very clunky word.) An economist must separate his word-sets from others, and so uses distinct meanings for common words, and those words become jargon. A linguist does the same thing, as do engineers and what-have-you.

And there is the pleasure in a good, juicy word. Deconvolve is one. It has a distinct ring to it. It conjures up associations that (not-quite-right) alternatives such as untangle and unscramble — or, perhaps better yet, some readily understandable coinages, such as de-noise or noise-compensate — do not. And it does have a distinct meaning.

It strikes me, now, that irony itself is akin to convolution, as is delphic speech. It is supposed to be a beautiful noise, skewing the truth but allowing the reader to correct for it.

But there is an esoteric/exoteric level to the very process, and as contexts change (such as the rise of anarchism for Burke, the absence of my original Good Word page history, for me, perhaps) the ability to correct for irony goes.

That is, irony cannot always be accurately deconvolved. (Or should I just say decoded?)

Too bad.

This is especially the case if the irony was not indicated clearly enough in the beginning.

The opening of John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism has often been scoffed at for containing one of the great philosophical boners:

From the dawn of philosophy, the question concerning the summum bonum, or, what is the same thing, concerning the foundation of morality, has been accounted the main problem in speculative thought, has occupied the most gifted intellects, and divided them into sects and schools, carrying on a vigorous warfare against one another.

Hey, I've scoffed at it. The summum bonum is definitely not the same thing as the foundation of morality.

But I realized, recently, that Mill's error is a very common error. He identified two distinct things. And yet, many philosophers are pointing in the direction of the summum bonum when they talk about the foundation of ethics.

Here's the trouble: there is no one foundation for ethics. That is, the article is misplaced. The foundation of ethics? No one such thing.

Why?

The practical foundation of ethics is its function in human society, and the reasons for the use of ethical language and concepts by human beings. Morality is a toolset. Ethical norms, ideals, virtues, etc., are tools for the influencing of human conduct.

But when philosophers talk about a foundation for ethics, they're not always talking about where it comes from, and why its constituent parts have these or those characteristics (though it would be better if they would look at this more often).

No, what they are looking for is a foundation for a particular ethical system. Why this ethical system, and not another? The reason is the foundation for morality. It's why the true morality is, well, true.

Substitute the word fit for true, if you had trouble with the introduction of the word into the discussion. Think of a tool that holds true, that is, is ideally suited to its task.

The task of a universal morality is to prescribe rules that would allow us to live better lives.

How one toolset, with non-vague prescriptions, could be utterly distinct and completely persuasive is one of the troubles of moral philosophy.

But do you see my point? The foundation of ethics, as I describe it, as a social control toolset, is not what people are looking for. This designation and theory (a metaethical theory, not too far from emotivism and prescriptivism) merely describss and helps explain what people are doing when they do ethics.

What they want, on the other hand, is the ideal ethical system.

Determining that is a bit harder.

Why?

Define the perfect saw. Describe the perfect fastener system.

These are tools. But perfection and universality of use? No way. It depends, says the carpenter.

This might be the legitimate answer of moralists to the absolutist demand of the theologian or Kantian moral philosopher.

Or: it could be that the toolkit, evolved over time to meet differing needs, is broad enough and varied enough to handle most circumstances, and the trouble with some moralists is they misidentify which tool they need at which occasion, taking the moral notions of the family and applying them to politics, or vice versa.

And there may be a key in that only some moral notions are universalizable; the rest are up to personal taste, and that's OK.

Another key might be: there is no summum bonum. No greatest good. There are only many goods, and what we must be most on the watch out for are to avoid a number of obvious and dangerous bads, or evils.

My favorite songs? I don't listen to singing that often, and I usually prefer choral music to the single vocalist. But I do have some favorite songs. For example:

• Ancient Voices of Children (song cycle on Lorca poetry by George Crumb)
• Blake Songs (song cycle on William Blake poetry by George Rochberg)
• I'm Bidin' My Time (song by George and Ira Gershwin

I even like some songs that are by people not named George. Take guys named William, for example:

• The Serpent (a song on a Roethke poem, by William Bolcom)
• Foy porter (a virelai by Machaut)
• Douce Dame Jolie (another virelai by Machaut)

In fact, of all the songs I like, Machaut is the composer who hits my parade the most often. His first name was Guillaume (William, right?), and he was alive in the 1300s. Talk about likin' the Oldies!

A few other favorites:

• Freezing (Philip Glass; David Byrne, lyricist? I forget)
• Ann Street (Charles Ives)
• The Cage (Charles Ives)
• Tigeroo! (Irving Fine)
• The Listeners (Norman Dello-Joio, to the classic poem by Walter de la Mare)
• Ambiance (Jeff Jones, a long piece setting Sam Beckett poetry)
• Psyche (Manuel de Falla, I forget the lyricist)
• The Vatican Rag (Tom Lehrer)

There are a lot of popular songs I like, too. Too many to list.

And there are arias from cantatas and operas that I love, too, including Wachet auf, ruft und die Stimme by J.S. Bach, and The Hymn to the Sun by Philip Glass.

But it's Machaut's Douce Dame Jolie that's running through my brain right now. I like the way it moves from Dorian to Aeolian to the melodic minor mode.

I don't argue against some EPA efforts, such as regulations that force coal burning plants to have scrubbers. Pollutants are dangerous. It may very well be that, had a common law approach to pollutants been adopted in America in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, we wouldn't need a government department like the EPA at all.

But such a system was not allowed to develop. Property rights and tort law were not allowed properly to respond to massive polluters, and so organizations like the EPA became necessary.

I wouldn't want to live in a world without coal plant scrubbers universally in place.

And scrubber technology has become so good, I'm told, that soon plants will be burning low-grade coal again.

Invest in low-grade coal. Invest in scrubbers. Support the EPA!

I spent a lot of wasted time today at the Census Bureau site trying to discover the statistical reality of family planning. Apparently, the question I want answered isn't interesting to mainline statisticians.

I found a lot of information on poverty relating to children, but most of it looked at the subject I am interested in from the opposite direction. And I want to know about children not in poverty, too! Mainly, I want to know fertility rates per income quintile. I don't feel like taking those statistical conclusions and extrapolating the information I need. Surely a decent statistician has already done this for me!

I did several Google searches and came up empty-handed, too.

But there has to be a lot of information out there, and I bet I'm just missing it because I'm doing the searches incorrectly, using the wrong keywords, etc.

Here's what I'd like to see: the statistics on women who have children. How many children women give birth to, according to household income, and nature of household (living with husband, not living with husband, single, living with non-married sexual partner, living with friends, living with sibling(s), living with parent(s), living alone or with strangers, living on government assistance, etc. Abortion rates, adopting-out rates, and child confiscation rates, per income and household, would be great, too.

If any of my readers know something, a good site, please advise! I'm very curious about the facts here. The facts would be, perhaps, more interest in the theories I've developed from reading material that could be decades out of date.

In another life, I could have happily studied to be a population economist. It would be a useful vein of study. And fun to debate.

Surely, the history of population theory after Malthus is fascinating. My favorite post-Malthusian population studies were by Nassau Senior and Herbert Spencer.

Unfortunately, until I wrote what I wrote the other day (see below), I had not studied population theory and statistics for years.

Oskari Juurikkala has an interesting article posted to Mises.org, Making Kids Worthless: Social Security's Contribution to the Fertility Crisis. He revives a thesis that many common-sense people have advanced. In fact, R.W. Bradford's mother had explained it to her son when he was growing up. Social Security will destroy the family, she argued. Families stick together because they get help from one another. Take away the need, out goes the bond that holds us together. (Not an exact quote.) It is no great wonder that Bradford grew up to become a libertarian.

This alleged effect of Social Security wouldn't be so bad were what replaced the family better than the family itself. But fluid tribes of friends aren't very stable institutions. And the limits to neighborliness have a notoriety all their own.

The families and clans, on the other hand, are amazingly effective social institutions. The family's dissolution has already led to horrendous problems, especially among the not-so-bright (who become easily tempted with drugs, indolence, and crime).

Trouble is, Juurikkala's article does not consider the other causes of decreasing fertility. For instance, fecundity is highest (not lowest) in that portion of society that most relies upon Social Security for retirement. The richer sector, which could probably survive not getting any Social Security benefits, has a far lower fertility rate.

This seems to be the biggest counter-indicator of Juurikkala's thesis.

Why would this be the case?

For the reasons that economists associated with the Chicago school have given: people, the richer they become, tend to switch from investing in quantity of children to quality of children. This means that they increase investments in their children's educations, and this added cost (which does not diminish in terms of rate with each added child) thus increases the disincentive to produce large families.

It's in the middle class — that is, in the middle income group of higher wage workers and the self-employed — that we might see the effect Juurikkala identifies most clearly.

Still, the absence of a long-run incentive for children doesn't seem as strong as evidently operative near-term incentives and costs.

I think it is more reasonable to regard the family retirement plan of tradition as an unintended effect of having large numbers of children. Similarly, children are itself, for many throughout history, something like an unintended effect of engaging in sexual intercourse. The latter is fun; the children, less so. But the burden of children is reduced by familiar bonds, and the retirement effect.

Socialized retirement schemes do reduce one incentive to hold families together.

But increased availability of contraceptives allow most people to engage in family planning, reducing the birthrate, offsetting Juurikkala's effect.

Further, progress in medicine and agriculture and housing has increased the rate at which children who are conceived actually survive into adulthood, making the probability of conception from sexual intercourse (without contraception) more likely. All this increases the element of rationality, of actual choice and planning, in the production of children. Previously, when most children died before adulthood, and when contraception was very, very unreliable, the possibility of planning was much more chaotic.

Is it any wonder, then, why social mores in the past were so family-centered? It was a way to constrain behavior, and actually nurture the children that were produced. The chaotic element in the production of children had to be controlled. (And societies that didn't have a good way of doing this did not replicate themselves; they died out, so to speak.)

Now families are maintained largely by contract, not tradition and taboo.

Except for one major factor: the welfare state.

Not socialized retirement, but socialized child-rearing and livelihood. The number of women who produce children without any contracted means of supporting them is amazingly high in our society. Why? These mothers have a safety net, and a diminished taboo against bastardy (we can almost say: no taboo against bastardy). If a woman produces a child without being married, and has no means of supporting her child, there are all sorts of government programs there to help her.

The costs of child-rearing have gone down. Until recently, with workfare, one could argue that the costs were negative: a child conceived and raised out of wedlock gave an excuse for the state (taxpayers) to support the woman and her child. Thus producing children became a job, in effect. A low-paying job, but a job nonetheless. The state paid single women to conceive and produce children. And the cost of educating these children was borne almost entirely by the state, through the public education system.

The near-term incentive to engage in sexual intercourse is as great, or greater, than it ever was. Sexual activity is pleasurable, and now nearly everyone knows how pleasurable it can be (the nature of female orgasm, once a guarded secret in many Christian societies — and a thing actually feared in Islamic societies — is now regularly portrayed on TV and popular music, informing all of the possibilities of pleasure through sex).

The near-term disincentives to produce children — the fact that they are expensive to maintain (feeding, clothing, housing, medicating, and educating) — have been greatly reduced by the welfare state.

So of course, with the near-term costs and benefits skewed towards the production of children,some people will increase the quantity of children!

And this is the case in the lower classes, who produce children at higher rates than the wealthy and middle class (not surprisingly, there are more exceptions to this in the middle class than amongst the very wealthy; it should go without saying that all the discussion here assumes the reader can understand generalities and probabilities, without taking offense at any implied particular example or counter-example).

These effects tend not to play as much the wealthier one gets because the amount of money and quality of life amongst the poor is quite low. Anyone who aspires to greater wealth would find these incentives much less weighty. In fact, they can hardly even imagine that they could be effective at all.

Hence the continued unreserved support for them amongst many wealthy persons, utterly clueless about how actual impoverished humanity values and chooses. The rich and the professionals in our society possess radically different value scales because of increased income and wealth levels. They can foresee a future, and they can see the dead-endedness of the life offered by the state. And yet they continue to support these programs — and even argue for their increase — because they impute to the poor a status of victimhood, rarely muddied with an understanding of reflexive behaviors and values.

As pointed out in The Bell Curve, class lines in America are heavily determined by intelligence. The less smart one is, the harder it is to conceive of a longer time horizon, and of a multiplicity of effects of any one act. So, for less smart people, even the disincentive of costs of raising children can seem mistily distant, of lower probability than they care to worry about.

So, they fuck and they produce offspring.

Everyone has some trouble maintaining an extended time horizon, of thinking about the future. But the less the intelligence, the harder this becomes. So of course, just on this basis alone, we would expect lower rates of birth amongst the intelligent. And higher incomes, too.

The nature of schooling is important, also.

For wealthier, more intelligent individuals and couples, an education is something that requires work and investment. It doesn't stop at grade 12, and it is something that students are expected to work at. (Somehwat. Your family's mileage may vary.)

But for poorer, generally less intelligent people, schooling tends to reduce to something to be endured (for students) and something to be used as a babysitter (for parents). K-12 schooling is subsidized in America, and poorer people treat this as no expense at all, as a cost savings.

But education for smarter people (of whatever level of income) seems much more like an investment in the future, with parents willing to spend time and money home-schooling, supervising public education, paying for private lessons and even schools, and saving for college. Completely different attitudes towards education, thus increasing the likelihood of the production of larger numbers of children amongst the poor and decreasing this production amongst the better off.

The question becomes: why isn't there a birth explosion among the lower classes, far beyond current rates?

I can think of a number of factors, with the top two pretty obvious, if not alone persuasive:

1. The ready availability of contraception. Even the dumbest sexually active people use this in a helter-skelter way.




2. The widespread use of abortion to kill conceived fetuses. This has surely put a halt to a huge population explosion. (Though I haven't reviewed which segment of the population uses it most, I suspect this would be most widely used by lower-middle class women and pregnant teens.)

I might add drug use to this. Amazingly high numbers of what becomes the lower classes engage in drug activity that might decrease sexual drive and fertility (certainly the health of meth-addicted mothers). These people are run through a strange mill of welfare and imprisonment, and the latter, at least, tends to upset the ability of people to procreate. (The growing ranks of meth addicts consigned to prisons is amazing, at least in the Western states.)

Can we assign the main reason for decreased productivity to opportunity cost? Sexual activity is as fun as it ever was. And the costs for engaging in it have gone down. Contraception and abortion, especially, have led to a decreased number of babies in production. But surely it is important to us that we live in a wealthy society with many things to do. Music, movies, TV, sports-watching, what-have-you; these compete for the attention of all us away from sexual activity. Further, the growth of the pornography industry has made the old standby alternative to coition, masturbation, much easier. For increasing numbers of Americans and civilized people, sexual activity is becoming a lot like sports: more and more people engage in less and less socially active sex and sport, and instead watch the professionals do it on TV. So this tends to blunt the production of children, too.

There's a lot of fun things to do in society. Drug use may alleviate the vacuity of the lives of hordes of careless people, but art and industry and even work and religion do much the same for more careful folk. And all these things take our attention away from the immediate gratification of sexual intercourse.

Children have always been, to some extent, the joint product of sexual activity. But they are also desired, of course, as ends in themselves (I'll discuss this in a future post). And as hedges against the future, as Juurikkala argues. But when looking to explain the production, distribution, and consumption of children, I tend to look to more immediate effects than to the long-term incentives and disincentives, especially amongst the not-so-brights. Conceiving of the long term is much more difficult, for these people, than engaging in a bit o' fun that conceives a child.

O, for a one-armed economist! Which politician was it who decried the on the other hand rhetoric of his economic advisors? Doesn't matter. He just wanted an answer, and the economists he consulted kept on adding complexities.

It's no wonder. The world's a complex place. And economics has to accommodate and explain that complexity.

Milton Friedman insisted that prediction was the hallmark of science, and therefore economics. But Oscar Morgenstern noted the problem with this, long before Friedman: Any prediction of social events which is a causal factor for the predicted effects must necessarily go wrong. Willi Meyer, in Beyond Choice (Subjectivism, Intelligibility, and Economic Understanding, Israel Kirzner, ed.), correctly denies this Strong Impossibility Theorem a logical certainty, but gives it its due as a synthetic statement. It is, well, almost common sense.

Say an economist studies the development of an industry. He comes to the conclusion that investors have overvalued stock in several major corporations in said industry. He predicts that, down the road, this will lead to a major bubble burst.

The article gets published, and is picked up by financial journalists. And the stock goes into an immediate dive.

The prediction has influenced the outcome, speeding up the process of stock devaluation. And, perhaps, by doing so, has prevented a major bubble by pricking the bubble early on.

That shows an influence that prediction has, and that must be modified in the predictions.

Trouble is, it's hard to predict what will be made of any one prediction: nothing? what the predictor thinks savvy? or too much?

This last leads to a factor far more troublesome than the Strong Impossibility Theorem. It is the possibility of the self-fulfilling prophecy. One makes a prediction in order to influence events, perhaps to increase one's own reputation as a predictor.

This make economic prediction a form of wizardry. An art, perhaps, not unlike that of a confindence game. (And, after listening to the former head of the Federal Reserve, one might very well come to believe this was economics' very method.)

This shows the inherent limits that social sciences have at the predictive level, the level of exact predictions.

Hayek suggested that economics should be, instead, about the making of pattern predictions, and that gets it closer, but still, the problems of interference with the result by the very act of prediction remain a big problem.

This is the result of the key feature of human action: human ends change to adapt to information about possible goals and means, and predictions affect the relationship between various goals and means; so people choose differently based on predictions.

And this can lead to an amazing degree of complexity, far beyond the complexity of the statics that economists have traditionally theorized about. Predictions can be made that

• intentionally affect the outcome to prove the prediction (self-fulfilling prophecy as wizardry)
• intentionally affect the outcome contrary to the apparent content of the prediction (sly manipulation)
• unintentionally affect the outcome in a way that favors the prediction (self-fulfilling prophecy by means of Thomas Theorem factors)
• unintentionally affect the outcome to muddy or disprove the prediction (impossibility theorem)

These factors turn the nature of economics as a social science away from any simple predictive science. It turns the science into a critique of simple-minded scientism, doesn't it? A more dialectical enterprise, perhaps. I don't see how the science can be looked upon as a science in quite the same way physics is. The very nature of the science as influencing its observation may seem like just a macro instance of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in quantum mechanics. But the problem is much larger, and on every level of economics.

Perhaps this makes economics more like evolutionary biology. Or ecology. There's a place for prediction, but a limited place.

Even meteorology and climatology have to incorporate human influences. But they can do so in pretty simple modelling. Trouble is, in economics, human influence is at the discipline's heart, and susceptibility to influence from predictions and the science itself can change outcomes in unforeseeable ways, due not only to complexity but to the very structure of the central events: the human choices and actions.

Funny, though, I've never heard anyone suggest that the proper way to conduct economic research would be in guild secrecy. One could only test predictions that are never allowed to reach the populace!

Perhaps one reason I've never heard of this is not merely the trouble with keeping secrets. It's the problem that any observation and prediction that an economist can make can be made by actors in society itself. After all, some investors are extremely sophisticated. They have every reason to be.

These thoughts come to mind as I break open a book that just arrived in the mail, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Life of Chance in Life and in the Markets, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I'll see what new levels of complexity become apparent by reading this much-praised work.

After writing the above, I came across this, by Nicolai Foss:

While we can all agree that ideas matter, how much do they matter? Is much, and perhaps most, of social reality essentially bootstrap phenomena in which the Thomas Theorem (i.e., the the situations that men define as true, become true for them) holds true? Do the social sciences bootstrap much of social reality in the sense that social science decisively affects the agents that social scientists study? Or, are there constants, stable mechanisms, etc. that exist and work regardless of what social scientists believe about them (as, I suppose, many economists would hold)?

The idea that theorizing affects the objects of theorizing — that is, the notion of “reflexivity” — has been an important one in sociology for a long time (Thomas wrote about it in the 1920s; Merton in the 1940s). It has become a Leitmotiv in the sociology of knowledge. It has also been a recurring theme in economics (in connection with predictions and the modeling of expectations; e.g., the debate surrounding the Lucas critique), and it has been treated by philosophers as well (e.g. Popper). However, this literature has not discussed the extent to which reflexivity (in the above sense) obtains.

The issue is obviously very difficult to get a hold on. However, I also believe it is a crucial one, particularly in management where we have recently witnessed people essentially arguing that economics-as-applied to management is (nothing but?) a self-fulfilling prophecy (i.e., this paper). So, do any of our readers know of literature that can help to frame and answer the questions with which this bleg began?

Ah, another call for help. I just asked for such citations on two email discussion groups.

But, as I try to indicate in my post above, the Thomas Theorem is not the whole of the problem. It's not even the half of it. It's about the quarter of it. At most. The Thomas Theorem does not really take in the possibility of a intentional influence of a prediction, nor the unintended process of a prediction unintentionally influencing reality so as to seemingly falsify the prediction.

But then, Foss was mainly talking about reflexivity, reciprocal influence and all that, and used the Thomas Theorem as if in synecdochic relationship to reflexivity.

The blog I quote from, by the way, looks fantastic. Organizations and Markets: great title for a very large endeavor with a wide perspective. I had not seen it before. I've now bookmarked it as a savvy source for new and old ideas.

A lot of people seem utterly unable to grasp the concept of insurance. They get sick, and then they demand that the government pay for their health insurance . . . insurance they themselves had not bothered to purchase ahead of time.

Insurance is something you buy to hedge against bad turns of fortune. Once you are sick, it's too late to buy insurance. That's why insurance companies have clauses about pre-existing conditions. If a person starts feeling bad (but hasn't checked with a doctor), it's already too late to buy insurance. Buying it and not telling one's insurance company about a possible ailment is preciously close to fraud.

Ideally, everyone would pay for their own health care assitance out of his or her savings. But some ailments are rare enough that buying insurance makes sense. They would be too expensive to save for, so making the insurance bet makes sense to the person. The insurance company, looking at the actuarial risk of a pool of would-be insurers, makes the contrary bet. An exchange is made. Two parties with precisely opposite evaluations make a contract. It's a sensible policy, a great industry, a good deal for both insurer and insured.

Alas, the modern era in capitalism can almost be defined by attempts to turn these insurance contracts into social contracts. Interventions by regulation are extremely common these days. The gambit is usually to take away from an insurance contract inherent features of that contract; Prohibit or regulate away stipulations about existing medical conditions, for instance. When governments do that, insurance companies face drains on their resources. Some of them can raise insurance rates to cover costs, since all the competition in their industry face the same regulations; the cost is shifted to insurance consumers in general. To some extent.

You might think that this is the same as taxation and subsidy, only simpler. But you'd be wrong. Markets work by distributing information. Each transaction, rate, profit and loss tells participants something. But by turning insurance into an alternative to social contract provision of a good, one corrupts the resiliency of the industry. One corrupts the information.

The other weird aspect of modern medical insurance is the proliferation of full medical coverage, a bizarre concept in insurance, really. Why? Because it makes no sense to insure for check-ups and standard care. These are things you expect to spend, and thus should be saved for. But instead of saving for normal care, many people — perhaps most people — demand that their insurance policies take care of such payments.

Why? Only one reason that I can see: We have been taught to expect this from employer-provided health care packages. Because employers have had a tax write-off for health care benefits provided to employees, this has become a popular, alternative way of compensating employees, a way of increasing payments (and thus attracting good workers) while avoiding taxation. Employers and employees both have incentives, under this system, to stuff insurance packets with items that aren't insurance, but qualify as direct benefits, instead.

It turns medicine into an entitlement. And thus a tax policy (started under wage and price controls during World War II) has corrupted the medical care industry, the insurance industry, and, frankly, the ethos of individual responsibility in America.

We are now a thoroughly corrupt people. Very few individuals, including many libertarians, find themselves capable of thinking their way out of our current mess.

Oddly, the Bush administration now seems game to move Americans slightly in the right direction, through revising tax policy.

I haven't studied the current proposal, outlined (I hear) in this week's State of the Union Address, so I won't comment on it now.

Besides, tonight I have to get some rest. Tomorrow I'm taking my father to town for a medical check-up . . . a check-up paid entirely by tax money. He's treated by the V.A.!

Several years ago, when contemplating the re-election of George W. Bush, I expressed my disgust with both major candidates, calling them utterly clueless on domestic issues. I then offered "Ten Simple (?) Reforms" on health care. And one of my Internet interlocutors challenged me:

[Y]ou seem to object to governmment spending. [Y]ou seem to say it's better to let the insurance companies have the money instead. [A]nd how do you propose individuals buy *BUY* health insurance on a non-living (aka minimal) wage???

In an email response, I took the last point first (what follows is my original email, now belatedly posted):

I don't. People who can't afford insurance won't get insurance.

They should be helped directly, either through charity, or via government.

But we shouldn't pretend that either charity or government spending on the poor is insurance, because it isn't. And regulating insurance to make it behave more like government hand-outs is disastrous, and leads to terrible consequences. Constructing government handouts to mimic insurance may make some sense, but when this is done, adding regulations upon regulations to non-handout methods — or, in the case of America's Medicare systems, making competing private systems virtually illegal (which is precisely what has been done to senior citizens) — also makes no sense.

Insurance is a special contract. It is only one way of paying for some things we want. There are other ways. Pretending that insurance can be fiddled with to grant us everything is idiotic.

And trying to get everything is idiotic, too. You can't. That's simply the case. In countries like Britain and Canada, where the state takes care of most or all medical transactions, rationing by procrastination becomes the norm, and many people die waiting to get treatment.

There is the terrible truth that, in modern times, the bulk of a person's medical expenditures occur in the last year of life — indeed, the last six months of life — and that many of these expenditures (expecially those in the last week of life) don't even help the patient. This is a fact that activists and reformers on all sides tend to ignore. (I'll try not to, in my writing about medical reform.)

By the way, your line that you seem to say it's better to let the insurance companies have the money instead strikes me as extremely peculiar. I think insurance companies, with minimal regulation (and that mainly against various forms of fraud), would provide better help to most individuals regarding health care than will government-run systems. But I don't think people should rely only on insurance only. That's borderline insane. Most insurance programs, in the wake of the wage-and-price-control work-around from WWII, have tried to do too much, have tried to insure things that shouldn't be paid for by this method. I'm speaking mainly of routine doctors visits, which should be paid for out of savings. One should plan on spending some of one's own income on routine check-ups, etc.

The problem of medical economics is that the bulk of all transactions, public and private, are paid for by third parties, that is, not by the patients (or the families of patients) themselves. This means that very little economizing gets done.

In short, many medical services get over-used.

Example? OK, here's one from personal experience. I was at a friend's house a few years ago, and his son stubbed his toe. He bawled and bawled. Now, the 7- or 8-year-old boy had just stubbed is toe. I knew it, my friend knew it. But my friend's wife insisted that the lad be taken to the emergency room. So off we went, fearing the wrath of that notoriously irrational mother.

Well, by the time we got there, the poor kid was getting control of himself. And the doctor basically gave the standard advice, after an hour or so of the kid being sent from nurse to doctor and back again. An amazing waste of time and money.

Now, why would any rational person send their kid immediately to ER for a stubbed toe?

Why, because she didn't have to pay for it, that's why! My friend is poor, on disability, and all his family's medical expenses are taken care of by the state. Whereas that trip would've cost me about $400, it cost him — and, more importantly, his nutball wife — nothing.

I'm quite happy that my friend's being taken care of so well. He's a rational individual (except, I think, when it comes to choosing sexual partners), and tries to minimize his contact with the doctor, though his condition doesn't allow him to avoid the doctors entirely. But even if his wife were a rational individual, she'd be likely to over-use the system, because she doesn't have to pay a dime for it.

This happens with full coverage insurance program users, too. The less they have to pay for any single use (that is, the lower the deductible), the less sense they put into using the system.

And since many people do not even have a choice of economic coverage — they get their insurance through their employment, of all goofy things, and some never even see a bill — little economic rationality can be put into action.

Hence my desire to get insurance entirely out of the employment contract negotiation sector of the economy. To allow a little more consumer choice, which can rein in some costs.

Now, I understand that many people cannot afford to obtain any medical insurance. But I also realize that some of this is the result of current government regulation. For instance, a few years ago Washington state added some major regulations and requirements to health care insurance. And within a year or two, the bulk of the major players left the state, and the Big Blues went bankrupt. There's a real and obvious causal connection here, but one is not supposed to mention this.

Further, I know from my own weird life that many people who can afford medical insurance don't get it, because they want to buy other stuff instead. That was me for many years. I just recently bought a good policy. And today I went to the doctor for a surgical procedure that is not covered by my insurance. I knew it when I bought the insurance. So I'll have to pay for the procedure out of pocket. Though I'm not rich, I'll just do without some things.

And doing without is something I'm learning. Not perfectly, but I am learning to prioritize, even this late in life.

The biggest trouble in America regarding health care, other than government policy, is an individual failing, all-too-widespread. Too many women bring babies to term without being able to provide for them. Too many couples beget children without being able to pay for basic care, much less medical care. Obviously, a new level of social control - cultural, not political — should be added to our current lenience: obloquy against procreation without some level of wealth.

Of course, those who — through no or little fault of their own — become poor after a period of solvency should not be treated with disdain. They should be helped. And in a decent society, and where people aren't trying to remake everything by government edict, they most likely would be helped. And find their way back on their feet more quickly than is often the case today.

This is still what I want, except that it need not be quite so big. A true Mac book . . . a book that is a window into the world-wide web of information.

Of course, a keyboard should be attachable!

But a touch-user-interface should be the basic unit. All other peripherals (music keyboards, cameras, pens, etc.) would be add-ons. Some people may never wish to put an alphanumeric keyboard onto their portable knowledge navigator.

One should be able to use a pen on the right side, and see what you draw on that right side . . . and on the left, perhaps superimposed onto another image.

A super-Newton, or PDA. Since it's a tablet, I'd call it iCodex.

I just started reading the satire Jennifer Government, by Max Barry.

It seems to be an anti-capitalist, anti-globalist, anti-corporatist, anti-privatization satire by someone who's never heard of anarchocapitalism, and only skimmed through libertarian ideas. In his novel, all of America (which includes Australia!) has privatized government. For some reason, this means that the corporations take over, and everyone's last name is of the corporation that employs them.

To my mind, this isn't so much witless as clueless. Markets, freed, don't lead to corporations taking over everything. Partnerships and sole proprietorships are everywhere, and would probably grow in influence in a freer market than we have now.

But Barry is one of those anti-corporate types, who see corporations as the worst thing in the world. It strikes me as rather silly.

The last name gag is simply a funny idea. But can it be good satire? It reveals the author's lack of realism, not capitalist reality's hidden entelechy. Capitalism is much more likely to lead to corporations kowtowing to a greater individual diversity than before.

A far more realistic nomenclature would be the evolution of naming one's last name in net terms.

Call me Timo Wirkman.net.

Still, the book isn't bad so far, and the little kid parroting anti-statism at school was funny. I'll continue reading. For a while, anyway.

Liner notes to my cousin's rousing, dynamic percussion piece.

Reading Paul Jacob this weekend, on the idiocies of regulated tomatoes, I was reminded of something H.L. Mencken wrote:

No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

So I'm tempted to interpret the rationale of the Florida Tomato Commission along those lines. It assumes that consumers are stupid. They cannot learn to discriminate properly about tomatoes. Some ugly tomatoes taste better than pretty tomatoes. Yes. Paul Jacob is right. But surely not all. So this government-sponsored tomato cartel prohibits ugly tomatoes.

And thus they ensure a minimum standard. Sure, the tomatoes that come from Florida, year-around, are better than no tomatoes at all, I suppose. To me they taste bland. I tend to buy those sold on the vine, and skip the rest. But it is interesting how the standard set by the commission help the established businessmen (as Jacob asserts) more than the consumers. For, were there no such regulation, it is quite possible that competing tomatoes would be sold, with a variety of standards, and that some of those tomatoes would be better, way better, than what is standard now.

Of course, many consumers would be confused.

But my attitude is, well, forget about the stupid consumers. If a person won't learn how to choose, screw 'm.

I hazard, though, that, were we not protected by cartel builders like the Florida Tomato Commission (isn't Jacob wrong to call the organization, simply, a cartel? — it's a cartel-builder, no?), tomato producers would have to advertise informationally. They might have to provide leaflets (and websites, etc.) explaining how to choose the tastiest, most nutritious tomato.

American consumers are pretty stupid, I admit. And it's easy to conspire against them, so to speak, accommodating their stupidity by setting up stupid rules, like the No Ugly Tomato rule.

But what would consumers be like had they not been treated with contempt by the government? Farmers' jobs might be harder, and they'd have to engage in more marketing, and some people would be turned off from buying tomatoes altogether. Most consumers, though, would learn.

After all, people not unreasonably discriminate in buying MP3 players. Surely they can figure out how to choose tasty tomatoes, too.

I am such a grump. Britannica finally gets a decent article on libertarianism, and all I do is pick nits.

I should be thanking its author, David Boaz.

And yet, I really dislike the article. Strongly. With no small amount of disgust, even. It seems written in a style ill suited to an encyclopedia. Implicit in the whole article is that libertarians agree. Time and again, Boaz offers particular (sectarian) terminology as agreed terminology, particular arguments as points of agreement, where the agreement is loose at best.

According to the principle that libertarians call the nonaggression axiom, all acts of aggression against the rights of others—whether committed by individuals or by governments—are unjust.

First, the nonaggression axiom is Rothbard's term. Most libertarians don't use it. Many refuse to treat it as an axiom at all.

Second, this paragraph does not define the principle. The quoted sentence is a mere tautological statement: rights must be defended; encroachments against them are unjust. All that's added is that encroachments or abridgements of rights are to be called aggression. Nonsense. What a misuse of language.

What libertarians tend to agree to is the idea that all our rights derive from a basic right, the right to liberty. Liberty is defined as something like an absence of opposing coercive force. Coercion — that is violence, compulsion, and the threat thereof — may not be initiated. When initiated, that's a violation of rights. But once there's a violation, coercion may be used in defense.

Of course, Rand and Rothbard and lesser thinkers like LeFevre have so polluted the language of libertarianism that there's little agreement among libertarians about the exact definitions of constituent concepts. Aggression may or may not be a good word to use to designate initiated force, libertarians' main bugaboo.

Although various theories regarding the origin and justification of individual rights have been proposed—e.g., that they are given to human beings by God, that they are implied by the very idea of a moral law, and that respecting them produces better consequences—all libertarians agree that individual rights are imprescriptible—i.e., that they are not granted (and thus cannot be legitimately taken away) by governments or by any other human agency.

Well, maybe I should just give up, then, eh? Apparently, I'm not a libertarian.

Why do I say this? Because I'm not convinced of this talk of imprescriptability. Never have been. I understand the desire to see rights as imprescriptable. But just because you want something doesn't mean it exists.

There's a lot of this kind of stuff in the article. Here's a whopper:

Libertarians deny that their views imply anything like atomistic individualism.

Except, of course, for those libertarians who are very atomistic in their individualism, who despise social controls outside of law, too, who think of all social arrangements as contracts and nothing but, nothing more, nothing less, and . . .

Oh, well. Atomism is a defect in many libertarians' ideologies and in their private lives. Not David Boaz's, sure; and not mine. But I don't see why an encyclopedia article should avoid admitting that some libertarians are indeed stupid enough to embrace the errors that their debaters want them to embrace. Some libertarians' love their opponents' strawmen!

Yes: Many libertarians are utter fools. Many support strawman positions, positions that are risible, indefensible, and often just plain silly (as my old boss Bill Bradford liked to put it). The standard, paradigm case for this was Ayn Rand. She took up the strawman of selfishness and ran with it. But this wasn't easy, because egoism weighs heavily on the runner, it being nuts and all. And yet many libertarians, to this day, treat Rand and her new concept (which was really just old-hat nincompoopery, older than Nietzsche, at least as old as Stirner, but in her version particularly jumbled up and incoherent) with undue respect.

Now that I think about it: why do I call myself a libertarian? Why not just give up? Let the One True Way folks and the strawman nutjobs keep the term as their own.

Maybe I should call myself by an old term, now unused. I'm a Locofoco!

My friends over at The Shrubwalkersbloggers experienced bloggish friction recently. Justin, writing on the left side of the page, began a series of Bible-readings from the perspective a lampooning atheist. Eric, writing on the right side of the page, gave a thoughtful objection.

And then Justin stopped!

Well, what can I say? Friends disagree, and agree to disagree, and then agree to not annoy each other so much in public. Or something.

But the cessation of argumentation can be in itself disturbing. So I can't help but prick at the scab of this debate. Take Eric' main objection to the Bible readings:

[Justin] wants to take on some set or another of fundamentalist Christians by demonstrating that a surface reading of the Bible, taken literally, is absurd. I just don't see what's supposed to be enlightening about that. Almost anybody could dismantle this sort of literalism in less than five minutes to the satisfaction of anyone not prone to arguing that "the Bible is true because the Bible says it's true." So, fine, demonstrate that. Take 10 minutes, even. But move on. That horse is done beat to death already.

Well, has it? That's an interesting question. Are we to judge by enough by Eric's standards or . . . by some cultural calculation?

Here's what I see: the country is filled with a growing number of intelligent people who hold to exactly the unenlightened view of the Bible that Eric finds so easy to argumentatively destroy. The continuing influence of these people is what spurs on Justin, I'm sure. The increasing influence.

I think the reason many of us who pillory fundamentalist interpretations do what we do (and I guess I'm putting myself in Justin's camp), is that the sheer numbers and increasing loudness of the Bible-Is-True-Because-It-Says-So Camp provoke us.

Not every theist is as sophisticated as Eric. And it is a pity that he feels he's getting fire in a war he wants no part of. Think of it as collateral damage.

I'm in a similar position to Justin. I don't blog next to a theist, but most of my family is precisely the kind of theist who does believe the Bible as literally true, and will quote the Bible to support this contention! I don't try to convert them. It is my sincerest wish that they not read this blog. I don't try to convert nice people who do no harm.

But people who go out into the Arena of the Worldwide Web looking . . . I don't mind attacking strangers' notions. And not all fundamentalists are as nice as my family. In the public arena, where they attempt to influence education, where their friends in high places edit scientific papers, and the like, they can be very, very obnoxious.

And, further, I am very curious about Eric's theism. We've never talked about it.

Of course, I almost never make fun of Mormonism because every Mormon I've met (even the guy at the bar who discussed Nietzsche with me, at length) has been kind and decent and well-spoken. Mormons don't whine. I've never heard one complain of being persecuted. They don't seem to have a chip on their shoulders. A famous man once said, by their fruits you shall know them, and by this Nice Fruit Standard, Mormons desrve being cut a bit of slack.

So I rarely attack Mormonism in public.

But really, I don't attack the worship of Ba'al, either. Not very often, anyway.

Why? The worship of Ba'al, Ashtaroth, Isis, Ishtar, and others is just as risible to me as is the worship of Yahweh. Tribal gods. Ancient gods. Ye Olde Competitors to Deific Thrones.

There are few worshippers of the old gods. Only Yahweh and Allah have memetically survived into modern times, with huge fan bases.

And what bugs me about the literalist worshippers is, well . . . it's as much the truths they deny as the untruths they assert.

I dislike denials of an ancient earth, and of the scientific methods that have allowed us to learn so much about the course of its longevity.

I dislike denials of (or avoidance of) the consequentialist foundations of ethics, and I despise easy dismissals of relativism . . . especially in the course of holding to incredible dogmas with misty origins in ancient myth.

I dislike avoidance of reason, and of evidence. Especially when bad evidence about religion is held to be good evidence, and faith gets farded up as an answer to . . . anything.

Well, my dislikes are pretty obvious. So, in the face of such denial, it seems a natural to take the given, bedrock notions of these deniers and pillory them.

But I have to come clean, here. I don't really understand the support for any Old Time Religion. Genesis is not literally true. The world did not come to be in the manner specified in the time period specified. Similarly, the world was not destroyed by a flood, and saved by an animal-filled Ark. This is pretty obvious stuff. This is myth. Interesting, fascinating myth. Myths I actually love as much as the Greek myths, as much as Gilgamesh, more than the Egyptian tales. But literally untrue. False. Didn't happen.

You can say that the point of these myths is not their literalness, and I agree, to a point. But I will also note that the bulk of the tellers of these myths sincerely believed these myths as literally true for thousands of years.

So why worship the deity who grew out of this mythic tradition? Why bother? Tainted sources.

Of course, the value of a thing does not depend on its origin. But the existence of a being for which we have no evidence? The source indicates the belief's true nature.

So, while Justin and I may pillory the risible notions of literalist Old Believers, I suspect that the thing we don't mention much, the continued beliefs of more sophisticated thinkers like Eric, puzzles us even more. We really don't get it. We don't understand why anyone would bother.

The social aspect of religion is understandable. But is that all that really spurs on the more sophisticated theists? Religion just seems so neat? The myths are too nifty to give up entirely? We have to retell them, and gloss them in new ways, to keep them alive like children are supposed to keep alive the existence of fairies simply by clapping?

I can't speak for Justin. But I know that, as much as I pillory fundamentalism, it's something I understand. More sophisticated approaches to theism, though — the neo-izing of the Old Time Religions — seems to me sophistic. It's not very dangerous, so I don't like to complain about it. But I am truly puzzled by every instance of its continued existence.

I prefer humanistic readings of the old myths. I am a big fan of the old myths. Of many traditions. And I try to keep congnizant of the obvious fact that my readings cannot have the same emotional power as fundamentalist readings often have. To read a myth as an artifact and as art is one thing, and an important thing. But to read it as a member of the cult of that myth, something very other.

But I don't know how the sophisticated read the myths. I don't understand their allegiances. I confess to bafflement. Are they too sophisticated for my simple soul?

Or, as I've sometimes remakred, just sophistic?

I'm not suggesting a dialogue on this subject, though that would be fascinating. I suspect that the rift between secular humanism and religious humanism/humanistic religion is greater than between secular humanism and fundamentalism.

Which is why friends with such disagreements might want to keep mum. Rather than continually pick at the scab of their division.

I know a lot of people who have a lot of faith in regulations. And I'll admit this much: regulations sure do change the landscape of this world.

But for the better?

The case of the Hemingway cats is a good example of government run amok. These descendents of Ernest Hemingway's own six-toed cat wander around a privately run Hemingway museum. They are, in fact, well cared for. But the government wants to cage them:

The USDA insists that these cats be confined, restricted from roaming. A six foot stone wall surrounds the grounds of the Hemingway Home. Yet USDA inspectors have deemed this wall insufficient. They want to throw these cats into cages. The USDA has also suggested the installation of an electric fence around the Hemingway Home premises.

I'd like to know the exact rationale for the regulators' ruling. Economist D.W. MacKenzie, writing for the Mises Institute, doesn't go into a lot of detail. He sticks to sticking it to the regulators.

But I bet the full story has its own fascinations. And I bet it is funny.

Nothing like bureaucracy to tickle the funny bone.

A highbrow needs never to raise an eyebrow to cast an arch glance at the culture around him. His eyebrow is always at arch.

Alas, it is a pity to learn that the term highbrow comes from phrenology, not some folksier source. It has nothing to do with eyebrows, or hairy eyeball. It's about the size of the forehead, I think. I'm not going to study phrenology to find out.

But I can hazard this observation: As I age, my forehead is becoming more and more obvious.

By the way, I can raise my right eyebrow independently (for the most part) of the left; but not vice versa. How this affects my ability to give hairy eyeball should be judged empirically.

I first heard the phrase evangelical atheist from a quiet Unitarian, years ago. He admitted to being an atheist, but was not an evangelical atheist; he didn't aim to convert anyone. He didn't make a big deal of it.

I gather the term is becoming common. But I haven't looked it up. If the coinage is true to the meaning of the constituent terms, then the term means

evangelical atheist: a person who believes in no deity, and holds this belief to be good enough news to spread.

Epicurus, on the other hand, was an evangelical polytheist, ostensibly believing in (because he argued for) the existence of numerous gods, furthermore holding that belief in these gods was a good thing, provided one understood that these gods did not have traditional, mythic characteristics. The gods, as he conceived them, were good-for-themselves, but neither good nor evil towards us. Thus, in relation to the problem of evil — which, according to Lacantius, Epicurus provided the clearest ancient formulation — Epicurean theology was not either eutheistic or dystheistic. His point was that the gods were indifferent towards us, and that this was a good thing. A very good thing.

Epicurus also argued that the gods evolved, as had man, did not create the universe, were neither omni-present nor omnipotent, and had no continuing interest in the likes of us.

His position thus marks out an important middle ground in theological argument. It reminds me of Wickstead's account of economic man: is he egoistic or altruistic? Wickstead argued: poppycock! He's neither. He's non-tuistic. In markets, people behave as if the few interests he has are his own, and his own (or his family's, or his firm's) interests is singular, and thus not altruistic.

But, Wickstead explained, in other institutional settings that same person may be very altruistic. The question of egoism and altruism was thus a red herring, as far as market behavior was concerned.

As for me, I regard the bedrock indifference of the universe, offset somewhat by the naturally selected ability of human constitutions to adapt (thus allowing a generally meliorist perspective), good news. It's better than warring tribes of principalities and deities and devils, fighting amongst themselves and fighting us.

But I see no reason to spread this news to those who are basically peaceful but also religious. If you are one of them, I don't want to argue with you. And if you insist on reading these pages, you do so at your own risk to your present balance.

But to people who admit to being confused about matters of religion and philosophy, I do offer an evangelical perspective. The truth is basically good news. The truth is not such that, when you learn it, you must die. We all die. Eventually. And we all suffer. Occasionally, perhaps more often. (Death may be a great equalizer, in our ends, but suffering is not equal.) But learning the truth should help us adapt to the inevitable, and look upon our short interim lives with as much dignity and good cheer as possible.

That's another thing I like about Epicurus. He may have been an evangelical non-eu and non-dys polytheist, but he did treat cheerfulness as a basic virtue. As a kind of cure.

He stood at the edge of the abyss and laughed. Not a derisive chortle. But a quiet chuckle. Perhaps delievered with a shrug. "What ya gonna do?"

About some things: nothing.

And that is good news. We don't have to worry about all things, and certainly not the end of all things, including our own very selves.

I just ate my first raw parsnip. I'd bought two at the grocery store a few days ago, and had cut up some parsnip to put in with my morning breakfast stirfry earlier today. Verdict?

Magnificent! Almost as sweet as ginger, almost as tangy. Surprisingly tasty.

A relative of the carrot, it has none of the carrot's blandness. And, I read, it has some important nutritious advantages over the carrot. Far more potassium, for instance. And it is obvious, on crunching it in the mouth, it has plenty of fiber.

So why does it have so little a part in today's diet? The potato usurped its place. It was once an extremely important part of the diet of Europeans. But the potato got transplanted from the New World, and the rest is history.

I'll be using the parsnip quite a bit in the future, I believe. In soups. Curry dishes. With ginger, without. A simple source of pleasure and nutrition, perfect for an Epicurean diet.

But it looks like the wild parsnip (common, I think, hereabouts) can easily be mistaken for hemlock, the poisonous plant. I'd rather eat Epicurean than Socratic.

It looks like events, trends, and my work are conspiring (so to speak) to require me to make a sustained study of sustainability. One thing I'm going to be on the watch for is evidence that sustainability partisans (and theorists) keep in mind the simple fact that nature itself goes through cyclical processes, and that no one element of these processes is indefinitely sustainable.

Take the alder.

In my neck of the woods (and, apparently, elsewhere, such as Estonia), after a bout of deforestation (from whatever cause), alders are the first trees to emerge in the deforestted area, following the growth of scrub like blackberries and thistle. But alder growth isn't sustainable. The trees provide shade for the growth of conifers such as fir and hemlock and spruce. These then grow taller and shade out and kill the alder.

It is a natural cycle. I will be on the watch for lack of a long-term cyclical perspective from sustainability advocates. The truth is, progress, as human beings experience it, individually and in families, and in larger groupings, goes through cycles, stages. An individual's educational period is not sustainable, nor do we want it to be, really. We expect the most concentrated periods of education to be in a person's younger years. Later on, some mastery should be attained, allowing for productive work where the person can actually accomplish things.

We wouldn't want to sustain a person's education.

Just so, even, in societies. As populations and industries change, sustainability is not the issue. Progress is.

On the face of it, sustainability seems to me an alternative to progress as a model for human lives and economies. As such, the intellectual movement could give cover to the enemies of real human improvements.

And real human problems, such as pollution, or over-harvesting, get swept under the rug as unrealistic ideals take the place of good reasoning.

Well, this is only my suspicion. I could very well be wrong.

I'll see, as I continue to research the issue. It could be that sustainability theorists have already dealt with this issue at length and in a sophisticated fashion, and I just haven't come across even an inkling yet of their sophistication.

It's interesting to me that the sustainability expert in Oregon is not an economist. He's a lawyer. So he thinks like a lawyer. I like his name, though. Love that apostrophe. I wish my name had an apostrophe. (How about 'irkman Virkkala?)

I'm awfully tempted to buy the Collected Works of J.S. Mill, offered by LFB.com. But my question is: how can there be a Volume Ten of an eight-volume set? And where's number nine?

Paul Samuelson's column on Social Security is a breath of fresh air:

Opportunities for gradual change have been squandered. These public failings are also mirrored privately. I know many bright, politically engaged boomers who can summon vast concern or outrage about global warming, corporate corruption, foreign policy, budget deficits and much more—but somehow, their own Social Security and Medicare benefits rarely come up for discussion or criticism. Older boomers (say, those born by 1955) are the most cynical, hoping their benefits will be grandfathered in when inevitable cuts occur in the future.

This is the end game of the welfare state. It was started, allegedly, out of good, altruistic motives. It is being maintained, even as it heads towards disastrous insolvency, out of sheer greed. And this is bipartisan greed.

Samuelson does not draw any major, anti-welfare state conclusions from this. I do. This strikes me as the inevitable result of democratic pandering in a representative republic that has abandoned constitutional limits.

Is there any solution, now, but major reform?

Or open up the doors to under-30something foreigners, and let them and their spawn pay the taxes that will choke native-born American youngsters in the very near future?

Five sensible questions to ask yourself when contemplating automating your research project:

1. Is your workload big enough?


2. Is reproducibility paramount?


3. Is the cost of mistakes prohibitive?


4. Would scaling up offer additional benefits?


5. Is your protocol automation-friendly?

Contrast these questions with ones you should ask whether you really need a Roomba or not:

• How thick is the pile of your carpet? (No shags.)
• Do you have a large dog who likes to play frisbee? (If yes, consider that the Roomba is vaguely frisbee-shaped.)
• Is a necessary part of your vacuuming process the opportunity your cleaner provides to improvise melodies over the machine's drone? (Roomba doesn't have a drone, so to speak, though it does make a rather high-pitched electric-engine noise as it wanders around the room.)
• Just how lazy are you?

Note: the Roomba has become my first real robot. I've owned toy robots before, but this robot actually does work, thus living up to its name. (See R.U.R.)

I know people who have wanted to start their own country. So pissed off at the politics of America, or Canada, or England, they talk about a libertarian nation. Elsewhere. Start from scratch.

Well, why not put their money where their mouths are?

For sale: World's smallest country with sea view
By Paul Majendie Tue Jan 9, 8:14 AM ET
LONDON, Jan 8 (Reuters Life!) - For sale: the world's smallest country with its own flag, stamps, currency and passports.

Apply to Prince Michael of Sealand if you want to run your own nation, even if it is just a wartime fort perched on two concrete towers in the North Sea.

Built in World War Two as an anti-aircraft base to repel German bombers, the derelict platform was taken over 40 years ago by retired army major Paddy Roy Bates who went to live there with his family.

He declared the platform, perched seven miles off the east coast of England and just outside Britain's territorial waters, to be the principality of Sealand.

The self-styled Prince Roy adopted a flag, chose a national anthem and minted silver and gold coins.

The family saw off an attempt by Britain's Royal Navy to evict them and also an attempt in 1978 by a group of German and Dutch businessmen to seize Sealand by force.

Roy, 85, now lives in Spain and his son Michael told BBC Radio on Monday his family had been approached by estate agents with clients "who wanted a bit more than a bit of real estate, they wanted autonomy."

He suggested Sealand, which has eight rooms in each tower, could be a base for online gambling or offshore banking.

Asked to describe the delights of living on what he described as a cross between a house and a ship, the 54-year-old said: "The neighbors are very quiet. There is a good sea view."

It sounds kinda small, to me, though. Can it be built up?

I think of Bob Pyle as my neighbor. We rent rooms in the same building, though we live a few miles further apart. He's a naturalist who settled in the area I grew up in just about the time I left. Now, though, I'm back, and he's still here. And we often compare notes. Climate, flora, fauna, voting. Evolution, society, music, language.

His first book about the area we live in won a literary prize, and you can often find it in bookstores, at least in the Pacific Northwest: Wintergreen. It's well worth reading.

Now he has his second book about this land and its people: Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place. The card I just received from him has a very nice endorsement from Ursula K. Le Guin on the back:

Bob Pyle's quiet, accurate, sensual writing is perfectly suited to the secretive beauty of the rainy riverlands where he lives . . . [H]e truly knows the people and the landscape and loves every leaf and inch and birdcall of it, down to the footprints of the ants.

He is giving a reading from it this Thursday in Seattle, at Elliott Bay Books.

I have not read the new book yet. I was just in Powell's (in Portland) last night, but hadn't realized it was in print already so I didn't look for it. A friend just stopped by and told me she just bought it at Trillium Books in Cathlamet. I'll have to buy my copy soon.

. . . with my new diet. There's nothing creamy or fatty on the plate, to lick on after I'm finished eating.

She prefers cheese to veggies.

I am listening to the string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich, as performed in concert by the Emerson String Quartet.

I had never bothered to listen to these before, except for one or two here or there.

I'm only on the first disc, but I can offer a snap judgment: these are some of the best string quartets ever written. They are certainly to my taste. I'm not sure whether they always would have been, in the past. They are so, well, civilized! But they are exquisitely beautiful. So far. (I know: coming up is the really gnarly one!)

His first, in C major, is wondrous. His third, in F minor, just ended, is better yet; it's magnificent.

But really, it's too early in my listening for me to do say anything more about these quartets other than that they are very, very good.

I was introduced into the medium not by any of the Usual Suspects, but by Leon Kirchner's Second String Quartet. And, as much as I love Haydn's string quartets, or admire Mozart's and Beethoven's, most of my favorites in the medium are from the 20th century:

1. String Quartet No. 2, Leon Kirchner



2. String Quartet, Stefan Wolpe




3. String Quartet, Maurice Ravel




4. String Quartet No. 7, by Darius Milhaud




5. String Quartet No. 3: Some Aspects of Peltoniemi Hintrik's Funeral March, by Aulis Sallinen




6. String Quartet No. 5, by Philip Glass

Great music for the medium includes works by Grieg, Janacek, Stravinsky, Ives, Martinu, Hindemith, Fine, Hovhaness, and even John Cage! Leon Kirchner's first and third quartets are brilliant as well, though the third is, in truth, a quintet for synthesizer and strings. I've not heard the bulk of Hindemith's and Milhaud's quartets. And I have this feeling that when I get around to listening to William Schumann's compositions in this genre, I'll be re-arranging my list. And Roy Harris; same goes for Roy Harris. And the rest of Sallinen's work. And Rautavaara's. And, and . . .

Well, it's back to listening to Shostakovich, for me.

As I type these words, I'm on hold to receive help with my Internet connection, which has been bad for several months now.

But that's not quite right. I'm not on hold. I'm on hode.

Wherever tech support for my Internet is, physically, the person who recorded the messages for automatic telephony with this service was from the South. Or the East. Somewhere they do not pronounce the L consonant in monosyllabic constructions, followed by another consonant. Such as d: hence hode not hold.

And yet when the construction goes beyond one syllable, the L becomes clearly spoken.

I've always been amused by this strange regional dialect pronunciation.

Somehow I'm not amused that I say aunt (ONT) and creek (CRICK not CREEK).

A half hour's walk from the Brandenbug Gates is an apartment named after Bohuslav Martinu!

I wonder why Americans don't name their apartments after great composers?

Oh, yes: Almost no American would care.

My favorite line from Gerald Ford was the self-deprecating comment, I'm a Ford, not a Lincoln. But in one way Ford managed to put himself in Big Lincolnian Shoes: he more-or-less authorized the suppression of an independence movement, one that led to nearly a quarter million people dead.

Ah, yes, East Timor! Ford no doubt gave it little thought. But when the president and Second Banana of the World's Greatest Superpower gives the head of a banana republic the go-ahead to suppress a mild rebellion, that's an important imprimatur.

So why not give Ford the nod? He's a great Mass Murderer, too, like Lincoln.

Lincoln gets good press for his decision to take the secession of the South as unconstitutional and worthy of suppression, largely because of the slavery issue. The southern states had slaves, and left largely because of the slave issue.

What was East Timor's danger? What specter there could excuse Ford's displeasure and wrath?

It would have been just as easy to support the independence movement.

But it's interesting how big imperial nations rarely take to the uppity little nations that want to go off on their own.

There's something truly horrible about America's stance in the world. And surely Ford's presidency should be reviled for his part in mass murder and the suppression of secession?

I've been a trackball fan for some time, and just installed the best I've ever used on my computer today. It's the Logitech TrackMan Wheel, which comes, also, in a cordless version:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004VUGJ/wirkman-20/

I like it because it uses the thumb to navigate around, in an easy-to-use config. If you have any trouble with your hand, especially the wrist or the fingers, this is one to try.

Since falling down the steps last summer, I've had horrible trouble with my hand, and some distress caused by my need to type and scroll through pages for hour after hour. This device allows this work to be a mostly painless enterprise. (Though the real test will be extended use, I confess.)

Getting a book one has ordered, in the mail, is only topped by buying a book at a bookstore. A few days ago I bought three remainders from a Borders Express nearby: writings by Thomas Jefferson, Emily Dickinson, and the late Judge Rehnquist. Today I got in the mail Conversations with Madeline Milhaud and F.A. Hayek's The Sensory Order.

Unfortunately, I have to work instead of starting to read them immediately.

Even more unfortunately, I have to solve a computer problem. Or: more correctly, an Internet problem. My DSL modem is going down.

I am watching, on DVD, the last season of Six Feet Under.

This series started out great, but it has gone downhill, chiefly as the characters became increasingly less likeable. It was as if the writers wanted to write about complex, ridden-down people, and concocted an oppressive series of incidents to weigh them down.

I am especially disliking the character of the mother and the character of the dauther. Both are played by fine actresses. But I'm pretty sure were the characters they play to show up in my life, I'd turn the other direction. The mother, especially, is a horrible woman.

The theme almost seems to be People who don't know what they want, and can't articulate what little they do know.

The show does get me to think in broad generalities, though. The women seem almost crazy, haunted by their biology, driven by some rather indecent entelechies. The men, two of whom are certifiably crazy, seem just a tad less so, on average, but only a tad. But they, too, can barely keep any emotion under control, and seem to spin off into baroque fancies.

The way things are going, I wouldn't mind seeing half the show's characters buried by the final episode.

But they don't seem to be doing much dying.

They are merely dying inside.

Great theme music, though.

The Iraqi economy is "booming"! Well, sorta. Amidst volleys of bombs and bullets, people are buying and selling food, real estate, cell phones, and other goods and services.

Well, you gotta live.

It's good news that the country isn't starving to death durin its apparent civil war. Similarly, during America's Revolutionary War (the War to Defend Colonial Secession, as I like to think of it), it was amazing how many people went about their business. As if no war were going on.

It's an interesting aspect of war. Some wars are not total. They don't take up the time and attention of everyone in the society wherein the war is going on.

And it reminds me that capitalism can survive quite a lot. For instance, it can suffer under tyranny, as in east Asia, and still thrive.

It's an important lesson to be reminded of. The resiliency of markets, of private property. Etc. But it's no excuse to burden the market with regulations, or bullets, or what-have-you.

The great moment of last year was Bush's firing of Rumsfeld, says Pat Buchanan. But, more importantly, is the larger message Americans sent to Bush: let's not do this any more.

It's time for the Yanks to come home.

When we began as a nation, the republic was feared and loathed by many of the monarchs of Europe. Yet, under Washington, Adams and Jefferson, we went our separate way, and prospered as no other republic. We don't have to run the world. Divestiture is an option.

Really, this makes the most sense. Unfortunately, Buchanan adds one line about trade policy that proves his mercantalist background: Interventionism has failed us. Americans are groping toward a new foreign policy that puts America first and a trade policy that puts Americans first.

A trade policy that tries not to establish a level playing field, but instead to put Americans first will make the world worse off, and it would put nation against nation, again, giving foreign nations the excuse not to embrace liberty, but to embrace nationalistic competition.

I don't think Pat has ever understood a lick of economics. But he does understand something about the hopelessness of empire.

The mystery of Enron, according to Malcolm Gladwell, was a complex one. And it required minds willing to ferret out truth. Mysteries require that we revisit our list of culprits and be willing to spread the blame a little more broadly. Because if you can’t find the truth in a mystery — even a mystery shrouded in propaganda — it’s not just the fault of the propagandist. It’s your fault as well.

This essay by Gladwell, like most others by this author, bears repeated reading. At first his distinction between puzzles and mysteries seemed like a gimmick to me. But he may be on to something.

After all, I prefer mysteries to puzzles.

In all seriousness, I think in one way George W. Bush has handled himself and the country well. Though he went ballistic after 9/11, attacking not only the terrorist support network in Afghanistan, but also the mostly unrelated tyranny in Iraq, he has repeatedly said that we (that is, Americans) are not at war with Islam.

Oh, yes, he used the word crusade, but the numskull was probably just thinking of the metaphoric usage, on a crusade to kill terrorists out to kill us, you know.

In this way he has not acted like the Left thinks the Right will, when push comes to shove: define a whole big Out-Group and declare war on it, at home and abroad.

FDR was much worse in World War II, with the imprisonment of the West Coast Japanese population.

There was no round-up of Muslims in America, though . . . anyone who'd given money to a charity that turned out to be siphoning money to terrorists was in deep doo-doo (to use Bush I's terminology), and some of these Muslims were indeed rounded up. Without full Constitutional rights.

Still, this whole mess could have been much worse.

On New Year's Eve I received a great letter from a new visitor to this site. But today, the first day of the New Year, I received this from a very different correspondent, in reply to my questions about the umpteenth truculent letter I had received from him:

No, I don't wish to make converts among assholes who hate my Country. I intend to kick your mother-fucking asses.

So fuck off, and stop hating my country, asshole

The fact that I don't really hate my country, that there's a difference between a government and a nation, that loving liberty more than either state or nation is the highest form of patriotism . . . these are lost on my correspondent.

Oh, well. I think he and I know how we stand, now.

I was walking down the street in Kelso, Washington, yesterday afternoon, and I came upon a man and a woman in the back of their truck, pumping on some sort of a siphon next to a gas station.

I wasn't sure what, precisely, they were doing, so I asked them if they were pumping something in or pumping it out.

"Out," the man said. "Oil. This is how we heat our home!"

"Free is a good price," said the woman, smiling.

I asked a few questions. They gladly answered, though they continued the hand pump.

It turns out that this is what happens to the recylced oil from restaurants and gas stations these days. It's left up to those who can filter it and burn it!

The man said he had the only EPA-approved furnace for burning such oils in the area.

He said he also preferred burning vegetable oils. "It burns hotter. And it smells like French Fries," he said.