Interesting experience today. So I decided to go cross-country skiing up in a local forest right around the time it was starting to get dark, around 4:00 or so (bad idea -- pub). Halfway along the trail, to my surprise, I saw another person walking on the trail a few hundred feet ahead of me. Now at this point I was becoming a little cautious because he might have been someone sketchy, and it is kind of strange to see someone just walking alone in the snow in the woods. But I hopefully assumed that it was just some old guy going out for a stroll or something.
But not only was he a sketchy townie type (long hair, unshaven, hunting jacket, crazy expression in his eyes), but he was also carrying a clearly real and presumably loaded gun. I was more than a little concerned, for one because this isn't hunting season, so I just nervously asked him what he was hunting, and he told me he was looking for coyotes, but didn't expect to find any. Then he reassured me that he "wouldn't shoot [me]. Or anyone else for that matter." Not exactly the most comforting reassurance. But I was just as civil as I could be and then hauled ass with this potentially psychotic guy carrying a loaded gun at my back. Needless to say, it was a great workout getting to a place where the trail split so I could get out of there.
On a more serious note though, being alone with your back to someone you don't entirely trust holding a loaded gun gave me a taste, however minute, of what it's like for these soldiers in Iraq who are faced with the prospect that the guy next to them on the street could be an enemy who's going to shoot them or blow them up. It's a tough situation to be in and I respect all those who are putting themselves in harm's way to serve.
Apparently the top-grossing Christmas Day film of all time is "Meet the Fockers" (which I in fact also went to see on Christmas Day; review unavailable). In typical journalistic fashion, Msnbc offers a few possible explanation for why this is.
"'Meet the Fockers' succeeded in part because of an aggressive ad campaign..."
"[it coincided with] the release of the DVD of the original 'Meet the Parents...'"
"[it features] the return of Streisand to the big screen after an eight-year absence..."
"It captured the clash between families, which resonates at the holidays..."
However, I believe there is a simpler explanation. "Meet the Fockers" was about the clash of families from two different religious backgrounds, and Ben Stiller's whole family was jewish. Seeing that Jews compose the major component of the market for going to the movies on Christmas Day, I think that this fact is the most obvious explanation for why the movie grossed so highly. And it is clear that releasing "Meet the Fockers" on Christmas day was quite a smart move on the part of the movie's producers.
I want to do a post clarifying what I said earlier about the intellectual arcaneness and sometimes outright obfuscation that is found in many so-called "academic" or "intellectual" pieces of writing, notably philosophy. I also want to resond to what Jung said: "It's nearly impossible to make any progress in thinking while trying to make everything accessible and clear," and "it's just that it's unbearably stifling to the process of thinking to explain the history behind every word they use before they use it."
First of all, the problem with many so called "intellectual" works is not so much that the authors don't explain the full relevant history of every word used, or for that matter that they do explain the history of words they use, or that they write words in shorthand for concepts that have been elaborated much more thoroughly elsewhere. The problem is using strange words or phrasings that no one but a few philosophers or scholars of philosophy would know or care to know, writing in interminable run-on sentences, using semicolons every few lines. Let's face it. Philosophy is often written in a very obscure style that's just plain hard to read.
But Jung argues that such presentation is necessary, given the nature of the task and subject. Fair enough. I can evaluate that claim on its face. There are two reasons why I could see this would be true. One is that the concepts are so abstract and difficult that attaining a solid grasp of them is impossible. The second is that the concepts are so abstract and difficult that even when understood, expressing them in consise and simple form is impossible - that is, something is lost conceptually in the translation. The first case is plausible. No one "knows" what justice is. People can only speculate about it, or when trying to define it, conceive it in the most vague and abstract terms. But it still isn't clear to me that the kind of obscurity you see in philosophy comes from a fundamental fuzziness about the underlying ideas. The second case seems to me to be a case of plain pretension. It's saying "Oh, look at me. I'm so smart that ordinary language can't even do justice to the exquisite, subtle complexity of my thoughts." It's a well known fact that entire schools of philosophy developed the habit of writing in abstruse prose as a kind of badge of intellectual heft. On the other hand, plenty of good philosophers wrote simply and clearly. William James is one. Nietzsche is another. I think it's only honest to face the fact that for all its merits, philosophy has a problem, and that problem is elitism and intellectual obscurantism.
I can already hear the counterargument saying that philosophy needs its own jargon because it is a specialized subject dealing with specialized issues. I think it's important to make a distinction between jargon and pseudo-jargon. It's true that in proper discursive fields, terminology is inevitable. New terminology is necessary to represent and communicate unique ideas. Some fields really are so distinct from anything else that they require their own whole new language to facilitate communication. A good example is something like, say, the hard sciences. There is no colloquial correlate to "vector" or "proton." Hence the new word is created to serve a fundamental purpose. Then there are other branches of learning that seem to like to define things that have already been defined because they want to be a science too! To take psychology as an quite fertile example: did you take care of your conatative self today? Conatative happens to be nothing more than the psychological word for "emotional," so why do we need it? I don't know. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, but I can't think of them, probably because they're insubstantial.
To relate this to philosophy, take Kant's "Categorical Imperative," for example. Would anything have been lost if he had simply called it the "Golden Rule," especially considering that the very idea of the Golden Rule existed long before Kant came into existence? Feel free to argue with me on this, but I'm going to venture nothing would be different. For every philosopher I'm sure there are multiple examples similar to this one. I'm not faulting Kant, or philosophy for being this way, and here's what I wanted to clarify about my other post. We look to philosophy for great intellectual acheivements, and as such, we expect philosophy to be highly intellectually charged and formidable pieces of work. Philosophy provides the intellectual world the equivalent of the fine arts. In addition to what they say, we appreciate great works of philosophy simply because they are great and they exist. They are intellectual showpieces, or momuments of human acheivement. Asking philosophy to write in layman's terms would be like asking an orchestral composer to write a symphony for kazoos. For this reason, I can appreciate philosophy for what it is: sometimes profound, most of the time just inspiring. Like fine art, philosophy takes a certain highbrow approach that will require you to rise up to its level. There's nothing wrong with a highbrow approach, and some of these works of philosopher are great masterpieces. But just don't go thinking that every piece of philosophy has the most profound, useful, thoughtful answers of anything in the world. And don't be fooled into thinking that expositions of thought need to be written in an obscure, inaccesible fashion.
Just a quick thought that may have something to add to the ongoing debate on gay rights. This thought just went through my head, so for what it's worth, I'm going to take a minute to write it down here.
Let me begin by saying I honestly don't know what I think the right answer is to many of the current debates involving gay rights, i.e. legalized marriage, civil unions etc.
But I wonder how many people opposing any measures that would afford civil gains for homosexuals and homosexual couples oppose it out of a kind of reflexive sense of justice. What I mean is the kind of thing where somebody has done something wrong, and you don't want to do anything that would benefit or make life more pleasant for them. Opposing something because it benefits a party you deem as reprehensible is sound ethics, in principle. As an example, most people would be against providing convicted criminals with lavish and luxurious living arrangements, and are repulsed whenever stories to that effect are exposed, because criminals don't deserve these things. I, for one, am against providing convicted criminals with comforts and luxuries such as golf courses and TVs in their cells, not for fiscal reasons, but because I think criminals don't deserve to live as comfortable a life in prison as they would be living in the real world had they not been convicted of a crime.
Some people, and a fairly substantial number I would assume, oppose the advancement of certain gay rights causes on the basis of law, policy, or principle (although the latter is hard to define). All these considerations are valid and should be freely debated. On the other hand, how many people oppose gay rights causes because they oppose homosexuality and see any kind of concession as capitulation to it? There's something wrong with this position in my mind. It scares me that there may be a real religious (or perhaps just profoundly ethically driven) majority that opposes all these gay rights causes simply because they feel it in keeping with just principles of punishing (or at least discouraging) a vice.
When Bush was asked if he thought homosexuality was a choice in the third debate he answered that he didn't know. I thought this was a great answer, because I myself don't know the answer, and I don't think anyone knows the answer. But here's the thing, if no one can say whether it's a choice or not, how can you at the same time definitively say it is wrong? This may seem unclear, but let me make a parallel to an aspect of our criminal justice system. If someone is accused of a crime, they are generally considered culpable UNLESS they can prove that their actions were not a choice. This can be established under many guises. They may have been acting in self-defense, and hence it was not a choice but a matter of live or death. They may have been insane at the time and not able to make choices. They may have been acting out of passion, and the criminal justice system is significantly less harsh in dealing with these criminals.
If homosexuality ISN'T a choice, that it is something that someone is either born with, fated to develop, in their makeup etc., then all (or at least some major) arguments that it is wrong lose their foundation, and this in turn invalidates any opposition to gay rights causes that is based on the rationale of vice punishment. Moreover, it's important to realize that a fundamental function of retributive policies is that they are coercive. That is, someone who is likely to experience negative consequences for doing something is less likely to choose to do that thing. Yet if homosexuality is fundamentally not a choice, a retributive policy, or perhaps put a little more mildly, a policy that makes being homosexual less attractive, will not prevent people from becoming homosexuals. That is, it won't work.
This doesn't settle the debates. As I said before, there are legal, social, and religious factors and arguments that have a legitimate place in the debate, and should not be discounted. I myself am not fully decided on many of the issues yet. But I think this analysis might have something to contribute
Here's a quick thought. One of the good things about being on a computer late at night is that you get to have first dibs on the soap-opera that is currently the New York Times editorial page. But today the editorial page is telling me that David Brooks, who of all the columnists has the greatest potential to produce something entertaining, is on vacation. Two questions: what exactly is Mr. Brooks doing that necessitates taking a vacation? Writing a 300 word column twice a week? Second, what exactly is Mr. Brooks doing on his vacation that prevents him from writing and turning in a 300 word column? It might be that either he has to be in his office to produce his column for some reason (which is kind of strange), or that he spends so much time on his column that it would seriously cut into his vacation time to produce it (which is kind of pathetic). I guess all that defending your "conservative" viewpoint can get pretty tiring after a while...
People who know me know I'm not a big literary analysis type, and even less a poetry type. But I just started getting back into Billy Joel and, for the sake of promoting my own personal tastes, which let's face it is what a blog is for right, I want to share my excitement while engaging in a very crude and possibly incorrect lyrical analysis during the next few days.
I've always felt that if something needs to be said, then the most effective way to communicate it is in plain language. I'm still not big on indirect forms of communication, but some songs are just good. Now that I've been personally introduced to good singer-songwriter music through the music of my friend Dan and this new Billy Joel phase, I'm beginning to see that a good song is good because of the way it encapsulates a state of mind, and so almost comes to form its own little temporary world that the listener can enter into. This I feel is how the best vocal music comes about, across a wide range of genres, and it is notably missing in today's pop vocal music.
I've never given much creedence to interpretive or lyrical analysis and it's a skill I'd like to develop some more, this blog being the appropriate place to do it. So expect me to post some song lyrics and a few comments on why I think they're so good relatively soon.
On topic, there's a song lyric-style op-ed today by Maureen Dowd, so why don't I start with some commentating on that:
On the first day of Christmas,
my Rummy sent to me
a Saddam pigeon in a palm tree...
That's the beginning. There are ten more verses...you get the idea. Now this would be terribly cute if it weren't for that fact that - and maybe I'm wrong on this... it sucks. Oh well.
I was deeply saddened to hear today that David Brudnoy, host of the David Brudnoy Show on WBZ radio, died yesterday. I was personally a big listener on his program, and loved every minute of it. He was the most humane, intelligent, candid talk show host out there. I was also greately impressed by the strength with which he faced and battled his HIV infection and cancer. I hope this won't be too insufficient a tribute to a fine man.
If anyone's ever seen the "Rumsfeld Fighting Techniques" comedy site you'll know what I'm talking about; I think this photo, taken from today's Times, would make a worthy addition:
Of course the official name is up for debate, but I like "Demolition Lobster!"
It's finals time, and as everyone knows, it can be stressful. A student health awareness packet I picked up off the street told me that doing things that I enjoy can be helping in relieving stress. For me, one of those things is shooting ideas off the top of my head. In an earlier post, I left as an intellectual exercise to the reader coming up with a list of poll questions as intellectually bankrupt as possible. I'm going to take a shot at coming up with my own here; the reader is warned they will be of varying degrees of funniness.
Where is Osama Bin Laden right now, Pakistan or Afganistan?
follow-up poll next day: Where is Osama Bin Laden right now, Saudi Arabia or Iran?
In your opinion, according to Barry Bonds' doctors, is Barry Bonds taking steroids, yes or no?
In your opinion, according to Barry Bonds' conscience, is Barry Bonds taking steroids, yes or no?
In your opinion, is the universe expanding, yes or no?
Is it your opinion that evolution is true, yes or no?
In your opinion, does the hypotenuse of a right triangle squared equal the first leg squared plus the second leg squared, yes or no?
Is Osama Bin Laden responsible for the 9/11 attacks, or not?
In your opinion, does George Bush give a crap about political opinion polls?
Anyone reading this should leave their own suggestions in the comments section.
I'm officially off-duty on this blog, but let me just peek my head in and make note of something that bears repeating. Timothy Burke, an academic, writes "The same forces that help academics to produce knowledge and scholarship are the forces which produce unwholesome close-mindedness and inbred self-satisfied attitudes." Ah, so refreshing to finally hear someone say it. And an academic no less.
He gives a bit of a justification for specialization in academia, though in my view this misses the point:
If tomorrow I persuaded my colleagues that the next job that opened in the humanities in Swarthmore should not be dedicated to any particular discipline or research specialization, but thrown open to the most interesting, fertile intellect we could recruit, I would be persuading my colleagues to join in an impractical catastrophe that would involve trying to winnow a field of 25,000 applicants down to a single person.
The real reason I would argue is that there's so much knowledge out there that specializing is simply a matter of efficiency. But the question reveals something important by the way it is phrased. The idea of awarding an academic position on the basis of having an interesting, fertile intellect is posed as a sort of absurd hypothetical. This is very revealing. Because it's true, in many institutions of higher education, positions aren't filled on the basis of intellect at all but rather on the basis of who is best able to supply the desired specialized credentials, or who fits the narrow, often arbitrarilly drawn disciplinary mold best. I'm not saying humanist scholars shouldn't specialize. That's like saying we shouldn't have specialized professionals in our economy - this of course would be hugely inefficient. I'm saying that if you choose to fill positions based on who can best specialize, you're going to get...a bunch of people who can only communicate with specialists.
The peer review that instructs me to come inside a canon so that I can be understood by an audience of comparable specialists quickly becomes the peer review that cracks the whip to force me inside a political orthodoxy.
More accurately, I would say, it's the peer review that demands that any piece of new knowledge or research produced by academics be so arcane and provincial that only another specialist in the same sub-sub-pseudo-discipline would be capable of understanding it or caring about it, and which would brand anything else as "unscholarly" or "queer." This problem of overspecialization and provincialism is particular to the humanities. I'm not saying the science academy isn't quite specialized these days either - it is. The difference is that scientists need to specialize because only a few people are capable of understanding the work (due to issues including aptitude, differences in scientific terminology / methods that are necesitated by the wide variations among scientific domains) whereas humanities academics specialize because they want to feel like only a few people can understand their work. In other words, science basically has an excuse for when it is accountable to only itself because of the considerable learning curve associated with acquiring the fundamentals of most modern scientific specialties. Moreoever, even the most arcane science becomes relevant whenever its findings contribute to the betterment of our society, technologically, medically, or ecologically (which is often) - REGARDLESS of how arcane the actual science involved may be. Can arcane humanities disciplines claim any kind of similar contribution? If the mainstream of humanities academia wants to contribute anything meaningful to society it out to rethink its entire orientation and consider producing ideas, concepts or analyses of general - not just academic -value, social, intellectual or moral.
I've been reading this book online recently written by a pyschologist in the early 1900's. It's a devastating review of the whole system of education of the time, but I think some of it still applies today. Here are some passages of interest, but really you should read the whole thing.
There are a lot of passages of general insight:
WE are stock-blind to our own barbarities; we do not realize the enormities of our life and consider our age and country as civilized and enlightened. We censure the faults of other societies, but do not notice our own. Thus Lecky, in describing Roman society, says: "The gladiatorial games form indeed the one feature which to a modern mind is most inconceivable in its atrocity. That not only men, but women, man advanced period of civilization,―men and women who not only professed, but very frequently acted upon a high code of morals―should have made the carnage of men their habitual amusement, that all this should have continued for centuries with scarcely a protest, is one of the most startling facts in moral history. It is, however, perfectly normal, while it opens out fields of ethical inquiry of a very deep, though painful, character."
Interesting to think about... Another interesting insight which relates the education of individuals to the previously accumulated progress of the species actually touches on the view I came up with and wrote about in an earlier post about culture:
The well known biogenetic law may, with some modifications, be applied to mental life. The development of the individual is an abbreviated reproduction of the evolution of the species. Briefly put: Ontogenesis is an epitome of Phylogenesis. This biogenetic law holds true in the domain of education. The stored-up experiences of the race are condensed, foreshortened, and recapitulated in the child's life history.
A good point on the fear of elitism which currently exists in our schools, thereby branding gifted programs as politically incorrect, while at the same time putting huge allocations of funds away for special education programs:
In levelling education to mediocrity we imagine that we uphold the democratic spirit of our institutions. Our American sensibilities a-re shocked when the president of one of our leading colleges dares to recommend to his college that it should cease catering to the average student.
There's also lots of great, admirably ascerbic alarmist rhetoric:
I ASSUME that as liberal men and women you have no use for the process of cramming and stuffing of college-geese and mentally indolent, morally obtuse and religiously "cultured" prigs and philistines.
...
The savage compresses the skull of the infant, while we flatten the brain and cramp the mind of our young generation.
...
We trust our unfortunate youth to the Procrustean bed of the mentally obtuse, hidebound pedagogue. We desiccate, sterilize, petrify and embalm our youth in keeping with the rules of our Egyptian code and in accordance with the Confucian regulations of our school-clerks and college mandarins. Our children learn by rote and are guided by routine.
...
We piously sacrifice our tender children and the flower of our youth to the greedy, industrial Moloch of a military, despotic, rapacious plutocracy.
I'm pretty sure that the situation is not as bad in most places today as the one he describes. Still I have to admit to finding a lot of truth in what he writes.
Not long ago we were informed by one of those successful college-mandarins, lionized by office-clerks, superintendents and tradesmen, that he could measure education by the foot-rule! Our Regents are supposed to raise the level of education by a vicious system of examination and coaching, a system which Professor James, in a private conversation with me, has aptly characterized as "idiotic."
Our schools brand their pupils by a system of marks, while our foremost colleges measure the knowledge and education of their students by the number of "points" passed. The student may pass either in Logic or Blacksmithing. It does not matter which, provided he makes up a certain number of "points"!
Now, obviously it's very difficult to think of a practical alternative to running schools by giving examinations, awarding grades, and counting credits...But I've always felt the system is imperfect because it does nothing to encourage initiative in learning, aside from whatever advantage having initiative in learning could confer in the way of earning good grades. What's rewarded is not how well you can apply what you know in an original way, which is in reality what leads to productivity outside of the classroom setting, school being quite unique in the context of larger life in rewarding narrow learning and memorization. The system probably needs to be structured as it is for practical reasons, but the saving grace is when individual teachers work independently to inspire students to see the world of inquiry and original application associated with what they're teaching beyond the books, assignments and pedagogy. There are a lot of good, inspiring people with an understanding of the individual aspect of learning at the teaching level. Or at least I've been fortunate to have encountered many throughout my education.
I have to say I pretty much totally agree with the following description of the purpose of education, provided at the very beginning:
I also assume that as men and women of liberal education you are not limited to the narrow interests of one particular subject, to the exclusion of all else. I assume that you are especially interested in the development of personality as a whole, the true aim of education. I also assume that you realize that what is requisite is not some more routine, not more desiccated, quasi-scientific methods of educational psychology, not the sawdust of college-pseudogogics and philistine, normal school-training, but more light on the problems of life.
Indeed. I don't know why it's so hard to find a coherent statement to that effect (ok, maybe not as ascerbic...) put out by the leading educational institutions or educational authorities of the day.
I would like to direct my readers to a new album put out by my friend Dan. If I had to compare it to anything I would compare it to Stevie Wonder, but you should listen to the samples yourself. I would be surprised if anyone who likes music doesn't like this album.
Swarthmore professor Tim Burke asks the important question "what kind of equality?" There is equality in the sense of equal opportunity, which may of course end up resulting in actual economic inequalities, or a reduction of the distance between rich and poor, or a more absolute rigid egalitarianism.
Disregarding the normative natural right justification as pseudo-religious and just generally unsound, there are still reasons why inequality is desirable. I would never wish for absolute equality. As I said before, a certain amount of inequality provides positive incentives for risk-taking and provides a healthy social outlet for the expression of ambition and competitive urges.
However, I think that common sense tells us that the effect is subject to highly diminishing returns. Someone ought to do a real psychological study testing the effect of different levels of incentive on effort, ambition and productivity. But without even having access to the study, I think it's clear what the results would be, and why they would turn out that way. Productivity can't be a linear function of incentive. For one, the conclusion is preposterous because it presumes that the workers have unlimited capacity to work harder as wealth disparities grow ever greater. Is this realistic? Does the average worker even have the ability to produce at 5, 10 or greater times an observed baseline level, which would represent the ratio of highest to average wealth roughly? If resources are in fact limited, not only would there be an upper ceiling beyond which a person simply cannot respond with increased productivity, the productivity function will almost certainly have diminishing returns. This is not a matter of incentive, it's a matter of resources - psychological or economic. Consider the following thought experiment:
Assume that x times the disparity in wealth equals x times the incentive - though in reality it's probably less. Psychologically, how would you expect someone with limited resources working relativity close to capacity to respond to a doubling of the (internal) incentive? I think the intuitive answer is that it would take into account how close to capacity the person is. That is, the response will be to increase their utilization of resources by some fixed fraction of their remaining resources.
To put it a little more formally, say M is the maximum level of resources, or the total reserve of resources. Presumably people start working at a reasonable fraction of their total capacity, say B. Then, the total increase in resource utilization corresponding to a doubling of incentive is f(M-B) where f is some fixed fraction. Any value of f could correspond to a given multiplication in the incentive; I guess you could say it reflects the sensitivity of a person in responding to incentives. The next doubling of incentive will result in f(1-f)(M-B), the next f(M-B - f(1-f)(M-B) - f(M-B)) = f(1- f(1-f) - f)(M-B) = f(1-f)^2(M-B). Or, for n doublings of incentive, the marginal contribution to productivity will be f(1-f)^n(M-B), which gets very small very quickly.
Perhaps you don't like this model because you think that how people respond to incentives does not depend on how close to their maximum working capacity they are. This is a psychologically plausible position. Then you have a situation where people exhaust their resources, presumably after a short period of time. The practical implications of this are that there will be a definite ceiling beyond which increases in incentives do not lead to any corresponding increase in productivity. If this is the case, beyond this point there wouldn't be any utilitity, in terms of motivation, in having greater inequality of wealth at all. In the first case, there would be greatly diminishing reason to promote greater inequality of wealth as it gets higher. Either way it seems like a losing policy.
This seems to mean that great differences in wealth have no motivational function; the motivational rationale for economic inequalities becomes null very quickly. So this would lead me to believe that some degree of inequality is beneficial, but only in small amounts.
Equality of opportunity is a harder thing to work out on its own. People who have more resources naturally are going to have an advantage over people with less resources in a capitalist system. There are actually a whole bunch of "scientific" justifications for supporting policies that perpetuate economic advantages through families. Suffice it to say that I think they're all bad, in both senses. So I think equality of opportunity is something we should strive for. The answer to me seems to be that in keeping actual inequality to a minimum, the playing field of opportunity will stay level also. Radicalization of starting points, aside from being prohibitively impractical, would probably not even be desirable, because it probably would lead to a situation little different from the current one. This is not to say that we are doing a perfect job ensuring equal opportunity, just that an equal opportunity scheme would also probably lead to great inequalities if left untempered.
I know you've been anxiously awaiting the rest of my manifesto loyal readers. Here it is, in all it's humble glory:
Partisanship should be the means not an end. What do I mean by this? Generally, the more people consider themselves beholden to a particular party, the more the members of the party adhere to a kind of groupthink which is governed by the rules of mob psychology rather than rationality. I know that sounds rather alarmist but let me explain. When there is absolute conformity, conditions become especially conducive to autocracy. When conformity is a given, arbitrary forces or a single influential leader can sway entire bodies of followers whichever way and they will not dissent. Entire well-developed and respectable nations have made disastrous choices this way because of singular allegiance to a bad idea in the name of country, ideology, even science. The genius of the constitution is that it allowed free speech and dissent to flourish so that autocracy, whenever and wherever it may appear, can be freely dissented. On the other hand, there's nothing systematic about fascism (total conformity) that necessitates an autocrat, yet ever major instance of fascism in history has been accompanied by a dictatorship, which should tell you something.
If you believe in the wisdom of self-correcting systems you naturally think this prospect is terrible. The real value of partisanship, as it was actually explained to me by one of my peers, is in enhancing one's personal political influence through coalition-building. If you're willing to support multifold agendas within a party, it's more likely that the ones you care about will come through also. Compromise is going to have to happen at some point, whether it's at the individual or the group level. As far as I'm concerned, this is the origin of good partisanship.
I've been thinking a little more on the inequalities of wealth thing, and another argument that could be made for it occured to me. That is, it is a natural right for me to make more money than you; it is the natural right of every person to make as much money as they want and are able to even if it means making much more than the next guy.
Natural rights are always very fuzzy concepts. For instance, couldn't the case just as persuasively be made that it is everyone's natural right to be treated as an equal? There are various religious / ethical lines of thought that could justify including some form of equality as a natural right. On the other hand there are solid philosophical and scientific underpinnings to claiming that the opposite is a natural right - or perhaps it could be put a bit more neutrally, a natural law. Any scientific findings that support the conclusion that there are differences among people in terms of abilities are absolutely devastating to the natural law case for equality, and there is very much such evidence. People differ in terms of aptitude, and even in a non-economic setting, inequalities in ability, status, hierarchy are going to exist. Furthermore, the theory of evolution is predicated on the existence of inequalities. The fit flourish while the unfit are selected out, and the result is a net good, considered from the perspective of the species as a whole, taking this as the assumed operative unit. So there is much in nature that reflects an unegalitarian scheme.
But here's why I'm not convinced by this argument: for every argument that humans should do something or be allowed to do something because it is natural, there is a corresponding argument of a very different nature, that humans should not behave a certain way, or conduct affairs a certain way, because it is primitive and is fit for the brutes, not a species as elevated and refined as humanity. And the second argument is always equally compelling. For instance, would anyone argue that humans should strive to govern in the same way as a pack of wolves? Should instant violent retribution without due justice process be allowed because it is exhibited in various species of beasts? Everyone would argue that these things shouldn't be permitted precisely because they are characteristic of the lower animals.
When it comes down to it, the natural right and negative natural right arguments seem so evenly weighted that I'm inclined to ignore the rationale altogether and say the categorization of natural is inconsequential to how things should be. And I think this makes sense for any rational person. It essentially involves a leap of faith to make the jump from a descriptive scheme to a normative arugment. Who's to say that just because something occurs naturally, that means it should be. There is no logical connection there, only a faith in an falsely santified entity that can be refered to as Nature. Blind faith isn't how rational people should make decisions.
I'll be taking a break for a month so because I have both schoolwork and planning-related issues and don't want to be tempted to procrastinate as much. But taking over for me will be Jung, who I'm sure has an interesting perspective on lots of topics. I may post a thing or two after this, but enjoy the break and expect me to be back at the end of the semester.
...does an arbitrageur care? Or something like that. I've been big on the academic-style posts lately, and this post is no exception. Today's topic is economics. Here's a question from the MA exam in economics given at George Mason University:
You can't take it with you. A private owner of a natural resource, like a forest, therefore, will want to clear-cut the forest before he dies in order to maximize his consumption stream (assume the owner has no children or other bequest motive). True or False. Explain.
A George Mason professor provides the answer as follows:
False. The owner can sell the forest. As a result, the owner of a forest has an incentive to continue to seed it even if seeds planted today won't produce trees until after the owner is dead. The same idea applies to any long-lived productive asset. I think this insight is very beautiful. It's precisely the fact that the forest is owned that gives the owner an incentive to take into account how other people value the forest.
The basic logic doesn't require perfect competition or fully efficient markets but if these assumptions do hold then the private owner will choose investment decisions exactly as would a "social planner."
I think I understand why the author chose a natural resource like a forest to illustrate the principle he was trying to get across (because it's tragic when forests are cut down! [pub -- he's expressing his sincere feelings here]), but I don't think it's the best choice of example for this question.
But first, there's an interesting aside to this question that I want to ask: does the logic imply that the forest will always be reseeded in the interests of enhancing its value to the next owner, or will it eventually be cut down by one of its owners? This has important consequences because no one likes it when forests are destroyed! (pub -- better - much more convincing.) I think the answer is that the forest will eventually be clear-cut by an owner, or in other words, there exists a circumstance in which the owner has incentive to clear-cut the forest rather than maintain it. Here's why I think this is:
The essential insight of the answer is that the value of the forest to the owner equals its value on the market (or to the highest bidder among future owners of the forest). Since future owners will be able to produce much more profit out of the forest over the course of their lives than an owner near the end of his life will, it will be worth more to them than to the owner, and thus the owner has an incentive to maintain the forest rather than harvest it for his own profit. Normally, the productive potential of the forest to a future owner will be greater than the actual saleable value of the forest to the current owner who has limited time left in which to transform the forest's product into profits.
But say that its value on the market is declining because, say, the demand for houses has decreased (there will be a natural delay between a decline in the demand for wood and a decline in the value of the forest because of imperfect information and the time it takes information to be transmitted). If the rate of decline in the value of the product of the forest is sufficiently great, and is expected to stay that level for the lifetime of the next generation of owners, the profit to be derived from harvesting the entire forest right now will be greater than the potential profitability of the forest to the future owner (or arbitrageurs or series of arbitrageurs, etc.) This makes sense because:
1) It takes time for the purchase to be completed and for the forest to change owners, time during which the value of the forest will further decline.
2) A steadily declining value for the forest takes away a major incentive for purchasing it: that is purchasing it for its continued profitability over an extended period of time.
Put another way, if the forest's greatest value is projected to be the value of its produce right now, why would anyone want to purchase it?
Such an answer assumes that long-term information is not perfect, which is a realistic assumption for the real world I think. If long-term information were perfect (long-term meaning for the purposes of this problem: knowledge of the future value of the forest beyond the lifespan of a single owner), then arbitrageurs would be willing to buy the forest in the intermediate term, even when the price is declining rapidly, with the aim of selling the forest back to forest industry people when demand for wood goes back up. I'm assuming that this is not possible, so that when the profitability of having a forest goes down, people assume that it's going to be down for the forseeable future, and are unwilling to pay higher for it than its current profit potential. Is this a reasonable assumption? I'm not sure, but I would think that 40 years or so is a reasonable span of time beyond which future demand for a product and market conditions would not be predictable.
So all this would suggest that, in the cold world of profit-maximizing forest owners, the will come a time when every forest is leveled. It's interesting to note that the forest is clear-cut when demand for wood goes down. Just something to think about...
Now back to the original reason for the post: I wanted to take issue with the professor's assertion that "the private owner will choose investment decisions exactly as would a 'social planner'." As I said before, I can understand why the creator of the question chose a forest as the asset, but in particular with a forest, I think, the market outcome will not be the same as the socially optimal outcome.
If the asset was, say, a stock of tree seedlings, and the choice was between preserving them and using them to spawn more tree seedlings, and selling them to nurseries, then it's true that the investment decisions of the owner will coincide exactly with what a social planner would do. But a forest is different because one of the principal benefits of the forest, recreation, is enjoyed by people who are not in the market for purchasing forests. Thus a large part of the social utility of forests is not represented by the price of the forest. I suppose you could construct a reality in which private owners of the forest also charge admission to individuals, but that's a stretch. Thus, the behavior of owners of the forest will only represent the interests of other potential-owners of the forest, which is a small segment of the people who have a use for the forest. Additionally, a forest has environmental value, which will be ignored by the decisions of profit-driven owners. So I don't think the market for forests is a particularly good example of socially-optimal market outcomes.
Ok, enough of this post. It's time for me to do real academics.
Well, that's it, the political season is over. And while it may not have ended how I would have preferred, rest assured that I will not continue to fight. That's right. Now that the election is over I will most probably post much less frequently on political matters, if you can even consider my very undeft attempts at political analysis to have been worthwhile in the first place. I'm generally much less involved than I should be when it comes to politics, and while I believe it is every citizen's duty to participate when the time comes and maintain a minimum level of knowledgeableness in order to participate intelligently, it really seems that there are so many differing sources of information out there that it would require a person to either devote a substantial portion of their time to wading through all of them, or be especially interested in it, neither of which I am willing to do. One of the incentives for starting a blog for the election cycle was that it would force me to follow my first voting-age presidential race more closely and chronicle my thoughts along the way. It was a learning experience for me, and it was good. But I don't know how much more I have to say on politics, and I'd like to post more about other stuff that interests me. As a kind of closing manifesto though, I'd like to lay out the things I do have strong personal beliefs about politically:
Large concentrations of wealth are bad. I know this is economic, not political, but still our economic policies are set in large part via a political process. I'm sure none of the reasons I can provide in supporting this position are original, since the matter has been argued for centuries by political theorists and intellectuals far more learned than I. But, at the risk of being superfluous, I'll state why I think this is the case.
I actually think it's easier to see why this is bad by starting with the justifications given for why they are good. The first, and probably predominant argument is that distributions of wealth are determined by markets and markets must not be tampered with. Some people with a religious-type adherence to the free market are not likely to have big problems with large differences in wealth, because they see the large differences in wealth as somehow the natural product of the free market. But one need only look to trusts and natural monopolies to see that sometimes intervention in free markets is more efficient than no intervention. Additionally, reverence for a system, however ingenious and perhaps philosophically pleasing, should never supersede honest analysis of all of its consequences, good and bad. Capitalism may be the best economic system ever invented, but that doesn't mean some of its consequences aren't undesirable and would be better if they were corrected.
Of course a necessary premise of capitalism is the profit-incentive or self-interest, which cannot exist without inequalities of wealth. In the real world, inequalities in wealth provide positive incentives for risk-taking, innovation, and entrepreneurship, all of which are essential to a well-functioning economy. Conversely, lack of possibility for inequalities in wealth led to the failure of communism on the massive scale. However, as I understand the argument, as a justification for the existence of larger inequalities of wealth, the profit-incentive argument must assume that there are constant or even increasing returns to greater and greater levels of inequality. This to me seems patently false. Does the typical middle-class person respond with 5 times the risk-taking, or, put another way, do 5 times as many middle-class people decide to take risks when the average income of the top 10% is increased by 5 times? It's true that this doesn't take into account certain macroeconomics multiplying effects that might translate to a greater than 1:1 contribution to the total economy for each unit of additional capital. Still, my argument is that there has to be a certain point where the marginal contribution to positive incentives of an increase in the income disparity is negligible. On a practical level, is a $50,000-earning member of the middle class considerably more motivated to take certain risks if he is able to earn $2,000,000 rather than $1,000,000?
There's an assertion that the rich invest (save) proportionally more money than non-rich citizens. I don't have any data on this, and can't find any on a quick search. Maybe someone who has some knowledge regarding this can leave a comment about it. Take it as true that the rich do re-invest a higher portion of their income than the non-rich. On the one hand, they're reinvesting it, so while it does briefly go through their hands and they receive the interest on the investment, they're really just acting as a proxy to distribute capital wherever it's going to go. On the other hand, they're investing in the most profitable ventures which will probably belong to other rich people who already have the substantial capital needed to cover the considerable overhead cost of a highly productive venture. So it's not clear how much this extra investment would "give back" to the population. Of course my knowledge of economics is pretty elementary and there very well could be a flaw somewhere.
There are obvious reasons why greater equality (not absolute equality) is good including reduced social tension, preservation of upward mobility, and an abundance of philosophical / ethical inquiry defending it as an inherent good that I can't possibly begin to address here. Historically, the existence of classes possessing fixed, differing levels of status has led to conflict and revolution. One of the things that has made America great and probably revolution-free is the lack of a class-system, which, wherever it existed in Europe, was subsequently overthrown in favor of democratic, capitalist systems. While today there is no danger of anything resembling a formal class system re-appearing, policies should be constructed so as to mitigate possibility of the formation of a de facto economic class division. I believe in policies formed with this aim in mind.
There are more things I feel strongly about, but since I'm tired of this post they will have to wait to future posts.
When I started this blog I assumed it would provide my friends and family with an entertaining and hopefully interesting read, and maybe the occasional google user with highly sough "1st-person commentary" - and maybe even some information. But I never expected to be providing self-help information. But if you do a search on Google (right now!) for "How to be less narcissistic" I come up on top! Even over the thousands of websites that actually address this issue (total list 150,000!). Ironically, the better an authority I become on being less narcissistic, the less narcissistic I become. Or so google says. Or something like that... But hopefully the guy in search of that info has, uh, gotten something about it.
Update: I've been bumped to number six. Aw, Shucks.
A pet peeve of mine is when people conflate opinion with fact. For instance, can I have an opinion on whether the explosives in Iraq disappeared before or after fighting began? No. The explosives were either there or they weren't. I can present evidence why one of them is the case, but I can't have an opinion on it. Now, can I have an opinion on whether Bush is a good president? Yes. This seems to be a question that is a matter of opinion.
I absolutely hate when people write editorials about facts, essentially making an assertion that something unknown is or is not the case, and then retreats from the duty of rigorously defending their case under the auspices of it just being their opinion. You know this kind of maneuver. Don't get me wrong. There isn't anything wrong with including facts for the purpose of supporting your opinion, or making an entire editorial a list of facts if that's what you want to do, but you can't opine on a fact. At this point, my relationship with editorials, specifically the kind you find written in major newspapers, is like the relationship you have with a bad soap opera series. You don't have any respect for the content, but you keep coming back week after week out of some sick fascination with the fact that they just keep going.
Msnbc doesn't seem to share my opinion (pop quiz: is it proper to call this an opinion?) about opinions and hence proliferates fundamentally flawed onlines polls asking things like "Will the Iraq elections take place in January?" What!? What's the point of doing a survey on that? Does anyone know what will happen in January? Does anyone have any useful information that could lead to a useful prediction?
I would classify this as soliciting an opinion in the place of what is, in fact, a fact. Philosophically speaking, whether elections will take place in January is a fact, although it could be categorized in the proper sense as a "future fact" that is not presently evident. (I believe you can categorize it this way without assuming any kind of determinism.) But what the survey is asking for, I would argue, is an opinion, because:
1) No one knows what will happen at a future date. The best anyone can do is to make sound factually-based predictions. Unless you are operating under the assumption of a very strong determinism, which would say that it is possible to know what is going to happen in the future by surveying conditions at a given point in time, it cannot be said that a prediction of any future event is "a fact."
2) Even if strong determinism were assumed, respondents to online polls are absolutely ignorant of anything factually relevant to the issue being polled. Therefore, even if there were factual basis for a certain answer, people's answers are not likely to reflect it.
Thus these online polls are guilty of opining on facts, which to me is a capital intellectual sin. This is eclipsed only by my second pet peeve: people posting academic work (or college entrance essays (!?)) on their personal websites. It might be entertaining to come up with other equally irrelevant poll questions; I'll leave that as an intellectual exercise to the reader.
Ok, I've got a ton of work to do, which means...I've got to update this biznotch. For some reason, whenever I have the most work to do I'm at my most independently creative. For me it kind of functions as a reason to never quite have all my work done. Then again, another result of never having your work done is that you're slightly pre-occupied all the time, which is unavoidable no matter how flippant an attitude you may have.
Ok, most importantly, the results of the election. Bush was marginally elected by a very divided electorate. Which is fine. Compromise is what makes democracy work. Although on an intellectual level I like the idea of a multi-party parliamentary system better. However I don't have enough political knowledge back that up with substantive arguments, other than that it ensures the government more closely represents the will of the people. But in America it's winner take all. So when Kerry called Bush to formally concede the presidency and congratulate him, he made a point of mentioning how divided the country was, and how he thought that was a bad thing, which I think we all can agree on. And I think Bush agreed, which is good.
So then Bush goes and releases this 6 point plan for his domestic agenda:
Continuing to raise accountability standards in public schools.
Upholding "our deepest values and family and faith.”
Halving the record $413 billion deficit.
Expanding health care coverage.
Seeking a constitutional ban on gay marriage.
Moving “this goodhearted nation toward a culture of life,” a reference to the abortion issue.
Ok, well the first point calls a giant federal program, something liberals can relate to. And I honestly don't know the liberal / conservative breakdown on supporting the "No Child Left Behind" program. I do know that it's generally recognized to be a big failure, one reason being that it is massively underfunded, and I can't imagine liberals feeling feeling any differently. And what does the second point mean? Not even in policy terms, but as a statement? How do you uphold family (other than issuing a constitutional ammendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, which is already covered by point 5)? Then there's the last two points which address the two most divisive domestic issues. I honestly am surprised that the consitutional ban on gay marriage is in there again. I really thought it was intended to energize the base for the election and was not a heartfelt policy. I do like halving the deficit though because of how lofty and ambitious it is.
So this does seem like a hard agenda to unify people on but we'll see.
The second thing I've been thinking about is girls and math. Nothing lewd or anything. Specifically, you know the common wisdom that girls are not as good at math as boys. Well there are two issues, whether that's fundamentally true, and then if so, why it's true. On the first point, I tend to believe that to the extent that being good at math equates with performing in math, girls are not as good, but in the sense of raw potential, I don't think there's a difference. It think the first point is undebatable, that girls' performance is not as high. There are many reasons put forth to explain this. Some have it that this is a social phenomenon. This argument has it that girls are just not encouraged to be good at math, so few become good at it. This may explain why some girls who are good at math are just as good as boys who are good at math, but the overall distribution is shifted much more toward the not good end. Some allege it has something to do with visual-spatial skills. The predicates of this argument have merit: men do have superior visual-spatial abilities. There's an evolutionary reason for this. If you buy into the story that long ago men were hunters who navigated and traveled and women were gatherers who traveled shorter distances, it makes sense that men would be selected for spatial and directional abilities, and that if these traits are in fact sex-linked, they would be propogated along to their male ancestors. The problem I see with this argument is that the assumed link between spatial abilities and math not clear. For instance, does it take spatial ability to understand algebra or calculus? The answer isn't clear to me. Granted that many of math's most useful applications are physical, but men could just be more drawn to physical things which seems an easier and more direct answer than they somehow use their spatial inclinations to be good at math. According to the simpler is more likely to be correct law, I support the former view.
This is slightly off-topic, but there's a fascinating theory for why more often men show exceptionally high ability in things like math that demand a high IQ. According to the general theory, some of the alleles that are important for intelligence are X-linked, meaning that they only appear on the X chromosome. For those who need brushing up on their biology, males have both an X and a Y chromosome, and females have two X chromosomes. Therefore male descendents of males get their Y chromosome from their father and their X from their mother, and female descendants get an X chromosome from each parent.
There is a strong and a weak version of this theory. The strong version of an X-linked intelligence trait theory would have it that genes encoding for high intelligence only occur on the X chromosome, meaning that they are only transmitted to a male through the mother, which can be considered disproved since if it were true, pedigrees of smart families would show a clear X-linked pattern, which would be quite evident and vindicate the theory conclusively. But there is a weaker form of the X-linked theory that makes more sense. Imagine if X chromosome alleles had proportionally more importance in determining intelligence. Then any mutation or natural variation that should happen to occur in the single X chromosome of a male would automatically be manifested. Of course the probability of a single fluke occurence is greater than the probability of two coincident fluke occurences, so for this reason there would be more variability in male intelligence than in female intelligence, where the actual expression of the X chromosome trait is somehow a combination of two inherited X alleles. The prediction of greater variability is exactly consistent with the established observation that there are more male mentally retarded people, and more male creative geniuses, but the mean intellectual ability for the sexes is the same. From an evolutionary perspective, if intelligence is assumed to be an adaptive trait, then it makes sense why the most transparent variability of the trait occurs in the more easily "selected" sex. (Whereas the man can be selected at the tip of a hat, thousands of times over in the course of a year, a female can, theoretically, only be selected once every nine months or so.)
Of course this doesn't seem to offer explanation for the higher apparent mean math ability in men. But I have a personal view, although it might be mundane compared to the alternatives. Men like competition, especially the type where if someone wins someone else loses. It just goes along with our competitive nature, which can also probably be explained as some sort of evolutionary thing. The thing that distinguishes math and, to a slightly lesser extent, science from other forms of intellectual discourse is that there is a right answer and a wrong answer. English is self-evidently vague and, to me, relativistic. Even with something like language, in which women are purported to be more adept, there isn't one correct way to say something, there are multiple ways of saying it, within the constraints of proper grammar. Math dovetails nicely with guys' desire to be right about stuff. To be the one person who gets the solution to a problem while everyone else is in sheepish ingorance is kind of appealing for dominance-loving creatures, though admittedly this isn't an admirable trait. One corollary of this theory would be you'd find more guys interested in things like trivia. And it's true that there are more guys on shows like Jeopardy than girls.
All right, now that I've got that out of my system maybe I'll get something done...
People tell me I don't do enough personal entries (you don't do any -- pub), and this is a blog after all, so here you go. What follows is the rapid-fire unraveling of my brain.
Readers of this blog will likely know that I occasionally have exhibited symptoms of disillusionment and apathy towards school. However, I feel that some degree of questioning things and questioning your path is healthy by the time one reaches college age. College, unlike high school, is a choice. You choose which college to attend, you choose what field of knowledge to pursue, you choose what classes to take. Many people choose to go to college over doing other financially lucrative things (albeit very few). Therefore I'm not concerned that I'm questioning the point of what I'm doing. So I've been thinking about the purpose of school lately, not in a social or institutional sense, but in the sense of what use it serves the student. For most all professions, you have to go through lots of school if you want to be succeessful. So school is a kind of have-to, which is fine with me. It sure beats going to work at some menial deathly boring that you have to work years at in order to even have the chance of advancing to something more interesting. It also tops a system where good jobs are awarded according to connections, family origin, reciprocal favors or worse. So I'm not complaining about it. But does it give you something else? Is it reasonable to expect school to provide other kinds of fulfillment than just social advancement? Or is it most reasonable to just try to make it as pleasant as possible a step in the larger rat race of which it is a part?
Other than there are three things I can identify that school gives us:
1) School teaches you knowledge. Going to school provides you with a unique opportunity in your life in which you can focus exclusively on enriching your knowledge. Therefore one should look at school as a convenient time in which to pursue what fascinates you.
This is all well and good. If you're interested in a science and your school has a decent science program then the classroom format can be valuable in faciliating the process of learning your subject. Many sciences are hard, and for most students the learning process is aided by the rigor and scrutiny provided by regular problem sets. If you're at a university, then you have to the advantage of being at the frontier of knowledge where new knowledge is being created daily. That clearly presents an educational advantage over just reading books, if nothing else because the newest knowledge hasn't found its way into books yet. At the very least it's inspiring and makes one want to explore knowledge to be in such an environment.
If you're interested in humanities, the concept of knowledge is defined a little differently. Whereas most science course end up presenting a fairly standardized curriculum across different schools, humanities courses that deal with similar topics are more variable; it's harder to say what it means to be a properly educated English major, or even U.S. history major for that matter, than a physics major. Although, even for an English major there is a core group of works that are considered neccessary to be familiar with in order for one to be considered well educated. Now, assuming that the contents of this group is common knowledge, it's a little less clear to me what one gains from reading these works as part of a course syllabus as opposed to on one's own, since understanding or grasping the material doesn't require the same kind of repetition and rigor that a difficult scientific concept would. But I can already hear the response that the knowledge you derive from an English course, for instance, isn't contained within the pages of the book, it comes from the interpretation of what's in the book. And to that end, the more interpretations the better. Hence, the discussion aspect of a literature course is essential to the knowledge derived from the course. Another argument might be that the wisdom derived from literature derives from the way it is to be understood in relation to life, and thus more it is discussed, the more insights it can provide.
All in all, I'm not sure how much greater an advantage for acquiring new knowledge school offers a motivated and capable person. The resources are out there, now more accessible than ever, and if one is motivated enough to seek them out and assemble them sensibly, and capable enough to learn and understand without the oversight of teachers, I'm convinced one can get just as good an education without college. Where school does present an advantage is in providing that structure and incentive, and providing a pedagogical structure. The pardox is that the people I know who are truly expert in the field they are studying - that is, those who have the most to gain from school - are also the ones who are most self-directed, and with the most self-derived interest, and thus most likely to do well for themselves without the guidance of school. What school provides for people who have the interest, the means, and the will to succeed in an area of life, or an area of inquiry, is still unclear to me. Still, you do get four years to just learn things and recognition for having done it. That's worth something.
2. School is a challenge, specifically a challenge for your intellect.
This is only appealing to a particular type of person. But it's probably true that most high acheivers got there in part because they enjoy flexing their intellectual muscle. Most (not all) people would prefer a challenging job to an unchallenging job. People like challenge. There's an inherent joy in testing the limits of one's capabilities. If you perform well, you get to feel good about yourself and that you are a smart person. There's a certain wrestling with things mentally that school provides, and although it's not as dramatic as say the lone scientist deriving on his own the fundamental formula of nature, or solving a hitherto unsolved problem, it still feels good to feel yourself making intellectual progress.
3. Doing well in school is a way to prove yourself to those who would want to hire you or otherwise evaluate you.
Now the one that everybody cares about. It would be hugely inefficient to introduce inexperienced workers directly into the labor force without first being evaluated in a neutral medium like school and placed accordingly. While the system does have its flaws, things that school measures like discipline, intelligence, dedication are highly correlative with traits that result in success in the workplace. As such, the better you do in school, the more you prove that you would be capable of doing whatever you want to do after school. For types who are always concerned about the next step, this is a highly motivating reason to do well and work hard in school, even if they're not particularly interested in the course material.
There are many different values and purposes to school, and often I find it hard to understand how they're packed together in the same institution. I definitely have a difficult time balancing these objectives, usually because I focus too narrowly on one of them, and try to make the whole thing into something it isn't. I think that if you honor only one of them, you're not going to be successful: If you see it as only an education and have any semblance of independence of thought you're going to be frustrated when school requirements and pedagogy conflict with your personal educational aspirations. If you see it as just a mental challenge then you'll come out not having learned anything useful to take into the next stage. If you regard it as just a prelude to your future career you'll find the work more tedious and pointless than other people who are fascinated by the subject matter and will possibly burn out. Of course, I'm sure I'm missing some other equally important purposes of school but I want to keep this short and these are just my immediate thoughts.
Seeing as my role as blogger is to correct the excesses and misapprehensions of the press (yeah right -- pub), I'm going to take a stab at this sensationalist title, which was frankly long overdue and we all knew was coming when word of this Bin Laden tape got out.
Here we have this headline from Msnbc that says, quite frighteningly, "Neither Bush nor Kerry can protect U.S., he says." That sounds like a presage of an attack or something, right? Well, if you read the actual statement it was excerpted from, the message is totally different: “...your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al-Qaida. Your security is in your own hands.” By comparison the real message is much less sinister. It's almost kind of... empowering, but more on that later...
That being said, there are a few things worth noting about this tape. First, it's a rather undire message to be coming from the world's most wanted man. I mean, all his other tapes said things like "you will be attacked everywhere" and so on. Why would this one clearly not try to inspire the usual fear of his network's awesome capability to do harm to the United States and its interests?
In general, there are many good reasons, as a terrorist, to try to come off as frightening. For one it helps to accomplish your political agenda, whatever it may be. Given that terrorists, by definition, use fear as a means to accomplish a certain end, usually political, it would seem that part of the terrorist method would be to extend the fear as much as possible through the most efficient means possible. Now, no one can succeed at manipulating outcomes if they go on tape with their masks and AK-47s threatening to chop the head off of a voodoo doll representing the U.S., or something; you need to be able to back up your threats with credible evidence that you can cause damage. But, once you have already established yourself as a credible threat, what has, to put it in economic terms, the greater marginal return to marginal cost? Planning and executing another 20 year-long operation to blow up major skyscrapers within the United States, or appearing on TV with your guns behind you and making the threat, either explicitly or implicitly, that more attacks are possible or are already on the way? Now, the latter option is much cheaper (costing approximately 30 cents, assuming the guns are fake), and probably almost as effective at engendering fear as an actual attack, at least until it's overused.
But the second reason terrorists would want to appear intimidating is that it helps the network organizationally. Terrorist networks like Al Qaeda do not have the luxury of instituting a draft when membership gets low. They rely on there being a pool of people who want to join the network because they are impressed with the its effectiveness, power, intimidatingness, success, message or whatever. In order to inspire the proper jihad spirit in prospective recruits, the network must appear impressive, directed and formidable, and the only way to do that in today's global environment is to advertise it via these tapes that are sent to international news networks and played all over the world. So there are at least two really good reasons why Al Qaeda would want to appear on the offensive and intimidating, especially in these videos. So why do they not come off as intimidating in this latest video. I have a theory, but it's just a theory. Here it is:
The question of whether or not Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups wish to influence the election has been the topic of much speculation. Some say they want Kerry, some contend they want Bush, and it ususally depends on which side you're on. There are approximately equivalent, and stupid, reasons given in defense of each view: the terrorists want to see Kerry because he is weak and wishy-washy and terrorists love a flip-flopper (it makes all their terrorizing rewarding)! Or, equivalently, they want to see Bush win because he will almost certainly be more inflammatory to the Islamic world, which will help stoke the fire of dissension and anger that provides their organizations with an abundant flow of new recruits. Both of these assumptions seem farcical. Sometimes the argument is extended to "Osama bin Laden wants Kerry, therefore vote for Bush," which is when I usually tune out. After all, the rightly extolled idea of not letting terrorists influence domestic political events means it is equally reprehensible to vote based on which candidate a terrorist would allegedly not want.
The line of reasoning that says that whoever the terrorists want must be inherently against our interest assumes that we are living in a zero-sum world with the terrorists. I'm not so sure this is true. Setting aside the legitimate point that it is morally reprehensible to concede anything to terrorists (this is a kind of retribution argument), I'm not so sure it's correct to say that because the terrorists want something, that means its bad for us. Now, let me make clear what I mean: Insofar as the terrorists are unconditionally committed to our destruction this is obviously a zero-sum game. Similarly, insofar as terrorists are committed to the Islamist vision of a world-wide Islamic theocratic utopia, thereby making it impossible for the United States to exist, our interests are completely opposed. Sadly, I'm not a scholar in these things so I don't know to what extent terrorists are unequivocally committed to these goals. But when it comes to certain discrete demands made by terrorists, which are often also widespread throughout the muslim world, I'm not so sure how much the outcome is either they win or we win. For instance, one of Al Qaeda's big grievances is to ensure the rights of the Palestinians in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It's in our long-term best interest to be even-handed in the peace process, because the idea that we're not is poisonous when spread through the muslim world in particular. Some may argue that radical muslim clerics are going to preach in their maddrassas that the U.S. is partial and evil either way, but why don't we take a legitimate critique away from them? Why not at least have the objective facts on our side that we are doing our best to broker a deal with both sides' interests taken equally into account? Why not give the rest of the world reason to alienate these demagogues for what they are, hate-spewing liars? Or take Al Qaeda's demand that America remove troops from Saudi Arabia. While it may have some strategic value for us to have troops stationed there, it's their land, and if they don't want troops stationed on it for religious or nationalistic regions then that's their call. We may have lost a minor strategic asset, but it's worth the cost of pissing off hundreds of thousands or millions of muslims. Given the choice between keeping troops in Saudi Arabia or taking them out, I'd say taking them out is the correct policy. It has to be a very minor asset. So what I'm trying to say is that just because terrorists would want something doesn't necessarilly make it a bad policy. Therefore, the fact that a terrorist prefers a candidate should not make that candidate a bad choice.
But back to the tape...say for some reason Osama bin Laden did prefer one candidate, and did wish to influence the election in his favor...who would he likely favor? Of all the arguments for each side, which I won't list here and with which I am only vaguely familiar, the ones I find most compelling on the whole are the ones pointing to Kerry. Admittedly, this assumption is the weakest part of my argument and I can't defend it very well. But take for demonstration's sake that he would prefer Kerry; then the question is, if he desired to influence the elections toward Kerry, how would he go about effecting that outcome?
Speculators have long feared a similar situation here to what happened in Spain four days before their presidential election. But an attack isn't going to work, because it has already happened once, and the American people are prepared for it. The first time is sudden and everybody is confused and acting on emotions, but the event has been analyzed enough and people have been educated enough that, if the American people were to change who they elected based on a terrorist strike, they would be aware that they were capitulating to terrorism, and I doubt that's something the American people would accept. Plus, I'm not so sure the American people are capable like the Spaniards of being intimidated into changing their vote by a clearly manipulative attack. Secondly, if anything, a terrorist strike could only help Bush. Remember how Americans unified around the president when the first terrorist attacks happened...why wouldn't the same thing happen again if there was another terrorist attack? There would be arguments for both sides, and an infinite chain of reverse and counter-reverse psychological inference would ensue, but regardless of the real motivation, the perceived target of the attack would be Bush. He's the incumbent for one, and any attack perpetrated while he is in office is an attack on his country under his watch, regardless of how close election day is. So people would either resist being manipulated altogether or if anything further rally around Bush.
If you were trying to sway the election towards Kerry, I think it's safe to say that you would try as hard as possible to avoid the appearance that you were trying to intimidate into a particular result. Bush officials, who have greater prominence than Kerry's officials and thus greater sway, would use an attack as an opportunity to say "Look, they're trying to intimidate you, they're trying to manipulate your decisions. Don't let them. (Vote for George W. Bush)." Since if he tries to blow up people into submission or comes off in any was as trying to influence the outcome it's likely to either not work or backfire in this way, the only way Osama could influence the election for Kerry, it strikes me, is to make an indirect statement about George Bush's policies, and remind the public of George Bush's failures, without seeming to be trying to influence the election. And who better to remind the public of Bush's primary failures than Osama Bin Laden himself. It then also makes sense why this was the first tape in many years in which Osama Bin Laden appears in person, as if to add extra emphasis to the fact that he's still alive.
Really the whole tape is a criticism of Bush or his policies. I'll post a few of the relevant excerpts below:
"...the main reasons” for the Sept. 11 attacks “are still existing to repeat what happened before.”
...
“Do not play with our security, and spontaneously you will secure yourself.”
...
“We never thought that the high commander of the U.S. armies would leave 50,000 of his citizens in both towers to face the horrors by themselves when they most needed him because it seemed to distract his attention from listening to the girl telling him about her goat butting,” he says, referring to Bush’s decision to wait more than seven minutes after being informed of the attacks before leaving an elementary room classroom in Florida where a student was reading a story called “The Pet Goat.”
“It appeared to him that a little girl’s talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God.”
It's possible, however, that as most informed people agree bin Laden would not prefer either candidate over the other, because his visions are so extreme that nothing short of a complete Islamic revolution would satisfy them. This is certainly possible, but what would the purpose of releasing a tape right before election day be then?
Update: Everyone seems to concur that the release of this tape helps Bush. Fine, but if that's true, that means that if you take for granted
a) Osama does everything for a reason and knows what he's doing
b) the (mostly GOP) acknowledgements that the release of this tape helps Bush
then you conclude that Osama prefers Bush to Kerry, which is an interesting twist given the whole GOP "Osama prefers Kerry" demagoguery thing.
For those of you who are considering voting for Ralph Nader this election, this may be of interest. Other will probably disregard it. HOWEVER, let me just first say that I personally would not vote for Nader because the number of votes he gets doesn't affect his ability to be heard, except perhaps in a negative light if he again sways a close election. However, the question of whether or not Ralph should be allowed to run is one I think everyone, except the most rabid liberal intelligentsia types, can agree on. Of course he has the right to run, and everyone has the right to vote for him! The more interesting and I think overlooked question is should he be given fair and commensurate coverage despite the unviability of his candidacy. Currently he is not, seeing as I have yet to see one serious piece of coverage of Ralph's platform, what he stands for, and his reasons for running produced by the mainstream media (note that I don't read many news sources very frequently though), and no one of any prominence seems to have a problem with this fact. This, to my mind, is very unfortunate. A visit to his site will show you, he's a serious man (Ok, this isn't serious, though it is quite amusing) with a serious message. Whereas George Bush is a not serious man who has a message, and John Kerry is a serious man who doesn't have a message.
In terms of substance, he has by far the most substantial platform of the three major candidates to draw on, with the most well-developed policies and most attention given to real solutions. Now, I should say at this point that I know many of his solutions aren't viable in the context of Washington and domestic politics. But that's not the point because, although a running candidate would never say such a thing, I think it's pretty clear that Nader is running a kind of campaign of osmosis, not to become the president.
Let's face it: at this point in history both major parties are pitifully poor at entertaining real solutions to real problems, or holding any kind of a discussion that could lead to better solutions to real problems. Both are too busy trying to discredit the other party while making sure they don't appear "un-American," or other things that could open them up to attack. Here's a perfect example from CNN of the kind of things that substitute for constructive discourse. It's not their fault, that's just what the voting public responds to, and each party wants to win. The current two-party status quo is a little like the prisoner's dilemma: both parties, trying to protect their rear-ends, choose an action that leads to a collectively less desirable outcome. The Democrats would prefer to talk about the orgins of Islamic extremism and how maybe a purely military policy doesn't address some of the factors causing it, or maybe how our unconditional support for Israel's current policies (which in itself I find an understandable and probably correct stance) without much offered in the way of explanation might not help the cause of winning over the hearts and minds of the next generation of Arab and Muslim leaders. But they can't, because when there's an element of fear at play in the issue, the Republicans can call them on it and paint them as the weaker party, and they will lose. Likewise, through some obscene distortion in reality, if the Republicans were to adopt such a stance, the Democrats would have just as much an incentive to exploit it for their own political gain. Further, if Kerry wanted to talk about things other than winning wars, the Republicans would accuse him of not being serious about terrorism, so he devotes an entire convention to talking about winning the war in Iraq which, admittedly is important, but is it really worth the entire convention? The end result is that in trying to make sure they win, the two parties create an outcome that is unduly focused on topics relevant to the fears of the American people. That's why I'm so much in favor of PUBLICIZING a candidacy like Nader's that has no chance of winning. There are plenty of ideas out there that make lots of sense but would otherwise never be introduced into the political arena because it is not in either party's interest to do so.
Third-parties are generally useful. With the status quo of campaigning, air-time is the great commodity for politicians, and it is available in limited quantities. Because there's too little exposure time and too much bickering, whenever a politician gets the chance to present himself and communicate something to the American people, he's going to use the time to cover his highest-priority issues, which will usually be defending his record and attacking the other guy's record, because there is a greater immediate return to time expended. The reality of politics is it seems if one side makes an accusation, the other side HAS to respond, or else they lose the exchange by default. Therefore, the more mudslinging there is, the more answering to mudslinging there is and the less time there is to bring up potentially more important issues. A third-party is immune to mudslinging because it has nothing to lose, and therefore won't have to subjugate political substance to expediency.
What's the point of this rant (I find myself asking that a lot)? I guess it's that there's nothing wrong with not voting for Nader, and there's nothing wrong with educating people about the possible consequences of voting for Nader, but there is something wrong with the complete lack of coverage he gets.
