Author: Curt Doolittle

Let me say this in public. Openly. With conviction. “Over…. My…. Dead…. Body….” Let me promise any and all that I mean that statement. I’ll die to prevent it. Period.

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NOTES

Forms Of Argumenta) Our Republican political system is a trade of violence for argument. Argument, consent, and majority-voting are proxies for violence. These proxies for violence were the result of the need for expensively equipped warriors to resolve disputes among a military class of necessarily meritocratic warriors, and to enfranchise additional soldiers into western battle tactics, which required individual imitative and consent. But regardless of the reason of it’s origin, we have traded violence for argument. b) The unspoken purpose of our political structure is the management of the market. A society cannot have a division of labor without a market. Nor can it decrease prices, nor generate wealth — and particular, the relative wealth needed to defend the market as it becomes more attractive and prosperous. The purpose of government in the west, since it’s inception, is to create a market, and to control the quality of goods in the market, to convert barbarians into observing market behavior in exchange for participation in the market, and frankly, for the shareholders to extract profits from the market, while providing sufficient benefit and incentives to the consumers and traders that the cost of policing property was widely distributed to all ‘enfranchised men’. In effect, soldiers were shareholders in the market and were expected to police that market. The joint stock company was not a modern innovation. It was the very structure of western civilization from it’s inception. Cities were formed as markets under the Germanic manor system, and under the Roman and Greek systems, by fraternal soldiers who defended and regulated them.The origin of this market is the egalitarian joint-stock company of fraternal soldiers who created, defended, and managed it. A ‘barbarian’ then, is a person who does not pay the fee for participating in the market: respect for the rules and regulations of that market, the first being, non-violence, the second, maintaining the quality of the market’s ability to attract and serve consumers, so that the joint shareholders could profit from the market.b) Our political system has transitioned such that it is founded upon economic arguments. It is no longer founded on moral or religious arguments. Moral and religious arguments are, in the large part, poorly articulated economic strategies. While some are better and some are worse than others, religious arguments and moral arguments are almost entirely economic in nature. Religious arguments in particular are Since IQ and Religiosity decrease together and IQ and Morality increase together, we assume incorrectly that the behavior is not the same despite the different narrative methods held by people at different positions on the scale. Reason and science can be taught but not utilized by a child who must rely instead upon simple narratives and repetition of good behavior, and an elder wise man has no need of fairy tales, and finds his juniors often tedious. c) Where our political system does not consider economic arguments it considers equality. Our politics is no longer founded upon roles and responsibilities that are necessary for the maintenance of social cooperation. Cooperation is assumed as a legal, moral, political mandate, as part of the capitalist process, and redistribution now forms the moral component of political argument, rather than role and responsibility. This structure is a result of the increase in the division of knowledge and labor in industrial, post-agrarian, society. Our political discourse emphasizes the post-productive object Money, but ignores the pre-productive object opportunity. In particular we do not include the opportunity economy as the only means of prospering now that prices are so low. We do not articulate that the barbarians ‘are paying a tax in opportunity cost’ for their citizenship simply by avoiding violence and fraud, and we rarely discuss opportunity costs, since they were a minor import to agrarians, but are the primary source of wealth in advanced societies. This error is a product of temporary irrational wealth in the west gained by the acquisition of a new continent. Government is obsessed with redistribution and insufficiently obsessed with innovation, competition, and accumulating human, intellectual, and built capital for the purpose of maintaining our quality of life.d) A political argument must contain at least one of these forms of argument. (Most political argument consists of sentiments supported by selectively applied biases that confirm the sentiments. Very few arguments are sufficiently articulated such that the underlying sentiments are expressly stated. In many cases this is because these sentiments are not understood by the person making the argument. Because of this tendency, )e) All sentiments are preferential biases, not absolute truths. Biases are not truths because humans are unequal in their abilities and wants. These different biases are expressions of preferences for uses of capital. Capital is scarce and the uses of it infinite. Therefore uses of capital are in conflict and are irreconcilable. Since they are irreconcilable, parties use a variety of techniques from overstatement, to distortion, to taking advantage of mutual ignorance, to deception, to outright fraud, to corruption, to threats, to violence in order to appropriate capital for their preferential purposes.f) Democratic Groups must rely upon sentiments in order to achieve goals and form leaders.Sentiments are goals. Goals can be agreed upon, and means cannot be agreed upon. The democratic process forces aggregation and compromise of means in order to achieve goals. Leadership must form or seize power in order to resolve conflicts over means. g) All arguments rely upon sentiments, because all arguments MUST advocate a sentiment. Since people are of different in ages, possessed of different knowledge, preferences, biases, classes, resources, and abilities, rational debate among individuals over means, is of necessity difficult, and solutions that employ complex means, and imply complex causes, are OPAQUE to the majority of participants. Only sentiments, or goals, that express common aggregate desires, are possible across a broad enough polity to enact a policy by the process of democratic violence: majority voting. h) A scientific argument contains data, assumptions categorized as proposed facts, and a theory of causality without which facts have no meaningFurthermore it must state how it can be proved false, and in the social sciences no one test is sufficient for proof of an argument – an argument in the social sciences is only possible if considering all similar studies from all similar circumstances from all similar cultures, including the opposing positions. This is the Aristotelian argument. Citation of a study is a guarantee of falsehood. Citation of the full body of studies is the only material reason for judgment. i) An economic argument should contain ALL of these forms of argument. (The primary component of an economic argument is a theory of incentives. An economic argument is supported by exhaustive application of correlative mathematics to indirectly accumulated data (economic activity that was naturally recorded, not intentionally constructed.)j) Economic arguments are the only possible arguments.They are not a preference. They are a necessity. Only an economic argument is sufficiently useful for a polity that must make capital decisions in a division of knowledge and labor whose scope both in people and time is sufficiently complex that no human can perceive that answer by other means. Conversely, the population may not consist of a sufficient number of people literate enough to communicate rational choices to each class, race, culture, and generation. This problem can be solved by fairly simple education. But such education would disadvantage numerous political groups with selfish motivations.k) All politicians represent a bias. They are not corrupt. They are not ill intentioned. They have no choice. The human mind is incapable of synthesizing the universe of outcomes. As such they will advocate any set of preferences to the maximum of their abilities. They cannot do otherwise. they are not hired by their constituents for any other reason, even if they were able to expand the scope of their understanding. However, we can hold them accountable for deceptions. And they are anthropomorphic symbols of opposing arguments for and against the use of capital. And we should see them as such. the fact that we allow the ignorant and foolish into office is a problem with our system of election.The Limits Of Social and Economic Science Unlike the physical sciences, all human economic activity is, cumulative, and correlative, not absolutely causal. Certainly, human interpersonal activity is causal, because it is observable. However, systemic data, and all non-contradictory causal derivations and deductions from narrative or factual history are correlative in the sense that they are necessarily insufficient, and open to external causality. We have markets because of our lack of perceptive ability. We have numbers, math, accounting, narrative, and reason to assist in compensating for a lack of perception. But history is constantly open to interpretation due to additional data, or because of an increase or decrease in the scope of the context of the causes and incentives we are applying in our analysis. This difference in scope of context, is the reason that scientific argument is often difficult to use in resolving political differences; due to the fact that most scopes of context are related to class, knowledge and intelligence, and are generally expressed as ‘time preferences’ – longer and shorter time horizons, as well as expressed as ‘population preferences’, – the scope of people to be affected by the outcome. That is because, while events are the same, the level of ‘noise’ in economic activity varies considerably, Pseudo-Science Survey data is a formal argument of sentiments – it is not scientifically causal. It is only scientifically descriptive. And it is open to distortion and deception to the degree that it is universally suspect.

The Curious Capitalist at Time Magazine posts: “Is economics ideological by nature?” by Barbara Kiviat

It’s easy to rag on economics as not being a “real” science, and I try not to do things that are too easy. But in recent weeks I’ve really started to wonder. It is fascinating, and frightening, to me that smart economists can disagree about whether what the economy needs right now is more government spending or less. The debate isn’t about how much stimulus, or how much austerity, or the way such stimulus/austerity should be applied, but rather about which one is called for in the first place. How is this possible? It’s like a group of doctors not being able to agree whether a patient’s blood should be thinned or coagulated. What am I supposed to make of that?

Let’s be technical for a moment:

[callout]Whether we do better governing with econometrics than random guessing, or by asking the average man on the street, or than relying on traditional wisdom, or better than interpreting a deity, or even interpreting entrails, is yet to be proven. In fact, it appears from the data that asking a random person on the street is a better predictor than any economic model. — And anyone who tells you differently is not scientific but ideological.[/callout]

1) Economics is a correlative mathematical discipline. Science is a methodology for incremental improvement of knowledge. Economists are attempting to act scientifically in their research. (Many of them anyway.) However, unlike the physical world, reproduction and interpretation of economic data are very hard to accomplish. We are doomed to eternally vulnerable correlations. Our mathematics and our measurements are too simple for the problem we’re taking on. But we know that. Everyone in the field knows it. As such, we’re acting scientifically, but our answers are not scientific, only our process of discovery is scientific. And our process of discovery is incomplete. People often equate scientific with ‘true’. But that’s an error. Science is a process of refinement whose purpose is to reduce human error. All scientific knowledge is tentative. It’s just the best we have to date. Economics (econometrics) must, of necessity, require assumptions because of ‘causal density’. The number of causal factors is very, very high. Human economic activity includes shocks (shortages) and inventions, and as such it’s economics are not gaussian (normally distributed), so any one event in a myriad of causal hierarchies can radically alter the entire network of human behavior. Unfortunately our mathematics, even in economics, tends to be probabilistically gaussian (normally distributed), rather than probabilistically mandelbrotian (abnormally, or randomly distributed). Simply because we do not know what we do not know, and have not figure out yet, ‘where’ there is a likelihood that we may ‘know’ something in the future that will effect our economy, and how people may react to it. 2) Political Economy is a moral philosophy that makes use of economic data for the purpose of determining the investments and returns on a society’s investment portfolio. A society is best thought of as a joint stock company with larger and smaller shareholders with different classes of shares each trying to get the management team to work in their favor. These shareholders have different interests. They want different things. They all ‘invest’ in society if only by not undermining it, or engaging in theft, fraud and violence. Most pay taxes. Some risk their lives in military service. We all buy our shares differently, and are rewarded differently. We do not understand the mathematics of human reasoning. It is largely the result of the properties of memory and of our cognitive biases. We are using correlative mathematics from the physical sciences to compensate for the fact that we do not understand the mathematics of human memory – probably because it is vastly more complex, and we do not have enough of the right kind of data. However, our use of current mathematics leads us to errors of aggregation and misunderstanding of causes. In fact, many have argued that all human knowledge is correlative, not causal. So we may always be working with insufficient information. 3) Politics is Decision Making: As a body politic, we disagree about the goals of political economy. We disagree about the purpose of government itself. This is because there are varying groups in our polity with different class, cultural, generational value systems, as well as different resources, and different biological capabilities. Our entire body of human moral codes are based upon circumstantial values (farming societies), and we no longer live in a farming society but an urban one. We are not even sure what a ‘good economy’ looks like for a densely urban society, or even if our limited tools of laws, religion and credit are sufficient technologies for maintaining social order: respect for some form of property, political decision making, cooperation, and redistribution. So, the problem is that we MUST use some sort of bias in resolving economic problems. We are using limited tools and a model of decision making in government that is probably antiquated for our circumstances. It was designed for city states. It seems inadequate for an empire. Society is changing very rapidly. We are open to many different unpredictable shocks. We have different preferences we apply when solving economic problems. And we must have those preferences in order to make some sort of decisions. And no matter what decision we make some faction of society will want another decision made instead.

[callout]This is because of the fundamental problem of human cooperation: while we can agree upon ends, we cannot agree upon means. And even when agreeing upon ends, it requires that we know and catalog ALL ends, and then sort among them. And given a multitude of ends, it becomes impossible for people to prioritize them, or even comprehend them. Our society is simply too large. [/callout]

This is because of the fundamental problem of human cooperation: while we can agree upon ends, we cannot agree upon means. And even when agreeing upon ends, it requires that we know and catalog ALL ends, and then sort among them. And given a multitude of ends, it becomes impossible for people to prioritize them, or even comprehend them. Our society is simply too large. THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL ECONOMY As such, a large economy is better, but politically difficult to govern unless it is very homogenous with people sharing very similar values. A smaller economy is less strong, but easier to govern. The worst economy of all is a large strong one like that of an empire, with many, many factions – because there are too many choices and people are not gregarious in diversity, just the opposite. And that’s the political environment that we have to work with. To make matters worse, our federal government can print money which makes it seem like we can either solve fewer more complicated ends, or we can solve a larger number of ends, than we actually can. Printing money as a means of redistribution or insurance are one thing. Printing money so that there isn’t any shortage of it is another. Printing money so that we just distort and confuse everyone, including economists, is something else. And we are doing too much ‘something else’. We are not the blind leading the blind. But we are definitely expecting too much of our current level of understanding of economics, when economic reasoning has become the primary means of decision making in human political systems. Whether we do better governing with econometrics than random guessing, or by asking the average man on the street, or than relying on traditional wisdom, or better than interpreting a deity, or even interpreting entrails, is yet to be proven. In fact, it appears from the data that asking a random person on the street is a better predictor than any economic model. And anyone who tells you differently is not scientific but ideological.

MEGAN MCARDLE at the Atlantic, posted an essay question by Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry.

Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

The thesis is false. Luddite on top of false. But false. 1) Governors are simply unable to possess sufficient knowledge. In the absence of knowledge governors do the one thing we charge them with: make laws. They make laws without knowledge. It is the system of regulations that breaks down, not technological complexity. Lawmakers cannot make good laws because they lack the ability to possess or integrate the knowledge necessary to make economic laws. Why this is the general critique of socialism (central planning) but we do not apply the same logic to republican government (central legislation) is an more interesting topic of study. Knowledge and incentives. You need both. Government has neither.

[callout]Our current state of affairs is not a problem of politics and parties. It is a problem with the very structure of government, and the multitudinous myths that we live under, tell ourselves and use to justify our wants and wishes. Our government was very useful for selling off a continent in the agrarian era. In the post agrarian, dense-urban era, we are too sufficiently un-equal, to diverse, possessed of too fragmentary knowledge, for lawmaking as we understand it.[/callout]

2) His analysis of complexity is erroneous. There is no evidence of marginal decreases in effectiveness. And any such analysis belies a misunderstanding of technical and epistemic progress. It is not LINEAR or STATIC. As is biology, innovation functions by punctuated equilibria. In other words, random, large shifts occur due to accumulated minor innovations, whereby all previous innovations are disrupted, and all social orders reorganize around the large shifts. 3) The context is erroneous. Western dominance rose because of changes in trade routes. The USA became dominant by selling off a continent to immigrants, and concentrating that capital in military and political conquest. A republican government is the only government dynamic enough (incorporating enough people) to sell off a continent. We did not make an excellent country. We simply sold off a continent and funded technological development with the proceeds. These proceeds are now in the form of intellectual capital. That intellectual capital is fluid, and open to unfettered replication. The world is copying that technology at a low cost. This low cost is allowing vast increases in population and vast increases in the structure of production, allowing people to move from subsistence farming to a suburban and urban working class. This migration is creating a vast pool of available labor. Since people are NOT EQUAL in ability, this means that the USA is specializing in productive efforts open only to the top two quintiles. It means that the bottom three quintiles are not able to participate in the production of the USA’s specialisms (creative marketing, medicine, education, product development, financial innovation) and the specializations are no longer sufficiently profitable to assist the lower quintiles by redistribution. Free Traders were wrong. Nations cannot specialize because people in them are unequal. CLASSES within NATIONS must specialize. Free trade is dangerous to the stability of advanced societies between whom differences are not sufficiently marginal. 4) We do not need simplicity. We need innovation and reorganization. We need the assistance of the government to concentrate capital in industries where we can be competitive, and to retain all possible capital inside the country, so that the lower quintiles do not so much suffer from the affect of increased competition from around the world. The Author of your essay is yet another Luddite. The way is not back, it is forward. 4) we have taken over the policing of trade routes from the British empire. We have built a political empire, if not an economic one. And we could afford that empire when Europe was in tatters, and the rest of the world languished in pre-capitalist technologies. We cannot afford to run this empire any longer. Any more than England could after the war. However, there will be no gains to be realize for the purposes of redistribution. The USA will no longer be able to borrow, nor productive enough to export it’s way to prosperity. We will not have either empire, nor our previous wealth. SUMMARY Societies failed because the were no longer able to coordinate. People must have coordinating myths. Myths are the means by which codify what we pay for social order: respect for some form of property or another. Every ‘respect’ of some form of property is a forgone opportunity. These forgone opportunities are costs. These costs are very expensive. The most advanced societies contain people who forgo great opportunities to ‘disrespect’ property. The primitive societies do not forgo those opportunities. This behavioral development is a very high cost. The first myths were simply conventions. They were formalized into Religions. Religions finally failed when the middle class developed, and societies became large enough that people could visibly ‘cheat’ with anonymity. Lawmaking developed in order, largely, to legitimize government (and it’s social order) by standardizing punishments for similar crimes against life and property. That technology of Lawmaking has failed (although our government does not recognize this.) Because laws are too many and too irrelevant and too impossible to police. Our politicians knowingly state that they do not understand nor have they even read, many of the laws that they implement. They leave this process to the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy serves it’s own purpose. And it is the bureaucracy that citizens learn to loathe. “Revolutions are built from the accumulation of petty violence by the bureaucracy, not the heinous crimes of a few politicians, princes, or kings.” The next form of government after lawmaking is banking and credit. The reason being that only that system will allow us to ‘sense’ the world, and only that system will allow the state to engage in the increase in capital so that redistribution is possible. Rather than the (current) assumption that capital will continue to accumulate and the government must simply confiscate enough of if to keep the citizens happy. To survive, we will become even more capitalist, not less. We must. Because only property, pricing, and numbers can provide us with the information to coordinate in vast division of knowledge and labor. THE STATE OF THE UNION Our current state of affairs is not a problem of politics and parties. It is a problem with the very structure of government, and the multitudinous myths that we live under, tell ourselves and use to justify our wants and wishes. Our government was very useful for selling off a continent in the agrarian era. In the post agrarian, dense-urban era, we are too sufficiently un-equal, to diverse, possessed of too fragmentary knowledge, for lawmaking as we understand it. This is why our society is failing. It is why previous societies have failed: the inability to regulate consumption and concentrate capital for production because the social orders did not develop a level of granular management. That management is visible to us in the private banking, credit and finance systems. Our governments must realize that they are banks first. You can’t redistribute something if you have nothing to start with. The first purpose is defense and property definition (order) The second purpose of the state is productivity (competition) The third is redistribution. (the result of order and competition) They must exist in that order. A state that does not focus on productivity will eventually be unable to redistribute, compete, or maintain order. SPECIOUS ARGUMENTS BY LUDDITES Arguments about complexity are specious. A division of labor is by definition complex. A market is complex, or we would not need it. Pricing systems are complex or we would not have had them. If we became less complex we would have to return more people to farming, and possibly, kill off billions of existing human beings. Complexity is our friend. The accumulated social and legal hindrances to reorganization, and the accumulated ERRORS in political philosophy that prohibit the concentration of capital behind innovative productive ends, is the problem. Our institution of government, as we practice it today, is the problem. It is predicated upon erroneous myths. It is structured to make laws for farmers. It is burdened with assumptions of productivity that may never be met. The institutions of government that are more socialist are even worse. They pretend knowledge of a future that cannot be known. And Luddite solutions are appeals to create a certain future, whose only certainty is destruction and poverty.

From the WSJ:

The Wall Street Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry. The study found that the nation’s 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred.

In this survey, the vast majority of people were concerned about ‘privacy’.

[callout] It’s not like Coca Cola, Nike and IBM want to be associated with cheap european amateur adult videos, snippets of skateboarders doing face-plants, or some silly little group of bloggers fomenting rebellion on some little personal political agenda.[/callout]

To which I respond: Tracking is not a privacy issue. It’s actually good for you, and good for society. (Really.) Tracking = Legitimate Companies. Privacy Invaders = Illegitimate Organizations. It’s not like these tracking-companies are doing anything novel, invasive, or even risky. They aren’t capturing your credit card number, or your home address, or the contents of your romantic emails. They are capturing the kind of things you’re interested in seeing online, so that advertisers can promote goods and services that you’re interested in, rather than spamming you with stuff that completely annoys you. The advertising industry knows perfectly well that people want privacy. Brand owners know perfectly well that if they mistreat your private information, that their brand, their products and their stock price, will pay a very high cost for that abuse. There are plenty of sites that will install malware and viruses. Tracking sites and cookies don’t do that. It’s not in their interest. It would put them out of business if they did install viruses or malware. Advertisers avoid anything negative. It’s too dangerous. Spammers don’t. That’s why spam and certain web sites, or petty criminal web sites (downloading or free entertainment) are the sources of malware and viruses. So, it’s not your absurd searching that will generally get you in trouble. ***It’s trying to get something for free.*** Spammers, Malware and Viruses are delivered by disreputable organizations doing disreputable things on disreputable sites. But advertisers aren’t. Advertisers use TRACKING cookies, and avoid malware, spam and viruses. Nobody Cares. You Aren’t Special But lets also look at it another way: Nobody cares if you surf adult sites, read about absurd human behavior at 11pm, or watch silly animal or kung-fu videos, delve into subcultures you would never interact with in real life, and generally prove that you are surfing under safe conditions for novel, absurd, silly , or radical experiences from the safety of your laptop – which is the best way to explore them.

[callout]Why? Because you aren’t special. You aren’t interesting. You aren’t rare. In fact, you’re so average that if you saw your surfing behavior graphed next to everyone else’s you’d be horrified and how much you had in common with people form all walks of life. We revel in the absurd. We like to learn from a safe distance. We like to understand the very limits of human behavior. We like to fantasize about what we could never really do. And there isn’t any harm in it. In fact, all things considered, it seems that just the opposite is true: it turns out that it’s a vent, a safe exploration, and it’s good for you, and society.[/callout]

But that said, no one cares. Why? Because you aren’t special. You aren’t interesting. You aren’t rare. In fact, you’re so average that if you saw your surfing behavior graphed next to everyone else’s you’d be horrified and how much you had in common with people form all walks of life. We revel in the absurd. We like to learn from a safe distance. We like to understand the very limits of human behavior. We like to fantasize about what we could never really do. And there isn’t any harm in it. In fact, all things considered, it seems that just the opposite is true: it turns out that it’s a vent, a safe exploration, and it’s good for you, and society. The private world of browsing is indeed private. It’s like using the bathroom. Everyone does it. We just don’t talk about it in public. That’s because it’s not risky to browse such things. By contrast, it’s very risky to DO those things in real life. That’s why we keep risky behavior safe, private and on the web. A relationship between you and your browser. The Self Interest Of Advertisers But your eccentric surfing behavior isn’t helpful to an advertiser. There isn’t anything really useful to advertise next to those oddities that isn’t already being advertised there. It’s not like Coca Cola, Nike and IBM want to be associated with cheap european amateur adult videos, snippets of skateboarders doing face-plants, or some silly little group of bloggers fomenting rebellion on some little personal political agenda. Or to be gender-balanced, your favorite little gossip site, compromising celebrity photos, rants about how awful men are for being interested in something other than living to fulfill a woman’s every whim, insecurity, status impairment, and nesting urge, and the fact that you shop for clothes that are too young and fitted for your weight, figure and age group. Your sense of individuality – the one that makes you want to protect your privacy – is a self imposed delusion. A delusion we embrace because our self image is part of our sense of social status. We guard that self illusion like we guard our property. If that realization seems unpleasant to your self esteem, then you know why advertisers are good at their jobs: they know this simple fact about you. They know you aren’t special, but you need to think that you are. Brands Only Want To Advertise In Places You Aren’t Ashamed Of Visiting Because of that, they only care about those places where reputable brands can advertise on the web. Not those things where they can’t. And more importantly, even if you were special, it’s not valuable to big brands to associate with perceived absurdities. Brands are public entities. They have public personas. Mixing those brands with anything that would not be done in public would be damaging to them. In fact, if a tracking organization captures enough data that could associate a group of consumer behavior that was aberrant, with a well known brand, (say associating domestic violence with a brand of alcohol) and if that data was released, it would be extremely damaging to the brand. ie: tracking companies don’t want to know, or capture, you’re extraordinary activities. Even having the data in their possession is dangerous to them. It presents them with a liability. Advertisers don’t want them even to collect it. For exactly that reason. Advertisers See The World As Groups Not Individuals Advertisers do not care about you as an individual, or your personal information. They are statisticians. They care about groups. They care about aggregates. About large groups of people doing similar things. They care that of all the people who hit MSN.com, or the NYT or Conde Nast, which kind of things are most of them interested in hearing about? They care about measuring the effect of their ads. They care that if you saw one ad in one place, where else can they show it to you to reinforce it? Because the more targeted the advertisement, the more interested you are, the more times they can show it to you in the hope of making an impression, then the cheaper it is, the more effective it is, and the less chance they will alienate someone by showing them something that they don’t like, while paying dearly for the opportunity to offend someone. They do care about your email. Because if they have your email, they can advertise directly to you. But they know that if they don’t ask permission, you will literally hate them for invading your privacy, and that will hurt their brand. Email crosses the line into privacy for most people, because you can’t shut out advertising that you don’t want. Email is personal. But traffic measurement isn’t stealing your time, or filling your inbox. It’s invisible. The current level of cluelessness among advertisers and marketers on how to use this traditional data and traditional advertising strategy on the web, is not clear to the public. Advertisers have not figured out exactly what to do about the decline in traditional media, and the kind of advertising that has been successful in the past, They don’t know how to advertise to you on the internet. They aren’t sure if it’s good money or bad. They know you want content that helps you make buying decisions. But they aren’t sure how to make you aware of new products and services. Or even if they need to make you aware of them. Tracking Is A Social Good? So to some degree, you’re doing yourself, and society in general a favor. Society needs advertising not only to help fuel the economy, but to simply help us be aware of our choices. If these people collect enough ‘traffic data’ (data about what you view, not about you yourself) then they will build enough information so that they can tell you about what you want to know, not what you don’t want to know. Personally, I would love it, if all the advertising I saw, was about those things I really want to know, but miss out on because there is no way to advertise them to me. For example, a small italian suit designer, or an interesting watch maker, or a small b&b in the Lake District, or a new local Porsche mechanic, or even Proctor and Gamble’s new products, or Crest White Strips, or the WSJ, or Precor Fitness Equipment, or Starbucks to reach me with a sincere sounding and useful message using existing mass market channels. It would simply be too expensive. and it’s not that I don’t want to know about all those things. I do. I just never, ever want to hear about weight loss, or, feminine protection, or a new pharmaceutical, or local football jerseys or sales at Sears, or discounts at Target, or any of the other things that are very relevant to other people and completely annoying wastes of time to me. Advertising is only bad when you don’t want it. And unless you help advertisers understand what you want, you’re going to continue getting what you don’t: stuff that’s irrelevant, and sometimes offensive to your sensibilities. Tracking your behavior lets advertisers target you with the right kinds of ads, and to keep up with your changing tastes and interests. So, tracking isn’t a privacy issue. It’s a public good. (Really.) – An Advertising Agency CEO. (We don’t do tracking. We just don’t think it’s useful to mislead people about tracking either.)

For some reason, Joseph Fouche from The Committee On Public Safety found a proposal on revising English Spelling interesting enough to write about. He lifts this example:

It woz in the ferst dae ov the nue yeer that the anounsment woz maed, aulmoest simultaeneusli from three obzervatoris, that the moeshen ov the planet Neptune, the outermoest ov aul the planets that w(h)eel about the sun, had bekum very eratik. A retardaeshen in its velositi had been suspekted in Desember. Then a faent, remoet spek ov lyt woz diskuverd in the reejen ov the perterbd planet. At ferst this did not cauz eni veri graet eksytment. Syentifik peepl, houever, found the intelijens remarkabl enuf, eeven befor it becaem noen that the nue bodi woz rapidli groeing larjer and bryter, and that the moeshen woz kwyt diferent from the orderli proegres ov the planets…

For some other reason known only to those of us who are social science nerds, I felt the need to respond. Possibly because I am a conservative by nature. Possibly because I understand as an economist, the value of CAPITALIZING just about everything. And that language is a form of capital that can either amplify or discount human beings that use it. SPELLING IN ENGLISH CONVEYS INFORMATION The odd spelling certainly makes the language harder to learn but conveys with it much greater content, and it solves the problem of homonyms (words that sound the same but have different meanings) and context. Complex spellings approach abstract symbols that reduce the problem of defining context with similar sounds. All those spellings and oddities convey information. That information is useful. THERE IS NO REASON THE FUTURE OF WRITTEN LANGUAGE IS CONSONANTAL It might be better to see it as an advantage for a very complex language to approach becoming both phonetic and pictographic rather than purely phonetic. (Which is what has happened with english.) Imagine chinese by contrast, which is a very old language, and is constructed of a myraid of homonyms and complex tones. (languages start with clicks in the ancient past and end with tonal songs in the distant future.) There are only 30K images or words. Not the nearly 1M in english. They speak poetically because they can’t be more precise. It’s an old language but a primitive one. English, the germanic indo european languages in particular, are technical languages. They are the languages of craftsmen and soldiers: meant to convey precision. LANGUAGES CONTAIN METAPHYSICAL JUDGEMENTS Try to speak probabalistically in Spanish. Try to speak factually in polish. Try to eliminate emotional experience from Romanian or italian. Try to convey duty in the Slavics. Languages are more than sounds. They are complex constructs that frame and limit as well as amplify, different social ideas. English is wonderful for insulting someone’s intelligence. Eskimo is wonderful for describing weather. Talk about sex or emotional experience in italian or french. See other languages for what they are: vastly primitive. THE ECONOMICS OF WRITING ARE CHANGING Another argument might be, that we are rapidly approaching a position where reading and writing, which are very abstract very inexpensive forms of illustration, may be irrelevant to more than half of the population: where the future is most likely constructed of pictograms or videograms – moving illustrations that are constructed by and presented by machines. The only reason we use letters rather than images is that they are less expensive to produce. Especially for consonantal languages. However, as languages mature (which they are doing rapidly right now) they become lazy and tonal rather than consonantal. And our current symbolic representations of those languages with consonantal symbols that do NOT convey tones is limiting to representing the tonal. And while the above statement may seem economically impossible, because of the current perception of machines as expensive, we must remember that writing materials were as expensive in the past, during the development of writing, as we consider computers today. Today’s iPad is yesterday’s quill and parchment. LUDDITES ARE EVERYWHERE Effectively the author is promoting a pidgin: a language for simple people to hold simple conversations, rather than a language for conveying complex information. As such, he is, like many others, a Luddite. And luddites are searching for a simpler past rather than a complex, safer, and more prosperous future. And we do not need to dumb down our civilization any further. Even if it does make reading easier. Learning to read a hard language if it conveys greater information increases human capital. 🙂

As I spend more of my time trying to understand the different ways by which the USA will degenerate from its position of trade-empire, I have been working on the future of cities, which will even more dominantly influence the future culturally, morally, economically and politically. There is a healthy literature on it. And it’s quite the opposite future that the libertarians fantasized about. Writings on our Dystopian Future: The Feral Cities Paper http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JIW/is_4_56/ai_110458726/?tag=content;col1 (Local copy for reference)The Building Blog and Cities Under Siege http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/cities-under-siege.html The Books The Fires by Joe Flood Planet of Slums by Mike Davis Cities Under Siege by Stephen Graham Urban Nightmares by Steve Macek The Unheavenly City by Banfield

Mike Davis wrote in Planet of Slums, “the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay.”

The future of the world is the south american model. It is quite different from the future envisioned by the Protestants, Libertarians and liberals. It certainly isn’t the orderly civility and sterility of star trek – as if the upper middle class ran the world rather than the proletariat.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s oft-repeated remark that “the modern city is a place for banking and prostitution and very little else.”

Be careful what you wish and plan for, if what you wish and plan for is counter to human nature. The approach to Natural Law combined with heroic aspiration is different from the myth of equality and heroic aspiration. We’re going to see the south american model.

Loved this little paragraph today on “extend and pretend”. Although I can’t remember where I found it.

The government has been playing “extend-and-pretend” based entirely on the idea that pent up demand in consumers would grow until it busted out and the recovery would be on – [a recovery] fueled by consumers. What has happened is the exact opposite. This is very serious. We are running into 3 years now, and 4 if you look at what commodity speculation did to consumers starting back in early 2007. …. And so the concern should be whether or not we have a permanent shift in consumer behaviors. Three or four years is plenty of time to break old habits and establish new ones.

Three weeks and you can develop a new habit. Nine months and you can change your system of habits. Three years and you can forget what life was like in the past. In four years you can even forget a bad divorce, death or tragedy. The bonds that create an economy are perishables. People forget. They forget skills, relationships, ambitions, ways of thinking. They forget.

This article by a local democratic group led me to this CBPP article, which is a response to a paper by the Heritage foundation.

Some critics continue to assert that President George W. Bush’s policies bear little responsibility for the deficits the nation faces over the coming decade — that, instead, the new policies of President Barack Obama and the 111th Congress are to blame. Most recently, a Heritage Foundation paper downplayed the role of Bush-era policies (for more on that paper, see p. 4). Nevertheless, the fact remains: Together with the economic downturn, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years

Which is another example of pretending that the long-cycle view of the republicans, from the sixties through the previous administration is selfishness rather than a REACTION to the socialist policies and socialist social system that conservatives were fighting for the majority of the 20th century. It was the conservative perception that without reinvigorating business and in particular entrepreneurship, that the american quality of life would perish, as it had appeared to by the 1970’s. If you think the european model is better, go live there for a while. Life in europe is expensive, cramped, dirty and urban. People look, act, and feel poor by comparison. The pretty part of europe seen by tourists was built in prior centuries under the great monarchies. It has nothing to do with the post war model. European cities are vast rings of urban blight, Los Angeles style, around small downtown cores of ancient monarchical elegance. By and large, no matter what social class you live in, america has offered better opportunities to its citizens. People have more choices. Add to their costs the necessity of rearming, and that they have a social problem with muslims on the scale of our post-slavery problem with blacks, and they have tremendous future costs to bear for their model. So go live there. Really. For a while. Life in europe is expensive. An expensive life neutralizes many class status differences. And that’s really the point of those models. But that aside, what bothers me most about the CBBP analysis, regardless of the figures presented by the heritage foundation, is the belief that our country would not endure OTHER costs, often strategic costs, that are NOT expressed in the numbers, if republican policies were not undertaken. We have accomplished much of our ambitions with the wars, which is to neutralize Iraqi expansionism, and punish afghans for hoteling terrorists. that we continue to attempt to create democracies is an ideological problem. It would be cheaper to reduce pakistan and iranian capabilities as we have iraqi and afghani capabilities. But we will not do that because we feel that we must be ‘nice’ to people who attack us, rather than punish people who attack us. But unless we forecast the republican view of the future, which was one in which even worse outcomes existed for the USA’s budget, and in particular, energy costs and decreased entrepreneurship, and decreased competitiveness, The dirty secret underneath our lack of competitiveness is our education system. We are paying vast competitive costs by forcing education into the private sector, and producing inferior goods, because we do not teach disciplined excellence in schools as do the germans. We don’t teach it for political reasons. We’re dumbing down our citizens. And it’s that cost that republicans are trying to fight as well. So most of the forecasts based upon assumptions made by both sides are complete nonsense. All that said, I responded with: I have absolutely no idea how you are coming up with this chart, and what assumptions it’s based upon. But it’s correspondence with reality approaches zero. Our tax revenue problem is far deeper and far more structural than whatever assumptions you’re relying upon. These include the dollar, the world economy, structural unemployment, and demographic changes. Most importantly they involve the class and race issues involved with different occupational distributions, and the resulting difficulty in putting vast numbers of our population (in particular, males) into industries that are permanently lost to us. We have expanded enough of the bottom end of the labor force through immigration, that we cannot push down our existing labor force into less interesting, but certainly productive, jobs. No society can survive 20% of the male population living in frustration. This anxiety will be directed somewhere. The country, as both a domestic and international empire, is too insufficiently homogenous to permit higher taxation and redistribution. It is contrary to human nature. There is no evidence of it in history. There is no evidence of it in behavioral testing. The costs of conducting these poorly managed external wars do not account for the cost of not prosecuting them, which are not insubstantial, and perhaps greater. Our domestic political mythology is a conflict between the erroneous assumptions of the twentieth century, and the expired political technologies of the eighteenth century. Neither side is going to get their desired future. We are headed toward the south american model of class and racial segregation of urban centers and a powerless central government. This pattern is evident in immigration and emigration moving patterns, demographic changes, domestic trade, domestic cash movement, re-regionalization of identity, and a loss of confidence in both the government and the nation itself. Conservatives live in a fantasy that the colonial republic is possible to reinstitute. Liberals live in a fantasy of the homogenous egalitarian society. But democratic republican government cannot function at our current scale for the same reason socialism cannot function at scale – information and incentive problems. Even if politicians want to make good decisions, law and taxes are insufficient tools for doing so. Only credit and banking and provide sufficient granularity of management, and our state is not structured any longer to assist in building the economy, only in resolving conflicts between interest groups. Furthermore human beings do not, never have, and never will operate in an egalitarian fashion across status class and race boundaries because status is more liquid and valuable in-group than extra-group. And because epistemologically, human beings do not possess sufficient perception, information, and intelligence to operate as creatures without status signals to tell them which actions are good and bad for them, any more than they can cooperate in large numbers without pricing signals to tell them what actions are good and bad for them. I am sorry if this is to complex an analysis for a posting on tax and spending policy. But I am speaking to the false assumptions that underly the graph that you presented here. I would love to live in an egalitarian redistributive society. But to accomplish that goal, you will have to fragment the empire into regions, reduce the federal government to banking and military functions, return the legislative control to the localities, and allow the natural preference that people express to associate within race and class. And that is antithetical to the underclass fantasy – a fantasy which is more concerned with status than it is with money. But every society is composed of classes. Not just economic classes, but social classes, and ‘greater and lesser productive classes’. And each of these groups pursues its own interests. And because those interests are epistemological in nature ( people need to know how to act ) they are permanent. And as permanent features, they will, especially under prolonged economic duress, be expressed by citizens. Either openly or in black markets, racism, and corruption. You will never achieve equality outside of a few million people of very similar racial and cultural preferences, with very similar economic interests. Otherwise, The only equality is in poverty. And that set of problems underlies the reason why people will become more conservative. ie: they will express sentiments of group persistence and attempt to implement those sentiments by legislation. So, we are destined to decades of political hostility. Because the US is now an empire, both domestically and internationally. And while internationally the government has lost legitimacy. THat is irrelevant compared to the loss of legitimacy of the government here at home. The only thing we can do is contract the empire and attempt to get our people employed in, while getting the upper and middle classes to try to create jobs and we may have permanently displaced our society by trade policy. THe germans build their society to produce disciplined craftsmen. This is important, because craftsmen can create exportable hard goods. But we have tried to create a service economy. And a service economy must bring people INTO the country in order to serve them. We can create a medical tourism industry. But that is not sufficient. We can close our educational system to foreigners. but that is not sufficient. We can devote vast labor to building nuclear power plants, a new power grid, and electric automobiles. And that might be enough. But we can never put people back into building houses. It creates expensive sprawl. But most importantly, it doesn’t make people ‘skilled’. It’s the intellectual equivalent of ditch digging, and as such it is a vast loss of human capital. Thats the reality of it. So your deficit prediction is based on the assumption that the nation was not at a structural crossroads by the fall of socialism in 1989. It is based upon the assumption that american productivity will continue as it has. But neither the society we call america, or the advantage that was western, or the advantage that was american, persists any longer. We are in for another decade of this economy, and if history is any measure, we are also in for something unpleasantly disruptive in the next generation. And neither side has a plan for getting us out of it.

Paul Krugman writes, in Permanently High Unemployment

I really don’t think people appreciate the huge dangers posed by a weak response to 9 1/2 percent unemployment, and the highest rate of long-term unemployment ever recorded

Paul, You will not get consensus on general liquidity (unbridled credit). You will not get consensus on government spending (expansion of the bureaucracy). You will not get consensus on redistributive infrastructure (city projects). But you will get consensus on investment in strategic competitive advantages if you can identify them. We are going to have long term structural employment. These people are not going to go back to work in their previous careers. You’re right that government can provide a solution. but that solution is to concentrate capital behind investments in competitive production that the market cannot create largely because of regulatory hinderances, or regulatory uncertainty, or regulatory competition. The greatest benefit to the country will be to invest in a new grid, triple the number of nuclear plants, and to convert as much infrastructure from hydrocarbons as possible. There is no mystery why this is a competitive advantage. It will create millions of jobs, especially in skilled trades. You’re just recommending the wrong platform for getting money into the economy. And no one is buying it.