Happy New Year! I spent yesterday replacing all the tires on my car, since one had gone flat while I was visiting Paris and my parents in Virginia over the Christmas break.
With my recent obsessive interest in climate change, mass extinctions and the like, I should have something to say about the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. But all I have to say for now is: send some money to help people! I like Doctors Without Borders, so I gave them 200 bucks.
One often wonders, with charities, how much of your money is actually going to the bigshots who run the organization. According to their 2003 financial statement, about 86% of their money goes to program services, while 12% goes to fundraising and 2% goes to management. They get an A rating (though not an A+) from American Institute of Philanthropy, and 3 stars (though not 4) from Charity Navigator.
It reassures me that Doctors Without Borders make their financial information really easy to find on their website: you click "about us" and there it is. Try to find this sort of information for the American Red Cross, starting from their homepage! Click "about us"... and you won't find it. In theory you can find it in just three clicks, but you have to be clever.
Just a couple of small items today...
Here's a book that looks good:
Jared Diamond has also thought a lot about why human history unfolded differently on different continents - and he won a Pulitzer for this book, whose title explains his theory quite succinctly:
Also, alpheccar recommended this site to me:
For example, you may know that Michael Crichton's new novel State of Fear is based on the premise that human-induced global warming is just a bunch of hot air - something like a massive conspiracy of scientists bent on terrifying the public. Some hacks have seized on this book to push their own agendas. For example, George Will writes:
In today's segmented America, Michael Crichton's new novel "State of Fear" might seem to be just reading for red states. Granted, a character resembling Martin Sheen -- Crichton's character is a prototypical Hollywood liberal who plays the president in a television series -- meets an appropriately grisly fate. But blue states, too -- no, especially -- need Crichton's fable about the ecology of public opinion.... and so on. Of course, it's a good sign that people like Will have now been reduced to citing science fiction novels instead of actual scientists to bolster their arguments! And he's just funny when he tut-tuts about "monetary, political, and even emotional" motives for alarmism, while ignoring the vastly greater motives of all three kinds for complacency: the whole geopolitical and economic status quo rests upon the fossil fuel economy, after all. So, in a sane world we could safely ignore Will. But Crichton presents some surprising actual data in his book, which needs to be analyzed. It's good, therefore that the folks at RealClimate are addressing him point for point:"State of Fear," with a first printing of 1.5 million copies, resembles Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" -- about 6 million copies sold since 1957 -- as a political broadside woven into an entertaining story. But whereas Rand had only an idea -- a good one (capitalism is splendid), but only one -- Crichton has information. "State of Fear" is the world's first page-turner that people will want to read in one gulp (a long gulp -- 600 pages, counting appendices) even though it has lots of real scientific graphs, and footnotes citing journals such as Progress in Physical Geography and Transactions of the American Geophysical Union.
Crichton's subject is today's fear that global warming will cause catastrophic climate change, a belief now so conventional that it seems to require no supporting data. Crichton's subject is also how conventional wisdom is manufactured in a credulous and media-drenched society.
Various factions have interests -- monetary, political, even emotional -- in cultivating fears. The fears invariably seem to require more government subservience to environmentalists, and more government supervision of our lives.
Crichton's villains are environmental hysterics who are innocent of information but overflowing with certitudes and moral vanity. His heroes resemble Navy SEALs tenured at MIT, foiling the villains with guns and graphs.
The villains are frustrated because the data do not prove that global warming is causing rising sea levels and other catastrophes. So they concoct high-tech schemes to manufacture catastrophes they can ascribe to global warming -- flash floods in the American West, the calving of an Antarctic iceberg 100 miles across and a tsunami that would roar 500 miles an hour across the Pacific and smash California's coast on the last day of a Los Angeles conference on abrupt climate change.
The theory of global warming -- Crichton says warming has amounted to just half a degree Celsius in 100 years -- is that "greenhouse gases," particularly carbon dioxide, trap heat on Earth, causing ... well, no one knows what, or when. Crichton's heroic skeptics delight in noting things like the decline of global temperature from 1940 to 1970. And that since 1970 glaciers in Iceland have been advancing. And that Antarctica is getting colder and its ice is getting thicker.
There's a good article in the MIT magazine "Technology Review" about the war that may start between Microsoft and Google:
While the battle for supreme control over information in this "information age" is fascinating - in a mildly sickening sort of way - my eye was caught by a little chart that showed the amount of information in various forms. It pointed me to this source:
You have to be careful interpreting these figures. For example, all the information in the Washington Post newspaper in 2002 is far less than the information capacity of all the newsprint put out by the Washington Post of 2002 - because there are thousands of identical copies of each newspaper. I have tried to distinguish between these two by saying "capacity" for the latter sort of figure. For example, when I say 130 petabytes is the capacity of all audio tapes produced in 2002, this includes thousands of identical copies of some album by the Backstreet Boys, and also lots of blank tape. And, it's quite possible that I screwed up on some of the items above, because my source makes it a bit hard to tell what's what.
Furthermore, these figures don't count the fact that information in print, hard drives, DNA and so on is typically not compressed down to the Shannon limit. So, there's not as much info around as this chart suggests. For some figures that try to take compression into account, see How Much Information? 2003.
For example, this compression issue is especially important in my guess at the information in the human genome, and the genomes of all the people in the world. I didn't try to take into account the immense overlap in genetic information between different people, nor the repetitive stretches in human DNA. Here's how I did the calculation. Each of us has chromosomes with about 5 billion base pairs. Each base pair holds 2 bits of information: A, T, C, or G. That's 10 billion bits or 1.25 gigabytes. Times the roughly 6.5 billion people in the world now, we get about 8 x 1018 bytes, or 8 exabytes. But, if we wanted to store the complete genetic identity of everyone on hard drives, we could do it using data compression, because a lot of genes are the same from person to person.
And of course, some of these figures are rough order-of-magnitude guesses, like "all the words ever spoken by human beings".
It would be fun to know how much information is in people's brains, but I don't have the knowhow to estimate that!
I just read from an unreliable source that the human eye has a resolution equivalent to that of 127 million pixels (whatever that means), and an input rate of 1 gigabit per second. This source also said that the human brain can store 10 terabytes of information. But, I don't trust these figures at all without knowing how they were calculated.
I read somewhere else that the human brain has 1014 synapses. If each stored just one bit (not true), that would be about 10 terabytes.
I have put the above information on information on a separate webpage, together with a fun calculation: how much information there is in a raindrop! As you can probably tell, I like compiling charts of cool data just as much as I like crusading for social justice and a better way of life. The former keeps me happy.
But, in the same MIT magazine as the article about Google versus Microsoft, there's also an interesting article on "why progress doesn't boost happiness" - a theme I began discussing on October 22nd, 2003:
My interest in economics hasn't waned... I've just been too busy to write in this diary much, especially when I've been travelling, and more recently when the hard disk on my laptop died after a mysterious stroke. This happened the moment I tried to use the internet after returning from Vancouver; the last time I'd used the internet was in an airport in Seattle. At first I thought I'd picked up a virus there, but now I'm not sure - the disk may have been physically damaged.
All the data on this disk was lost. Luckily, most of it was also on my account on the UNIX system of the U.C. Riverside math department. In the process of setting up my laptop again from scratch, I switched from Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox - mainly because it works great, it handles math text better, and it's supposed to be safer - but also because it's nice to see Microsoft getting some competition in this market.
Anyway, I just read some interesting stuff about Joshua Greene, a postdoc in psychology at Princeton who is using functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan people's brains while they deal with ethical dilemmas. In certain dilemmas where ones "gut feeling" wars against more rational calculations - say, where killing a baby could save a town - it turns out that centers of the brain that deal with emotion are very active, but also the anterior cingulate cortex (an area involved in monitoring conflict) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (a region involved in abstract reasoning and cognitive control).
In an article published in Nature Reviews:
All this makes perfect sense to me, and it raises the issue of to what extent we should spend more energy to alleviate suffering close at hand, versus those far away. To what extent should we try to overcome our inherited instincts to help relatives and "the tribe", and to what extent are these instincts wise?
Interestingly, Joshua Greene did research with Amartya Sen as an undergraduate.
My friend the philosopher David Corfield wrote an interesting reply to my remarks above. I got to know him through his work on the philosophy of "real mathematics", which pays more attention than usual to what actual mathematicians are interested in. He's also interested in the ethics of mathematics - what makes some mathematical work better than others. So, here's what he has to say:
I see from your economics entry you're getting interested in ethics. The guy to read is Alasdair MacIntyre. After Virtue begins by getting us to imagine a time after a period in which science has been systematically destroyed, scientists, equipment, books, etc. Now, all we're left with are fragments of language, papers, pieces of equipment. There are still vestiges of scientific language in daily speech, but they're used totally unsystematically. This, says MacIntyre, is what has happened to moral thinking. A tradition of moral theorising from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, on to neo-platatonists such as Augustine, interpreters, Jewish and Islamic, of Aristotle, the great reconciliation of Augustine and Aristotle by Aquinas, has been laid to waste. The Enlightenment doesn't come out looking too clever.A bold thesis certainly. Strangely what he says about flourishing traditions and the necessary virtues rings very true of intellectual traditions:
A living tradition then is an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition. Within a tradition the pursuit of goods extends through generations, sometimes through many generations. Hence the individual's search for his or her good is generally and characteristically conducted within a context defined by those traditions of which the individual's life is a part, and this is true both of those goods which are internal to practices and of the goods of a single life. Once again the narrative phenomenon of embedding is crucial: the history of a practice in our time is generally and characteristically embedded in and made intelligible in terms of the larger and longer history of the tradition through which the practice in its present form was conveyed to us; the history of each of our own lives is generally and characteristically embedded in and made intelligible in terms of the larger and longer histories of a number of traditions. I have to say 'generally and characteristically' rather than 'always', for traditions decay, disintegrate and disappear. What then sustains and strengthens traditions? What weakens and destroys them?The answer in key part is: the exercise or the lack of exercise of the relevant virtues. The virtues find their point and purpose not only in sustaining those relationships necessary if the varieties of goods internal to practices are to be achieved and not only in sustaining the form of an individual life in which that individual may seek out his or her good as the good of his or her whole life, but also in sustaining those traditions which provide both practices and individual lives with their necessary historical context. Lack of justice, lack of truthfulness, lack of courage, lack of the relevant intellectual virtues - these corrupt traditions, just as they do those institutions and practices which derive their life from the traditions of which they are the contemporary embodiments. To recognize this is of course also to recognize the existence of an additional virtue, one whose importance is perhaps most obvious when it is least present, the virtue of having an adequate sense of the traditions to which one belongs or which confront one. This virtue is not to be confused with any form of conservative antiquarianism; I am not praising those who choose the conventional conservative role of laudator temporis acti. It is rather the case that an adequate sense of tradition manifests itself in a grasp of those future possibilities which the past has made available to the present. Living traditions, just because they continue a not-yet-completed narrative, confront a future whose determinate and determinable character, so far as it possesses any, derives from the past. (After Virtue: 222-3)
The Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases was signed by 187 countries on Feburary 16th! Notably absent were the United States and Australia.
New research in oceanography warns that global warming might actually cause a repeat of the Younger Dryas Event, in which melting ice reduced the salinity of the North Atlantic enough to shut down the thermohaline circulation that brings warm water to the shores of Northern Europe. I wrote about this possibility already on November 13th. Here is some news, from an article by Clive Cookson in today's Financial Times:
Scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California have been working for several years with colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to analyse the effects of global warming on the oceans. They combined computer modelling with millions of temperature and salinity readings, taken around the world at different depths over five decades.I don't know how bad such an event would be - and I guess nobody does - but during the Younger Dryas, temperatures in Northern Europe dropped 7 degrees Celsius in only 20 years, causing a miniature ice age with glaciers in Europe that lasted for about 1000 years before the Conveyor Belt restarted. So, "several degrees" might be a big deal. Or maybe not.The researchers released their conclusions on Friday at the American Association of the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington. They found that the warming signals in the oceans could only have been produced by the build-up of man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Non-human factors would have produced quite different effects.
The latest study to suggest that global warming is a real phenomenon, and one caused by human action, adds further weight to a body of scientific evidence that has been accumulating steadily.
Tim Barnett, the Scripps project leader, said previous attempts to show that human activities caused global warming had looked for evidence in the atmosphere. "But the atmosphere is the worst place to look for a global warming signal", he said. Ninety per cent of the energy from global warming has gone into the oceans and the oceans show its fingerprint much better than the atmosphere.
Prof Barnett added: "The debate over whether there is a global warming signal is over now at least for rational people". He urged the US administration to rethink its refusal to join the Kyoto Protocol, which took effect this week.
The Scripps scientists also looked at the likely climatic effects of the warming they observed. They highlighted the impact on regional water supplies, which would be severely reduced during the summer in places that depend on rivers fed by melting winter snow and glaciers such as western China and the South American Andes.
The conference also heard a gloomy analysis of the way the North Atlantic Ocean is reacting to global warming from Ruth Curry of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Her new study showed that vast amounts of fresh water more than 20,000 cubic kilometres have been added to the northernmost parts of the ocean over the past 40 years because the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets are melting.
According to Dr. Curry, the resulting change in the salinity balance of the water threatens to shut down the Ocean Conveyor Belt, which transfers heat from the tropics towards the polar regions through currents such as the Gulf Stream. If that happened, winter temperatures in northern Europe would fall by several degrees.
Yay! It seems there's a kind of "movement" of people working on the kind of economics I'd like to see - some of them call it "Post-Autistic Economics":
I haven't actually read much of this stuff yet to see how much I agree with it, but I like the look of this book they're advertising:
Multinationals are everywhere except in economic theories and economics departments. - Grazia Ietto-Gillies
The close to monopoly position of neoclassical economics is not compatible with normal ideas about democracy. Economics is science in some senses, but is at the same time ideology. Limiting economics to the neoclassical paradigm means imposing a serious ideological limitation. Departments of economics become political propaganda centers. - Peter Söderbaum, author of "Ecological Economics"and best of all:
In Smith is a forgotten lesson that the foundation of success in creating a constructive classical liberal society lies in the individuals adherence to a common social ethics. According to Smith, virtue serves as the fine polish to the wheels of society while vice is like the vile rust, which makes them jar and grate upon one another. Indeed, Smith sought to distance his thesis from that of Mandeville and the implication that individual greed could be the basis for social good. Smith's deistic universe might not sit well with those of post-enlightenment sensibilities, but his understanding that virtue is a prerequisite for a desirable market society remains an important lesson. For Smith ethics is the hero - not self-interest or greed - for it is ethics that defend social intercourse from the Hobbesian chaos. - Charles K. WilberI learned about this website from Colin Danby, who wrote:
Greetings.Ran across your interesting site. If ucr is UC Riverside there are folks there in econ who might interest you.
Have you read Phil Mirowski's work? More Heat than Light is the classic and gives you a sense of the assumptions (19th-century physics) that mainstream econ descends from, but all of Mirowski is interesting.
And there are kinds of econ that start from very different sets of assumptions, for example Post Keynesian theory. Timothy Mitchell's Rule of Experts is a very smart exploration of how economic expertise came to do what it does.
You might also like the Post-Autistic Economics site: http://www.paecon.net/
Best, Colin
Colin Danby also gave me some other links:
Lots of reading for me to do!
Last night I read this short paper:
Quoting the aptly named Shaun Heap:
Few cannot be puzzled by the appetite of the affluent. The absence of any measurable effect of income growth on happiness is only one part of what is strange here. The failure to take measures that will address the global warming that has been and continues to be generated by output growth increasingly appears like some form of death wish. There are also more local pathologies. The highest earners in the UK and the US actually work longer hours than their counterparts 20 years ago. So the pursuit of more stuff is seemingly ornamental because the getting of it is now cutting into the time that we have left to play with it. To put the issue bluntly, if we could for one moment step outside the squirrel wheel, surely we would conclude that we are interested in output growth to an extent which casts doubt on whether we actually know where our interests lie anymore. For these reasons, the subject of Galbraith's book is even more timely now than it was in the late 1950s.This leads us right into some deep issues which I've been trying mince around so far in this diary, precisely because of their bottomless depth. It's hard to say just a little bit about these issues, but let me try.How relevant, though, is Galbraith's analysis of the dynamics of the squirrel wheel for the contemporary world?
I have two criticisms here. The first is perhaps best summarised as a failure to anticipate the problem of identity. I believe that this holds the key to understanding why consumption is so central to our lives. There are two parts to this observation. One is that while one kind of insecurity does disappear with full employment, the collapse of traditional bonds of one kind or another in the modern world has made personal identity more fluid and with this fluidity comes another kind of insecurity. It is no coincidence that people talk now of identity politics. The term reflects the way in which identity has become problematic. So Galbraith was wrong to assume that full employment pushes insecurity into the background.
At the same time, consumer goods have more clearly come to form a language system. This is the important insight that anthropology gives economics. We use consumer goods to say things about ourselves and as our identity has become less well fixed through traditional bonds of one kind or another, we have had increasing recourse to the world of goods to do it for us. (Incidentally, this means that advertising is not so much a conspiracy, as Galbraith seems to hint: it actually works with the grain of human nature. And while making parenthetic remarks, it is perhaps worth adding that it is not just the advertising industry which plays such a crucial role, it is the whole set of mass media industries.)
There's a feeling of inexorability to the current economic system. Corporations feel obliged to maximize their short-run profits and keep their stock prices high, almost as if this were a law of physics. People keep trying to earn more money, buy more stuff. Any thought of changing this system seems laughably impractical. Even if we needed to change the system to prevent a mass extinction of species, or the melting of the polar caps, we'd have trouble believing it possible. One might as well try to talk a falling rock out of its course.
Neoclassical economics, with its utility-maximizing rational agents, offers a nice story to explain why things must work this way... or why they should work this way - and would, if we could only get rid of those annoying "market inefficiences". But, the world didn't always work this way - and it still doesn't, if you look carefully.
Especially in an affluent society, the job of maximizing our utility is just one side of the story. An equally important and difficult job is determining our utility function - or in less tortured language, figuring out what we want. When we are starving and cold, this is not so hard. But it gets harder and harder as we become more wealthy and mere survival ceases to be such a big issue. We wind up flailing around, searching for meaning, or happiness, or at least a good time, or... something!
Indeed, for many of us, this problem is so intractable that we latch on to whatever plausible goals and desires are on offer - at least some of the time, anyway. Corporations are eager to define happiness for us: if you buy our product, you will be happy. And we are eager to accept these definitions, or at least give them a try. But of course, when we try to buy happiness, it costs money.
Working hard to make money so we can buy more things - this has a plausible ring to it if we're trying to figure out what will make us happy. It's concrete and fairly well-defined. It may not seem very noble, but in our culture that makes it seem all the more "natural". Almost as if it were a law of nature: everyone wants more, no matter how much they have. The fact that this doesn't make us more happy past a certain point - we're actually quite willing to turn a blind eye to this. After all, life becomes very complicated when we try to figure out what really makes us happy: it's a slippery, endlessly elusive question!
And so, there's a sense in which the rigid rules of neoclassical economics do a very good job of saving us from chaos, by structuring our lives and our society, and by making our behavior as homo economicus seem sensible and natural. But there's a huge price to pay for this.
By coincidence, the day after writing the above stuff about economics and our slippery sense of identity, I bumped into a interesting article about the neurobiology of consumer decisions:
Children are exposed to 40,000 commercials every year. By the age of 18 months, they can recognize logos. By 10, they have memorized 300 to 400 brands, according to Boston College sociologist Juliet B. Schor. The average adult can recognize thousands.Unfortunately but inevitably, the people most interested in this research are... advertisers! Quartz and his Caltech colleagues have been negotiating with a marketing company called Lieberman Research Worldwide to sell brain-scanning services to advertisers.
"We are embedded in an enormous sea of cultural messages, the neural influences of which we poorly understand," said neuroscientist Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "We don't understand the way in which messages can gain control over our behavior."
That is starting to change. By monitoring brain activity directly, researchers are discovering the unexpected ways in which the brain makes up its mind.
Many seemingly rational decisions are reflexive snap judgments, shaped by networks of neurons acting in concert. These orchestras of cells are surprisingly malleable, readily responding to the influence of experience.
Moreover, researchers suspect that the inescapable influence of marketing does more than change minds. It may alter the brain.
Just as practicing the piano or learning to read can physically alter areas of the cerebral cortex, the intense, repetitive stimulation of marketing might shape susceptible brain circuits involved in decision-making.
These inquiries into consumer behavior harness techniques pioneered for medical diagnosis: positron emission tomography, which measures the brain's chemical activity; magneto-encephalography, which measures the brain's magnetic fields; and functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures blood flow around working neurons.
"This is a way of prying open the box and seeing what is inside," said psychologist Jonathan Cohen, director of Princeton University's Center for the Study of Brain, Mind & Behavior.
Inside the Caltech scanner, faces flashed before the subject's eyes.
Each one was famous — an easily recognized emblem of celebrity marketed as heavily as any designer label.
Each triggered a response in the volunteer's brain, recorded by Steven Quartz and Anette Asp with Caltech's $2.5-million functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI) and then weighed against the volunteer's responses to a 14-page questionnaire.
Uma Thurman. Cool.
Barbra Streisand. Uncool.
Justin Timberlake. Uncool.
Al Pacino. Cool.
Patrick Swayze. Very uncool.
The volunteer's brain cells became a focus group.
In his mind's eye, the celebrities triggered many of the same circuits as images of shoes, cars, chairs, wristwatches, sunglasses, handbags and water bottles.
For all their differences, objects and celebrity faces were reduced to a common denominator: a spasm of synapses in a part of the cortex called Brodmann's area 10, a region associated with a sense of identity and social image.
"On first pass, there might seem to be nothing in common between cool sunglasses, cool dishwashers and cool people," Asp said. "But there is something that these brains are recognizing — some common dimension."
None of these neural responses come consciously to mind when a shopper is browsing brand labels.
Much of what was traditionally considered the product of logic and deliberation is actually driven by primitive brain systems responsible for emotional responses — automatic processes that evolved to manage conflicts between sex, hunger, thirst and the other elemental appetites of survival.
In recent years, researchers have discovered that regions such as the amygdala, the hippocampus and the hypothalamus are dynamic switchboards that blend memory, emotions and biochemical triggers. These interconnected neurons shape the ways that fear, panic, exhilaration and social pressure influence the choices people make.
As researchers have learned to map the anatomy of behavior, they realized that the brain — a 3-pound constellation of relationships between billions of cells, shaped by the interplay of genes and environment — is more malleable than anyone had guessed.
Lattices of neurons are linked by pathways forged, then continually revised, by experience. So intimate is this feedback that there is no way to separate the brain's neural structure from the influence of the world that surrounds it.
In that sense, some people may indeed be born to shop; but others may be molded into consumers.
"We think there are branded brains," Asp said.
The Caltech experiment, funded with a $1-million grant from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, seemed to detect a part of the brain susceptible to such influences.
After analyzing test data from 21 men and women, Quartz and Asp discovered that consumer products triggered distinctive brain patterns that allowed them to classify people in broad psychological categories.
At one extreme were people whose brains responded intensely to "cool" products and celebrities with bursts of activity in Brodmann's area 10 — but reacted not at all to the "uncool" displays.
The scientists dubbed these people "cool fools," likely to be impulsive or compulsive shoppers.
At the other extreme were people whose brains reacted only to the unstylish items, a pattern that fits well with people who tend to be anxious, apprehensive or neurotic, Quartz said.
The reaction in both sets of brains was intense. The brains reflexively sought to fulfill desires or avoid humiliation.
Asp, a Swedish researcher who once majored in industrial design, volunteered for the fMRI probe. The scanner revealed a personality quite at odds with her own sense of self.
She searched the scanner's images for the excited neurons in her prefrontal cortex that would reflect her enthusiasm for Prada and other high-fashion goods. Instead, the scanner detected the agitation in brain areas associated with anxiety and pain, suggesting she found it embarrassing to be seen in something insufficiently stylish.
It was fear, not admiration, that motivated her fashion sense.
"I thought I would be a cool fool," she said. "I was very uncool."
For much more, check out the reading material for Steve Quartz's course on the Neural Foundations of Social Science!
Here's an interesting article on Richard Thaler's work on "behavioral economics":
This is drifting from economics into sociology and psychology, but it's way too interesting not to include:
Let me quote some:
Psycho-physiology is an important part of this research. It's something that Bob Levenson brought to the search initially, and then I got trained in psycho-physiology as well. And the reason we're interested in what was happening in the body is that there's an intimate connection between what's happening to the autonomic nervous system and what happening in the brain, and how well people can take in information - how well they can just process information - for example, just being able to listen to your partner - that is much harder when your heart rate is above the intrinsic rate of the heart, which is around a hundred to a hundred and five beats a minute for most people with a healthy heart.At that point we know, from Loren Rowling's work, that people start secreting adrenalin, and then they get into a state of diffuse physiological arousal (or DPA), so their heart is beating faster, it's contracting harder, the arteries start getting constricted, blood is drawn away from the periphery into the trunk, the blood supply shuts down to the gut and the kidney, and all kinds of other things are happening - people are sweating, and things are happening in the brain that create a tunnel vision, one in which they perceive everything as a threat and they react as if they have been put in great danger by this conversation.
All of which are really great conditions for running away from a predator, or fighting aggressively to protect the tribe. And survival. So when you have less blood in the periphery you create what Malcolm Gladwell calls a bloodless armor that lets you strike without really bleeding too much, or run away without hurting yourself too much. But in the context of a discussion with somebody you love clearly this DPA is not very functional. And we found in fact that physiological arousal is one of the best predictors of what happens to that relationship. That's why it predicts.
And men and women are somewhat different, not a lot, but enough, which is another fascinating puzzle, because we find that if the woman is driving the husband's heart rate, that predicts the dissolution of the relationship - and not the other way around. Now why should that be? Why should it be that DPA, the general physiological arousal of men is a worse indicator of the fate of a heterosexual relationship than that of the woman? Unless she's been abused, physically or sexually, when the arousal of both of them is a really good indicator.
Because men are different. Men have a lot of trouble when they reach a state of vigilance, when they think there's real danger, they have a lot of trouble calming down. and there's probably an evolutionary history to that. Because it functioned very well for our hominid ancestors, anthropologists think, for men to stay physiologically aroused and vigilant, in cooperative hunting and protecting the tribe, which was a role that males had very early in our evolutionary history. Whereas women had the opposite sort of role, in terms of survival of the species, those women reproduced more effectively who had the milk-let-down reflex, which only happens when oxytocin is secreted in the brain, it only happens when women - as any woman knows who's been breast-feeding, you have to be able to calm down and relax. But oxytocin is also the hormone of affiliation. So women have developed this sort of social order, caring for one another, helping one another, and affiliating, that also allows them to really calm down and have the milk let-down reflex. And so - it's one of nature's jokes. Women can calm down, men can't; they stay aroused and vigilant.
So it's a real challenge, now that relationships, in the last couple of centuries, have started becoming important in terms of affection and nurturance and support - and we're having fathers come back into the equation in a big way in baby's life. Physiology becomes really critical in this whole thing. A provocative finding from Alyson Shapiro's recent dissertation is that if we take a look at how a couple argues when the woman is in the sixth month of pregnancy, we can predict over half the variation in the baby, the three-month-old baby's vagal tone, which is the ability of the vagus nerve, the major nerve of the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, which is responsible for establishing calm and focusing attention. That vagus nerve in the baby is eventually going to be working well if the parents, during pregnancy, are fighting with each other constructively. That takes us into fetal development, a whole new realm of inquiry.
And if they're not, if they're fighting destructively, that fetus, that baby is on a different longitudinal course - its neurological development is already handicapped - from the time it's born. The fetal development is really affecting the function of this vagus nerve, the tenth cranial nerve. Now this destructive process that happens to two thirds of all couples can be reversed, just in a 10-hour workshop the parents take in the last trimester of pregnancy. One of the things that's very interesting is that with psychological interventions you can change neurological growth and development, and emotional growth and development in the baby. This makes for more empathetic children - and more empathetic infants as well. Daniel Siegel is beginning to help us understand how this happens, how to integrate attachment theory, relationship science and brain neurophysiology and growth. It's a rich and exciting new field, what Jaak Panksepp calls this "affective neuroscience."
We find that there are differences between men and women and the way you to study these differences is independent of sexual orientation. You have to study gay and Lesbian couples who are committed to each other as well as heterosexual couples who are committed to each other, and try and match things as much as you can, like how long they've been together, and the quality of their relationship. And we've done that, and we find that there are two gender differences that really hold up.
One is that if a man presents an issue, to either a man he's in love with or a woman he's in love with, the man is angrier presenting the issue. And we find that when a woman receives an issue, either from a woman she loves or a man she loves, she is much more sad than a man would be receiving that same issue. It's about anger and sadness. Why? Remember, Bowlby taught us that attachment and loss and grief are part of the same system. So women are finely tuned to attaching and connecting and to sadness and loss and grief, while men are attuned to defend, stay vigilant, attack, to anger. My friend Levenson did an acoustic startle study (that's where you shoot of a blank pistol behind someone's head when they least expect it). Men had a bigger heart rate reactivity and took longer to recover, which we would expect, but what even more interesting is that when you asked people what they were feeling, women were scared and men were angry.
It's weird how when you get interested in something, all of a sudden you keep seeing it all over the place. Here's another interesting article about work on "neuroeconomics":
Here are more detailed papers on this subject that you can get online:
I deliberately avoid getting involved in the "culture wars" and "war on terrorism" that are tearing up the United States right now. So, I won't comment on the Terry Schiavo euthanasia case, or Bill Frist's attempt to eliminate filibusters of controversial judicial nominees, or the controversy of Newsweek's reports about a Koran flushed down a toilet, or the battle over allowing the Ten Commandments to be posted in courtrooms, or the battle over gay marriage, or the leaked British memo proving that Bush had made up his mind to invade Iraq by July 2002....
However, I will say this. I'm glad people are noticing that this crap makes the US a less desirable place to live for many people - especially the creative sorts who play such a big role in our economy:
And most of all, I think about it whenever I read the paper and see ideological battles between liberals and conservatives sucking away energy from more important things.
Here's an book about how socially responsible firms can survive in competitive environments:
The Amazon jungle is burning:
Rain Forest Myth Goes Up in Smoke Over the Amazon
By Henry Chu
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 8, 2005
REMANSO TALISMA, Brazil - The death of a myth begins with stinging eyes and heaving chests here on the edge of the Amazon rain forest.
Every year, fire envelops the jungle, throwing up inky billows of smoke that blot out the sun. Animals flee. Residents for miles around cry and wheeze, while the weak and unlucky develop serious respiratory problems.
When the burning season strikes, life and health in the Amazon falter, and color drains out of the riotous green landscape as great swaths of majestic trees, creeping vines, delicate bromeliads and hardy ferns are reduced to blackened stubble.
But more than just the land, these annual blazes also lay waste to a cherished notion that has roosted in the popular mind for decades: the idea of the rain forest as the "lungs of the world."
Ever since saving the Amazon became a fashionable cause in the 1980s, championed by Madonna, Sting and other celebrities, the jungle has consistently been likened to an enormous recycling plant that slurps up carbon dioxide and pumps out oxygen for us all to breathe, from Los Angeles to London to Lusaka.
Think again, scientists say.
Far from cleaning up the atmosphere, the Amazon is now a major source for pollution. Rampant burning and deforestation, mostly at the hands of illegal loggers and of ranchers, release hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the skies each year.
Brazil now ranks as one of the world's leading producers of greenhouse gases, thanks in large part to the Amazon, the source for up to two-thirds of the country's emissions.
"It's not the lungs of the world," said Daniel Nepstad, an American ecologist who has studied the Amazon for 20 years. "It's probably burning up more oxygen now than it's producing."
Scientists such as Nepstad prefer to think of the world's largest tropical rain forest as Earth's air conditioner. The region's humidity, they say, is vital in climate regulation and cooling patterns in South America and perhaps as far away as Europe.
The Amazon's role as a source of pollution, not a remover of it, is directly linked to the galloping rate of destruction in the region over the last quarter-century.
The dense and steamy habitat straddles eight countries and is home to up to 20% of the world's fresh water and 30% of its plant and animal species.
Brazil's portion accounts for more than half the entire ecosystem. Official figures show that, on average, 7,500 square miles of rain forest were chopped and burned down in Brazil every year between 1979 and 2004. Over the 25 years, it's as if a forest the size of California had disappeared from the face of the Earth.
Such encroachment on virgin land is theoretically illegal or subject to tough regulation, but the government here lacks the resources some say the will to enforce environmental protection laws.
Loggers are typically the first to punch through, hacking crude roads and harvesting all the precious hardwoods they can find. One gang of woodcutters, in cahoots with crooked environmental-protection officials, cut down nearly $371 million worth of timber from 1990 until it was busted in the biggest sting operation of its kind in Brazil, authorities said last week.
Close on the loggers' heels are big ranchers and farmers, who torch the remaining vegetation to clear the way for cattle and crops such as soy, Brazil's new star export, which is claiming ever larger quantities of land.
Prime burning period in the Amazon runs from July to January, the dry season. In 2004, government satellite images of the forest registered 165,440 "hot spots," fires whose flames can shoot as high as 100 feet and push temperatures beyond 2,500 degrees.
These tremendous blazes spew about 200 million tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere each year, which translates into several times that amount in actual carbon dioxide. In contrast, Brazil's consumption of fossil fuels, the chief source of greenhouse gases worldwide, creates less than half what the fires send up.
During burning season, dark palls of smoke settle over parts of the jungle for days.
"It becomes hard to see, and your eyes have problems. The kids all get sick and have trouble breathing," said Joaquim Borges da Silva, 42, a rural worker who lives in a small encampment here in Remanso Talisma, on the forest's outskirts.
Smoke grew so thick at one point last year that two cars on the road into the camp barreled into each other head-on, killing two people, Borges da Silva said. The fires also kill the game that workers and small settlers rely on for food.
He pointed out a charred tract of land, littered with stumps and felled trees that looked like so many toothpicks, where tractors working 24 hours a day for a month cleared 1,000 acres last year. Trucks rumbled in and out, loaded down with mahogany and cedar.
Farmers subsequently burned the area. Two months later, at the first rain, a small plane swooped in and dropped seeds.
Even with the burning of the rain forest, Brazil's annual output of carbon pollutants is tiny compared with that of the U.S., which produces nearly 6 billion tons.
[ ...much omitted... ]
Researchers are trying to determine what role the Amazon plays in keeping the region cool and relatively moist, which in turn has a hugely beneficial effect on agriculture ironically, the same interests trying to cut down the forest.
The theory goes that the jungle's humidity, as much as water from the ocean, is instrumental in creating rain over both the Amazon River basin and other parts of South America, particularly western and southern Brazil, where much of this country's agricultural production is concentrated.
"If you took away the Amazon, you'd take away half of the rain that falls on Brazil," Moutinho said. "You can imagine the problems that would ensue."
A shift in climate here could cause a ripple effect, disrupting weather patterns in Antarctica, the Eastern U.S. and even Western Europe, some scholars believe.
This is what worries ecologists about the continued destruction of the rain forest: not the supposed effect on the global air supply, but rather on the weather.
"Concern about the environmental aspects of deforestation now is more over climate rather than [carbon emissions] or whether the Amazon is the 'lungs of the world,'" said Paulo Barreto, a researcher with the Amazon Institute of People and Environment.
"For sure, the Amazon is not the lungs of the world," he added. "It never was."
The Amazon forests are burning as loggers and agriculture take over. On the bright side, sugar cane plantations in Brazil have largely freed this country from dependence on foreign oil! I don't know how much forest is being torn down to plant sugar cane, but it goes to show how everything in this world is a muddled mix of good and bad.
There are also complicated issues involving subsidies for the sugar industries in Brazil, Argentina and elsewhere:Homegrown Fuel Supply Helps Brazil Breathe Easy
By Marla Dickerson
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 15, 2005
SAO PAULO, Brazil - While Americans fume at high gasoline prices, Carolina Rossini is the essence of Brazilian cool at the pump.
Like tens of thousands of her countrymen, she is running her zippy red Fiat on pure ethanol extracted from Brazilian sugar cane. On a recent morning in Brazil's largest city, the clear liquid was selling for less than half the price of gasoline, a sweet deal for the 26-year-old lawyer.
"You save money and you don't pollute as much," said Rossini, who paid about $18 to fill her nearly empty tank. "And it's a good thing that the product is made here."
Three decades after the first oil shock rocked its economy, Brazil has nearly shaken its dependence on foreign oil. More vulnerable than even the United States when the 1973 Middle East oil embargo sent gas prices soaring, Brazil vowed to kick its import habit. Now the country that once relied on outsiders to supply 80% of its crude is projected to be self-sufficient within a few years.
Developing its own oil reserves was crucial to Brazil's long-term strategy. Its domestic petroleum production has increased sevenfold since 1980. But the Western Hemisphere's second-largest economy also has embraced renewable energy with a vengeance.
Today about 40% of all the fuel that Brazilians pump into their vehicles is ethanol, known here as alcohol, compared with about 3% in the United States. No other nation is using ethanol on such a vast scale. The change wasn't easy or cheap. But 30 years later, Brazil is reaping the return on its investment in energy security while the U.S. writes checks for $50-a-barrel foreign oil.
"Brazil showed it can be done, but it takes commitment and leadership," said Roland Hwang, vehicles policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco. In the U.S. "we're paying the highest prices at the pump since 1981, and we are sending over $100 billion overseas a year to import oil instead of keeping that money in the United States. Clearly Brazil has something to teach us."
Much of Brazil's ethanol usage stems from a government mandate requiring all gasoline to contain 25% alcohol. Vehicles that ran solely on ethanol fell out of favor here in the 1990s because of an alcohol shortage that pushed drivers back to gas-powered cars. But thanks to a new generation of vehicles that can run on gasoline, ethanol or any combination of those two fuels, more motorists like Rossini are filling up with 100% alcohol again to beat high gas prices.
The exploding popularity of these so-called flex-fuel vehicles is reverberating across Brazil's farming sector. Private investors are channeling billions of dollars into sugar and alcohol production, creating much-needed jobs in the countryside. Environmentalists support the expansion of this clean, renewable fuel that has helped improve air quality in Brazil's cities. Consumers are tickled to have a choice at the filling station.
Officials from other nations are flocking to Brazil to examine its methods. Most will find Brazil's sugar-fuel strategy impossible to replicate. Few countries possess the acreage and climate needed to produce sugar cane in gargantuan quantities, much less the infrastructure to get it to the pump.
Still, some Brazilians said their government's commitment to ditching imports and to jump-starting homegrown energy industries were the real keys to Brazil's success.
"It's a combination of strong public policy and the free market," said Mauricio Tolmasquim, president of a federal energy research agency based in Rio de Janeiro. "That's the Brazilian secret."
Brazil's fortunes have been tied to sugar since the Portuguese conquerors found that their tropical colony boasted ideal conditions for cultivating the tall, grassy plant. Brazilians produce and eat more cane sugar than any people on the planet, so the notion of using it to power their vehicles was a natural. After all, Henry Ford once viewed ethanol, which can be made from corn, barley and other crops, as a strong contender to fuel the Model T.
But the discovery of cheap, abundant petroleum changed everything. Like much of the rest of the world, Brazil guzzled imported crude until the 1970s oil shocks put its economy over a barrel. So totally reliant was Brazil on foreign oil that surging prices wreaked havoc on its balance of trade. That led to massive borrowing, huge deficits and, eventually, hyperinflation and a devaluation of its currency.
Thus the Brazilian government, then a military dictatorship, launched efforts in the mid-1970s to wean the nation off imports. Those efforts included its National Alcohol Program, known as Proalcool.
"To become less dependent was a matter of life and death," said Jose Goldemberg, secretary of the environment for the state of Sao Paulo.
With the help of public subsidies and tax breaks, farmers planted more sugar cane, investors built distilleries to convert the crop to ethanol and automakers designed cars to run on 100% alcohol. The government financed a mammoth distribution network to get the fuel to gas stations and kept alcohol prices low to entice consumers. It worked. By the mid-1980s, virtually all new cars sold in Brazil ran exclusively on ethanol.
But a 1989 shortage coupled with low gas prices soured many on the renewable fuel. Sales of alcohol-only cars tumbled in the 1990s, and the government gradually withdrew its subsidies and lifted price controls on ethanol. Demand stalled.
Some critics at the time chalked it up to the inevitable consequences of government meddling. But today many laud Brazil's Proalcool program for creating a viable domestic market for ethanol, and for spawning an industry with tremendous export potential that now employs more than 1 million Brazilians.
Meanwhile, ethanol remains little more than a boutique fuel in the United States. Although the U.S. is the world's second-largest ethanol maker, producing 3.4 billion gallons last year compared with around 4 billion gallons for Brazil, ethanol's main use is as a gasoline oxygenate to boost air quality rather than as a serious replacement for foreign oil. However, high gas prices have some farm belt legislators pushing Congress to mandate greater use of domestic corn-based ethanol in the nation's fuel supply to reduce oil consumption.
Virtually all cars sold in the U.S. since the early 1980s can run on gasoline containing as much as 10% ethanol. In addition, there are an estimated 5 million flex-fuel vehicles already on U.S. roads that can burn a mixture as high as 85% ethanol. But big logistical and political hurdles remain. Only a few hundred of the nation's approximately 169,000 retail gas stations are equipped to sell so-called E85 fuel. Nationwide distribution would require station owners to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in special tanks and pumps.
Although U.S. ethanol makers say they could easily double their output to meet any increase in demand, experts say that's still a drop in the bucket compared with the tens of billions of gallons that would be needed annually to displace meaningful amounts of oil. The U.S. industry is loath to give up tariffs that protect it from cheaper alcohol from Brazil.
Meanwhile, some environmentalists say feedstock such as grasses and municipal waste offer much more promise than corn. But huge investments in research are needed to get the costs down for this so-called cellulosic ethanol.
What most can agree on is that Brazil is an example of what might have been if America had seriously committed itself 30 years ago to renewable energy.
"If we would have spent one-hundredth of the money that we have spent to send tanks around the world to protect our oil supplies we would already be using cellulosic ethanol," said Michael Bryan, chief executive of BBI International, a Colorado-based bio-fuels consulting company.
Although public support was crucial in getting Brazil's program up and running, the private sector is now driving growth with flex-fuel cars.
At Volkswagen's sprawling Anchieta plant near Sao Paulo, the gleaming Fox and Polo models inching down the assembly line look just like regular cars. The only immediate clue that they are revolutionizing the Brazilian auto market is the TotalFlex logos on their back windshields.
The company was the first to unveil dual-fuel vehicles in Brazil in March 2003. The technology has proven to be such a hit with consumers that in a little more than two years the company has shifted nearly 90% of its domestic production to flex-fuel capability.
"It was a big bang in the market," Volkswagen spokeswoman Junia Nogueira de Sa said.
Equipped with a single fuel system, these vehicles employ sensors that allow the engine to adjust to gasoline and alcohol in any combination. Flex-fuel vehicles don't cost any more than regular gasoline-powered models. The only visible difference under the hood is a tiny auxiliary fuel tank that holds a bit of gasoline to aid starting on cold days, a common problem with the old alcohol-only models.
Today, a half dozen carmakers, including General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co., offer dual-fuel versions of their vehicles in Brazil, and more are on the way. Consumers bought around 48,000 of the vehicles the first year they were available in 2003, representing about 4% of total car sales. That figure quickly jumped to 328,000 cars, or 22% of the total volume, in 2004, and last month nearly half of the new cars sold were flex vehicles. Analysts predict that dual-fuel technology will easily dominate the market within a few years.
Cars aren't the only things being powered by ethanol in Brazil. Small planes such as crop-dusters are converting to alcohol. And Brazil's electrical grid, which experienced a severe shortage in 2001 because of a drought in its vital hydroelectric sector, is getting a charge from sugar.
In contrast to U.S. corn-based ethanol, which requires substantial amounts of fossil fuel to plant, harvest and distill, Brazil's industry uses crushed sugar cane stalks known as bagasse to feed the steam boilers that power its mills and distilleries. The process is environmentally friendly and so efficient that these centers are generating more energy than they can use. Ethanol producers are supplying Brazil's grid with more than 600 megawatts of electricity. The near-term potential is at least 10 times that.
[more stuff....]
The big reason the United States is doing so badly on environmental issues is that the Bush administration is in bed with polluting industries - in a truly shameless, egregious way.
You may have read how Bush hired Philip Cooney, a lobbyist from the American Petroleum Institute, to be the chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
And you may have read how Cooney doctored scientific reports to downplay the effects of global warming:
You can see more examples here and here:
You may also have read how Cooney suddenly resigned when this was discovered - for "completely unrelated" reasons, of course: "He has accumulated many weeks of leave, and so he decided to resign and take the summer off to spend some time with his family", according to presidential spokeswoman Erin Healy, who thinks we're a pack of idiots.
And now, what has Cooney done while spending time with his family? He's started to work for Exxon Mobil!
The main reason we know about Cooney's dirty tricks is that earlier this spring, Richard Piltz resigned in disgust from the U. S. Climate Change Science Program - and sent out a memo explaining why. He explained how the Bush administration has systematically suppressed the findings of the National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change. In particular, he explained how Cooney changed a document to "create an enhanced sense of scientific uncertainty about climate change and its implications".
And what were the findings of the National Assessment? Read them here:
Revealed: How Oil Giant Influenced Bush
White House sought advice from Exxon on Kyoto stance
By John Vidal
Environment Editor for The GuardianJune 8, 2005
President's George Bush's decision not to sign the United States up to the Kyoto global warming treaty was partly a result of pressure from ExxonMobil, the world's most powerful oil company, and other industries, according to US State Department papers seen by the Guardian.
The documents, which emerged as Tony Blair visited the White House for discussions on climate change before next month's G8 meeting, reinforce widely-held suspicions of how close the company is to the administration and its role in helping to formulate US policy.
In briefing papers given before meetings to the US under-secretary of state, Paula Dobriansky, between 2001 and 2004, the administration is found thanking Exxon executives for the company's "active involvement" in helping to determine climate change policy, and also seeking its advice on what climate change policies the company might find acceptable.
Other papers suggest that Ms Dobriansky should sound out Exxon executives and other anti-Kyoto business groups on potential alternatives to Kyoto.
Until now Exxon has publicly maintained that it had no involvement in the US government's rejection of Kyoto. But the documents, obtained by Greenpeace under US freedom of information legislation, suggest this is not the case.
"Potus [president of the United States] rejected Kyoto in part based on input from you [the Global Climate Coalition]," says one briefing note before Ms Dobriansky's meeting with the GCC, the main anti-Kyoto US industry group, which was dominated by Exxon.
The papers further state that the White House considered Exxon "among the companies most actively and prominently opposed to binding approaches [like Kyoto] to cut greenhouse gas emissions".
But in evidence to the UK House of Lords science and technology committee in 2003, Exxon's head of public affairs, Nick Thomas, said: "I think we can say categorically we have not campaigned with the United States government or any other government to take any sort of position over Kyoto."
Exxon, officially the US's most valuable company valued at $379bn earlier this year, is seen in the papers to share the White House's unwavering scepticism of international efforts to address climate change.
The documents, which reflect unanimity between the company and the US administration on the need for more global warming science and the unacceptable costs of Kyoto, state that Exxon believes that joining Kyoto "would be unjustifiably drastic and premature".
Speaking of Exxon - I ran into a great series of articles in the magazine Mother Jones on how Exxon Mobil has been raising doubts about global warming by paying fake "experts" to question its existence. While nobody outside the United States takes this crap seriously, American public discourse has been seriously distorted by it. Check it out!
Using this information, you can see how Exxon is bankrolling bogus "experts" like these:
Click on the photos to see what these guys are saying. Then see how much Exxon is paying them to say it.
A bit more about the three rascals shown above. If we want to understand how economic forces run the world, one thing we need to think about is people like these:
The Competitive Enterprise Institute is a front for corporations opposed to safety and environmental regulations. It has received $870,000 from Exxon Mobil since 2002.
He's the founder of techcentralstation.com, which received $95,000 for "climate change support" in 2003. He's also a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, which has received $485,000 from Exxon since 2002.
He's a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, which received $60,000 from Exxon in 2003; he's a writer at techcentralstation.com, which received $95,000 for "climate change support" from Exxon in 2003, and he's a contributing writer for the George C. Marshall Institute, which received $185,000 for "climate change public information and policy research" in 2002-2003.
Summer's here, and it's hot - about 96 in Riverside today, they say. That's actually nothing much for around here, but it's been a cool wet year so far, so it comes as a bit of a shock. With lots of plant growth earlier in the spring, I'm mainly worried about when the autumn, when things dry out and we get fires. If it doesn't get too hot and windy, we may not have a repeat of the 2003 fires.
Anyway - while hot, it's very beautiful and peaceful in my garden next to the hills. The baby hawks are practicing gliding.
This diary has been pretty downbeat so far, as I become aware in more and more detail of what I'd already known: a feedback loop of economic forces is pushing us down the road to disaster. But, the universe has passed through many crises before - look at the Permian extinction, for example!
So, to me the question is not whether we'll make it through this, but how. In what style? Surprisingly well, or severely damaged?
I use the term "we" in the broadest sense here, from paramecia to people to cyborgs... we're all in it together.
Here's a hopeful vision by a true visionary:
If we handle the huge transition correctly, it will be worth cheering. In 50 years, nature will be less oppressed, culture will be wiser, government will take new and improved forms, industrial systems will be more efficient and capable, and business will be less like a rigged casino. Purveyors of art, fashion, and design will see what went on nowadays and bust a gut laughing in derision. Our children and grandchildren will get up in the morning, look at the news, and instead of flinching in terror, they will see the edifying spectacle of the world's brightest people transparently solving the world's worst problems. This sounds utopian, but it could soon be everyday life.As for "bust a gut laughing" we don't need to wait 50 years for that. But anyway, Sterling says that over the long timeline he's imagining, there are only 3 technologies worth our attention - none of which has been invented. He writes:To achieve this victory, we need to understand technology with a depth of maturity that humans have never shown before. We tend to obsess over newfangled discoveries: the radio age, the space age, the atomic age, the computer age. We need to stop fussing over these tiny decades-long "ages" and think historically and comprehensively, employing technology as a means to preserve the web of life rather than for its own sake. The Iroquois considered the impacts of their decisions on seven generations, and so can we.
I most of all agree that we need the first sort of technology. There's a low-tech road to this: use existing sustainable farming practices to create recyclable products with minimum damage to the environment. And there's a high-tech road, which Sterling is imagining: use biotechnology and nanotechnology to figure out how to grow whatever we want.
- The first and most sensible technology is one that does its work and then eventually rots and goes away by itself. Its core materials and processes are biodegradable, so it's self-recycling. Writer Janine Benyus talks about "biomimetic" technologies; architect William McDonough describes "cradle to cradle" production systems. This means harnessing the same biochemical means of production that built the natural world and using them to create industries, cities, products, everything. It means the industrial use of new materials with the sturdy, no-nonsense qualities of spider silk, mussel glue, coral, seashell, horn, bone, and timber. It means room-temperature industrial assembly without toxics: no foundries, no pesticides, no mercury. When an object made by these processes is abandoned or worn out, it becomes part of the biosphere.
- The second kind of technology is monumental. These are artifacts built to outlast the ages artifacts with the honest, solid design demanded by, say, craftsman William Morris and art critic John Ruskin. In theory, monuments reduce the human load on the environment because they are "consumed" only over many generations.
- Then there's the third kind of decent technology, a cybernetic industrial base. Imagine a fully documented, trackable, searchable system in which the computer revolution has permeated manufacturing, inventorying, and transporting. Every manufactured object is bar-coded, scanned, and tracked throughout its lifetime. Consider a Dell computer: It doesn't even exist until you place your order, setting in motion a tightly controlled manufacturing and delivery process. (On a smaller scale, I can keep track of my writing„material stored on my hard disk using a Google search. Eventually I hope to be able to Google my misplaced car keys.) While this sounds like Big Brother, when it comes to managing the resources that go into industrial processes, such hyper-control creates great economic and environmental efficiency. Imagine a whirring technology that would keep full track of all its moving parts and, when its time inevitably came, recycle itself.
I'm sure the high-tech road is possible. Heck, we already have tomatoes that contain a vaccine against SARS, and scientists have figured out how to hack the genetic code in E. Coli to allow genes that code for an amino acid that's not one of the usual twenty. These innovations are just the tip of an enormous iceberg. The question is how to go down this "high road" in a reasonably safe way.
I would add " ...and whether we even should try", but I figure that's inevitable - I want to be practical here. A bunch of environmentalists seem too eager to clutch to a glorious past that we can never get back to - if it was ever really there. I have little use for "the ancient future", except as a delightful romantic vision. I'm glad the Sierra Club isn't too hidebound to let Sterling ponder the high-tech road in their magazine!
They also have a nice feature on inventors who are doing good things:
Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbanization, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.
The air is thick with smoke and occasional bits of ash as the fire season begins here in Southern California. There are big fires in Yucaipa and Chino tonight. There weren't so many last year, but the year before it was even worse... though later in the year: it could still get a lot worse than it is now, this year, since heavy rains created a lot of plant growth. It reminds me a bit about the burning of the Amazon rainforest, though it's very different: it's very arid here.
David Corfield emailed me an interesting link on the maximum power usage in a sustainable economy:
MacKay's site lists all sorts of caveats which might invalidate or at least modify his conclusions, but I think the basic point is an absolutely vital one: we're on an unsustainable course and will eventually be forced to change our habits in unpleasant ways if we don't do it more gracefully starting sooner.
I'm about to hog some power of my own: I'm flying to Sydney tomorrow, and then Canberra, and later Beijing. Then I'll wander around China and come back on August 16th. This diary will probably remain dormant until then, unless I find some time at a nice internet cafe. See ya! When I get back, I hope to have something to say about life in China.
Beijing is a huge city, mostly rather ugly, but dynamic and expanding, with a construction project on every block. On Tuesday I wandered around the ramshackle residential neighborhoods in the old downtown, especially a bunch directly north of Liulichang, a street where they sell inkstones, brushes, scrolls and jade.
These old neighborhoods are called "hutongs". They looked like slums to me, but I was assured they're not. The real slums are on the outskirts of town, outside the fifth ring road. The land these hutongs occupy is valuable and centrally located! The houses don't have private toilets, but there are public toilets ever few blocks. The buildings date to Ching or even Ming times; they're falling apart and ugly, not romantically old-fashioned as I had foolishly hoped. But, they're kept reasonably clean and lots of people grow vines in front. There are also lots of little hole-in-the-wall eateries which remind me of the less posh parts of Hong Kong: old folks sit there playing Chinese chess or chatting....
Some of the hutongs are getting torn down to make way for towering apartment complexes, but others are getting gentrified. Either way, they seem to be on their way out. So, I took a lot of pictures, some of which will eventually appear on my website.
My travel partner (Lisa Raphals) told me this is a civilization on its way up, bursting with energy, growing... while America is in decline. There's definitely some truth to this. People don't work as late here as they do in Hong Kong, where lots of little businesses stay open until midnight. But there's construction going on at all hours. People who come back to Beijing after a few years have trouble finding their way around anymore. Even the taxi drivers don't seem to know their way around that well. (Two tries to take a taxi to the Wudaokou stop on Line 13 both failed miserably. On the other hand, it turned out to be pretty hard to reach this stop by car.)
Unlike Hong Kong, there are lots of beggars here, at least in the more tourist-infested parts of town. Among the beggars are some scary-looking cripples, including a girl whose feet seem to have rotted away. I'm told these people are all run by Uighur gangs.
I also occasionally see families of a husband, wife and child begging for money, apparently down on their luck, but in a rather dramatically staged way that made me a bit suspicious the second or third time I saw them. The man, usually wearing wire-rimmed glasses and an outfit that brand him as a white-collar worker, bows in shame while holding his child, whose head lolls back as if ill. The wife sits motionless beside them, also bowed in shame. Their story is written out neatly on a piece of paper on the pavement in front of them. Some people stop to read it; most walk by. I don't give them any money - it could be a scam - but I feel pretty guilty about this. I do give some money to a blind fellow I see two days in a row playing an erhu in the subway.
(An erhu is a two-stringed Chinese fiddle.)
However, far more widespread than begging is hawking: if you walk past any store in the touristy part of town, you'll instantly have someone come out and try to lure you in. Some of this is quite annoying, some merely charming, but it's all impressively determined. In the US this sort of initiative is only found in TV ads, junk mail and spam.
I expected to see lots of bicycles, but while most major roads have bike lanes or even separate bike roads parallelling them, the bike traffic was less intense than the cars. People are buying lots of cars, pushing up the price of oil worldwide, polluting the city, and doing their bit to help global warming. There are also lots of new drivers, which might help excuse the terrifying tendency for cars to weave back and forth between lanes, jockeying for advantage and cutting off other drivers. Pedestrians routinely jaywalk across major multi-lane roads packed with cars moving at 40 miles per hour: it's almost necessary, because there aren't enough stoplights. I've heard there are lots of accidents, but I haven't actually seen any. I haven't even been run over myself, yet.
I still need to write about an interesting book that Leon Kuunders gave me... but here are two other book recommendations I just got.
Atte Marko Saarela from Finland writes:
If you're interested in the relation between psychology and politics, you might want to read a book called "What's the Matter with Kansas", which is about why so many people with middle and low income vote Republican against their own best interest.Sean Donovan Downes, a physics major at the University of Hawaii, writes:
I've been a reader of your site (math & physics) for a while, and have recently turned to your economics pages. Specifically
"See how Exxon is bankrolling 40 public policy groups and bogus 'experts' like these:"Almost immediately after reading Mr. Ebell's bio, I was reminded of a book that came out not more than a year ago: "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins. It was a pretty good read, and I learned a bit more than I expected to from it. Have you seen it? If not, I recommend it. I picked it up at Borders.
Aloha,
Sean
After visiting Beijing I spent 8 days in Chengdu, the capital of the province of Sichuan - better known to American fans of Chinese food as "Szechuan". Since my knowledge of Chinese geography was deplorably vague until this trip, I won't assume yours is any better! Sichuan is in the southwest of China, bordering Tibet, and Chengdu is a standard stop for tourists going to Tibet - which is a kind of restricted zone, since the Chinese government doesn't like Westerners who support the "free Tibet" policies of the Dalai Lama.
Chengdu itself is thoroughly Chinese, and more charming and relaxed than Beijing. It's hot and humid during the summer - downright steamy! - and it's packed with teahouses where people while away the hours playing mah jong. The downtown has some quite comfortable neighborhoods; poverty sets in as you enter the surrounding countryside. But when you go up into the misty mountains of northern or western Sichuan, you find lots of Tibetan communities, complete with yaks and compounds of houses bunched together and surrounded by prayer flags.
I took a tour of Huang Long and Jiu Zhai Go, two surreally beautiful parks in the north of Sichuan, and got a tiny little glimpse of this world. Check out my photos! Huang Long is famous for its terraced pools made out of travertine (calcium carbonate deposited by the water) - sort of an open-air cave. Jiu Zhai Go is famous for lakes with incredibly blue waters - perhaps the result of dissolved copper compounds? Near the parks everything was jam-packed with tourists, but almost all of them Chinese: I only saw about 5 whites there besides myself and my travel partner. So, while I experienced nothing at all like a "traditional Tibetan lifestyle", I did experience a traditional "Chinese-tourist-gawking-at-ethnic-minorities" lifestyle, which was almost as exotic to me, though less romantic.
The evening of local entertainment provided by the tour was somewhere between amusing and sad: some truly virtuosic singing and musicianship featuring some circular breathing, some updated versions of traditional dances - and some truly silly stuff, like 12 sexy maidens shimmying their hips while suggestively pumping butter churns to a feverish techno beat. In short, something for everyone.
It was all done in a spirit of good fun, and the locals even got their symbolic revenge by staging tug-of-war contests between male audience members at the end of the show, in which the top prize was to get married to one of the sexy maidens! The poor winner had to kiss her and carry her off stage... all in fun, of course. But, it reminded me of how subjugated peoples everywhere wind up eking out an existence by entertaining the conquerors with their quaint local customs. It's a kind of trivialized existence, sort of like a once-proud lion pacing back and forth in a cage. Alas, there's no turning back the hands of time, so I suppose one can only hope the Tibetans learn to ride the tide of change. In California the native Americans now make lots of money running casinos... though I'm not sure how much of this money the average folks living on the reservations ever wind up seeing.
There was an enlightening little argument between the tour guide (a very nice Tibetan guy) and a member of the tour who said that the Chinese needed a firm presence in Tibet because there was a lot of crime in Lhasa. (Yeah, right.) Later the tour guide said he was not at all in favor of Tibetan independence - a hopeless cause and a mess of trouble. Instead, he favored learning to work within the system.
I was also amused by how the international language of rap and techno featured in these touristic dance performances. Now that Tibetan variety shows for tourists in the backwoods of Sichuan play rap music, how can anyone consider this stuff "cutting-edge" or "rebellious" in the United States? I guess all that matters is that there are still plenty of Americans who hate it.
Anyway, I left Chengdu on Monday the 8th. Now I'm in
Shenzhen, a busy boom town
in the "special economic zone" in Guangdong
Province, on the coast right next to Hong Kong.
Free enterprise runs rampant here!
It's not at all like charming old Chengdu, but it's getting nicer,
I think, as people set up parks and other nice things. Certainly
it's nowhere near as scary or seedy as the Lonely Planet guide
makes it out to be. Maybe their writer never left the tourist
zone near the railway station, or maybe it's just gotten better
since the 1996 edition was written.
I took a long walk through a big park one night and saw old folks
walking around and kids
playing after dark. In a big US city everyone would be too scared
for this.
A lot of people in Shenzhen live in so-called "villages".
These are big tall apartment complexes right in the thick
of the city, but they have their own shops, restaurants,
swimming pools, ping pong tables, little parks, and so on - and
some even show free movies!
It's a clever way to bring some of the
charms of a village (or hutong) to modern urban life.
I'm staying in a hotel that's attached to one of these villages -
apparently residents can rent a room when they have visitors.
Why don't Americans set up living arrangements like
these? Too individualistic?
Right now my travel partner
and her grad student are shopping for clothes
while I write this from the comfort of a huge, dim
"web bar", lit by futuristic
blue-glowing metal arches and traditional Chinese lanterns. You can
use a computer in a private room here for only 8 yuan per hour
(1 dollar per hour), but I'm using the bare-bones basic option which costs
even less - just 5 yuan per hour.
I've seen no sign of the supposed
Chinese crackdown on internet cafes, though you do have to show them
your identity card (or passport, in my case). At first I
thought Google was being censored, because I got a lot of other sites
to work but not this one. What a pain! But now it's
working. So, while I hear a lot of websites are blocked by the
Chinese government, I haven't yet come across one.
Let's see if I can get the Amnesty International website...
hmm, no. But it's hard to know what this means: yesterday
I couldn't get the math/physics archive at
http://www.arxiv.org,
but I could get it at http://xxx.lanl.gov.
Erratic censorship or just flaky internet connections?
August 19, 2005
Back from China, I'm still recovering from jetlag. My mom called and recommended this book:
Still recovering from jetlag - I'm waking up at 5 am these days, which isn't natural for me.
Out of the blue I feel like talking about the coming revolution in biotechnology. This will go much further than most people realize. Pretty soon, we won't just be tinkering with the DNA of existing creatures, modifying it a little here or there. We'll be creating completely new creatures and even new genetic codes.
This is called "synthetic biology". The First International Meeting on Synthetic Biology was held in the summer of 2004, with talks like "Rewiring cell signaling pathways", "Programming cells and synthetic gene networks", and "Biological property rights".
But in fact, Thomas Knight has been teaching classes on synthetic biology for several years - back at my old grad school, MIT. The kids in these classes use a toolkit of standardized parts called Biobricks to build new biological systems. It's sort of like building electrical circuits from resistors, capacitors, and transistors. They do this for fun during the Independent Activities Period - a kind of free-for-all that takes place each January between semesters.
Check out some of their projects! You'll see stuff like:
The objective of the project is to design a bacteria that when cultured will produce a recognisable polka dot pattern in the culturing medium. Our design attempts to achieve this by hijacking the quorum sensing mechanism employed by bacteria such as Vibrio fischeri and more particularly in our case Pseudomonas aeruginosa used to regulate group behaviour. We are attempting to use the las/rhl quorum sensing system used by the latter, in conjunction with a heat trigger to cause small clumps of bacteria to turn on the LacZ colour expression gene and hopefully get a small selection of polka dots in a tasteful display of purple.
Some people will find this amusing. Some will find it exciting. Some will find it terrifying. I mainly just wish more people knew this kind of stuff is going on!
A while back I mentioned that scientists figured out how to expand the genetic code to create a new codon in E. coli bacteria. If you don't know what that means, you won't realize how far-out it is. The "letters" in DNA are grouped in "words" of 3 letters each, called codons, each of which serves as instructions to make a specific amino acid. A gene is a "sentence" built from these words, which creates a specific sequence of amino acids that get strung together to form a protein molecule. Since there are four letters - A, T, C, and G - there are potentially 43 = 64 codons. However, a bunch of codons create the same amino acids, and some potential codons don't get used at all. So in fact, most of the organisms on Earth only create 20 different amino acids. This leaves room for expansion - and scientists have created a new codon that lets Escherichia coli create an amino acid that's not one of the usual twenty.
In an even more radical move, some other scientists have introduced new "letters" into the genetic code - that is, new base pairs besides the familiar A (adenine), T (thymine), C (cytosine) and G (guanine)!
When I read this, it reminded me of Greg Egan's scary story "The Moat" in his book Axiomatic, where some radical secessionists genetically engineer themselves to have different base pairs and then... introduce a virus that kills off the rest of us? But, the original experiment came two years before Egan's tale:
Where will all this lead? Start imagining it now. Then read my October 27th entry.
I'm teaching a minicourse on gauge theory and homotopy theory up in Calgary, and I bumped into an interesting article on the flight up yesterday. It's about Islamic economics, and it's by the author of this book:
Money, Morals and Islam
By Timur KuranLos Angeles Times
August 21, 2005
Mistrust among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds is only partly to blame for last week's delay in drafting a new Iraqi constitution. Tangled up in the tension between sects and ethnicities is a fundamental ideological conflict between secularists and Islamists. To understand the constitutional battles, observers must grasp not only the principles of Islamic law, or Sharia, but also Islamic economics an esoteric modern doctrine that would befuddle Karl Marx, Adam Smith and even the Muslim jurists who, a millennium ago, developed the principles on which it claims to be based.
Secularist Iraqis believe that Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari's Dawa Party, Iraq's largest and best-organized Shiite Islamist organization, aims to establish a theocracy in which Islam serves as an overriding, supra-constitutional source of authority. Overwhelmingly Arab, it leads the United Iraqi Alliance - the "clerics' coalition" that captured a majority of the seats in the post-Hussein National Assembly. Growing out of a diffuse movement of opposition to secularist forces - the British in the 1920s, Arab nationalism and international communism from the 1930s onward - it was formally founded in 1957 under the spiritual leadership of the late Mohammed Baqir Sadr, whose opinions remain a source of authority.
Until his fall in 2003, Saddam Hussein persecuted Dawa as a conspiracy bent on dragging Iraq back to the Middle Ages. His dictatorship is said to have killed hundreds of thousands of Dawa adherents. Yet it has never been clear what policies Dawa would pursue if it achieved power. Its leaders agree that Iraq should be governed under Islamic law, yet they are of many minds on what Islamization would actually entail.
Sadr's intellectual legacy has facilitated the present ideological diversity. In his writings, Sadr laid out a vision, developed ideals and made sweeping predictions about the benefits of Islamization. He did not provide a blueprint for action, order priorities or grapple with the tactical aspects of social transformation.
Nevertheless, Shiite Islamists still consider him their leading authority on economic matters and the most gifted founder of "Islamic economics," a school of thought that aims to restructure the economy according to Islamic teachings. Among Sunni Islamists, his reputation as an economic scholar remains limited because Sunni-dominated Islamic research centers in Arabia, Pakistan and elsewhere habitually ignore his works. Still, among today's Islamist intellectuals, including Sunnis, Sadr's economic works are viewed as the clearest expression of why an "Islamic economy" would outperform its alternatives. His ideas are often reiterated, though in the case of Sunni Islamists usually without attribution.
Sadr's economic vision is developed in "Our Economics", his masterwork published in 1961. The purpose of "Our Economics" is to discredit both capitalism and socialism as flawed and alien systems, offer Islamic economics as a vastly superior alternative and demonstrate that Islam harbors solutions to a panoply of vexing economic problems. In both capitalism and socialism he finds virtues. Islamic economics, he says, embodies all of these virtues while escaping their numerous vices.
An ideally operating Islamic economy would find a golden mean between personal rights and collective responsibility. Islam shares, Sadr says, the socialist goal of providing decent material opportunities to one and all. The difference is that it pursues this goal without trampling on basic freedoms or crushing individual creativity. In an Islamic economy, the state does not control every facet of an individual's economic life. By the same token, it helps to limit inequalities rooted in selfishness and greed.
How is the golden mean to be reached? It will easily be found, Sadr claims, in a society infused with Islamic morality. In such a society, selfish and acquisitive impulses would be tamed, and the typical person would pursue material gain only within internalized limits imposed by Islamic ethics. This moral reconstruction would enable socialist egalitarianism to coexist with liberties characteristic of capitalism.
Most Islamic economists expect their readers to accept such thinking essentially on faith. Sadr aimed to convince broader audiences, including Muslims predisposed to think in categories rooted in secular ideologies. Inviting his readers to consider the challenge of preventing alcohol consumption, he observes that the United States failed at prohibition in spite of enormous efforts at enforcement. The fundamental reason, he claims, is that prohibition conflicts with a key capitalist tenet, the legitimacy of satisfying individual wants. An Islamic economic system would overcome alcohol consumption by liberating the individual from the preference for alcohol. The state would play merely a supportive role, and insofar as it resorted to compulsion, its policies would succeed by virtue of their harmony with the dominant ethos of society.
Personal restraint grounded in Islamic morality is Sadr's answer to diverse social issues. Take poverty elimination, which a socialist society pursues through mandatory wealth transfers. Islam exhorts its adherents to assist the disadvantaged, and it teaches those of means to participate in a decentralized transfer system called zakat. In Sadr's Islamic economy, the poor are fed and clothed largely through the voluntary zakat payments of believers seeking to draw closer to God. By the same logic, in this ideal economy every worker earns a decent wage because Islamic morality restrains employers from treating their workers unjustly. The state's role in wage determination is limited to corrective measures. Inequalities that a capitalist state tolerates as the outcome of an invisible hand and a socialist state tries to lessen through an iron hand are limited through the guiding hand of God, working through both Islamic norms and leaders steeped in Islamic doctrine.
Like practically every other modern Islamist, Sadr considers interest illegal, in the belief that the Koran bans it categorically, regardless of form, purpose or magnitude. At the same time, he repeatedly praises the market mechanism, arguing that the pressures of supply and demand should be respected, not resisted. "Our Economics" seeks to overcome the contradiction through moral training aimed at removing wants liable to produce un-Islamic outcomes. If Islamic education makes people equate interest with unearned income, demand for interest income will disappear; hence, there will be no interest-based lending. People will lend to consumers suffering cash-flow problems without expecting a return. And they will lend to businesses on the basis of "profit and loss sharing" by accepting not a fixed return but, rather, a portion of any profit from the financed venture in return for part of any loss. By this logic, an Islamic economy may remain interest-free while respecting the market freedoms associated with capitalism.
Sadr's economic agenda could not be put to the test in Baath-ruled Iraq. But similar agendas have been pursued elsewhere, most notably in Pakistan and Iran. Pakistan has prohibited interest, but its people have continued to give and take interest, usually disguised as a "bank fee," "financial commission" or "service charge." Voluntary zakat donations have been minimal. A government-run zakat system that requires the wealthy to contribute essentially at the rates of 7th century Arabia has failed to dent either poverty or inequality. In Iran, likewise, interest remains common, and there is no evidence of a reduction in poverty attributable to some distinctly Islamic policy.
In neither country have attempts at economic Islamization alleviated economic conflict measurably. Employers and employees have continued to differ over the morally just wage, and neither side has had trouble justifying its positions in Islamic terms. Likewise, clerics passing judgment on economic conflicts have disagreed among themselves. Instituting Islamic economic rules has thus proved to be anything but a mechanical process. Well-meaning interpreters of Islam, or of Islamic economics in particular, have encountered vast zones of moral ambiguity.
Such disappointments have led many Islamists to conclude that a properly Islamic
