Raw Sewage and Gender Equality

I've been enjoying discussions on a wide range of topics with my 16-year-old daughter.  I've probably poisoned her ability to ever be an unthinking person of the Left.  Sure, she goes to a California high school and is surrounded by Leftists (even though it's a private school) and as a result she still leans towards various ideologies like catastrophic global warmenism, but I've sown enough of a seed of doubt in such topics that she'll never be able to buy it hook, line, and sinker and will be easily able to reject it one day.  She has developed an impossible to completely suppress healthy skepticism of most topics.

Lately, she's been studying various gender and racial topics and she's been suffering from some cognitive dissonance. Things like, "there should be full gender equality but if they bring back the military draft, women shouldn't get drafted."  She knows that there's something not quite right about that statement, but she just can't bring herself to buy into the concept that men and women are different.  Yet.

Our drains backed up this morning.  I'm guessing that in this situation, a male deals with the drains and the associative disgusting raw sewage at least 95% of the time.  I mopped up the pools of backed up water, got the powered drain snake out, ran it through various clean outs, and cleared the blockages (roots of course, what else?).  As I was snaking the drains my daughter was getting ready to go shopping.  I called out, "You remember that discussion we were having about gender equality the other day?  As long as it's always guys who deal with the disgusting stuff like this, the concept of complete gender equality is nothing more than a giant load of stinking BS, much like I'm finding in these drains!"

She just smiled and walked out the door, but I think the point got through.

Dedicated followers of fashion (they are pretty clueless)

As a teenager interested in markets, mostly stock and commodity markets, but also economics I read the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal everyday.  Within a few years it was quite clear to me that the matters described and analysed in many instances were not even adequate as after the fact explanations.  The conventional wisdom was not to be taken at face value.

Motivated by intense curiosity I pursued better explanations of how the world actually works.  This allowed me to see beyond the statist assumptions that were so big a part of elite non-thinking.  I didn't even know the word statism back then.  My sense was that there were gains to be had in greater centralization but only up to a point.  

In a recent post  by my coblogger about resilience and collapse, I made a somewhat glib comment about how there were forces running counter to the trends of centralization that seem so irresistibly powerful.

In an article by Walter Russell Mead, The Crisis of the American Intellectual he expresses concern over having reached that point.  Because of his views he gives more credit to the Mandarins regarding past progress than I would, but here is some of his take on the matter:

Since the late nineteenth century most intellectuals have identified progress with the advance of the bureaucratic, redistributionist and administrative state.  The government, guided by credentialed intellectuals with scientific training and values, would lead society through the economic and political perils of the day.  An ever more powerful state would play an ever larger role in achieving ever greater degrees of affluence and stability for the population at large, redistributing wealth to provide basic sustenance and justice to the poor.  The social mission of intellectuals was to build political support for the development of the new order, to provide enlightened guidance based on rational and scientific thought to policymakers, to administer the state through a merit based civil service, and to train new generations of managers and administrators.

 Most American intellectuals today are still shaped by this worldview and genuinely cannot imagine an alternative vision of progress.  It is extremely difficult for such people to understand the economic forces that are making this model unsustainable and to see why so many Americans are in rebellion against this kind of state and society – but if our society is going to develop we have to move beyond the ideas and the institutions of twentieth century progressivism.  The promises of the administrative state can no longer be kept and its premises no longer hold.   The bureaucratic state is too inefficient to provide the needed services at a sustainable cost – and bureaucratic, administrative governments are by nature committed to maintain the status quo at a time when change is needed.  For America to move forward, power is going to have to shift from bureaucrats to entrepreneurs, from the state to society and from qualified experts and licensed professionals to the population at large.
...

So there you have it.  The foundational assumptions of American intellectuals as a group are firmly based on the assumptions of the progressive state and the Blue Social Model.  Those who run our government agencies, our universities, our foundations, our mainstream media outlets and other key institutions cannot at this point look the future in the face.  The world is moving in ways so opposed to their most hallowed assumptions that they simply cannot make sense of it.  They resist blindly and uncreatively and, unable to appreciate the extraordinary prospects for human liberation that this change can bring, they are incapable of creative and innovative response.

None of this is a great surprise to anyone who bothered to work things out rather than blindly parroting the ideas of the intellectuals.

(h/t Maggiesfarm)

Might Makes Right: Monopoly on Compassion

The wealthy actor Gérard Depardieu gave up his French citizenship in order to avoid France's seemingly ever increasing taxes.  The French socialists have been howling about the injustice of the huge and hugely wealthy man avoiding his obligation to help the French poor.

Theodore Dalrymple wonders if the socialists are really concerned with injustice and proposes the following thought experiment:

"Suppose that Gérard Depardieu were to undergo a conversion experience and see that his wealth was not unjust but unseemly in view of the difficulties or hardships of others, and that as a consequence he decided to give it away to those most in need (as determined by him) in exactly the same proportion as he would have been taxed. Would that be acceptable to all those who criticized him for refusing to pay his tax? 

"I suspect not: for in the modern world, the state claims the monopoly not only of force, but increasingly of compassion as well."

I find that the state's monopoly of compassion is an interesting concept.  Charity is one of the components of compassion, at least at the individual level.  The Jewish philosopher Maimonides lists 8 levels of charity (in ascending order of "goodness"):

1. Giving unwillingly.
2. Giving willingly, but inadequately.
3. Giving adequately after being asked.
4. Giving before being asked.
5. Giving publicly to an unknown recipient.
6. Giving anonymously to a known recipient.
7. Giving anonymously to an unknown recipient.
8. Giving that results in a person no longer living by relying upon others.

Giving anonymously is considered a preferred form of giving.  It has the advantage of not advertising the goodness of the giver but rather helps ensure that the giver is giving because of compassion with few other benefits to self.  The second advantage is that the person receiving the charity can't feel beholden to any individual since he has no idea from where the charity originated.  If anything, the recipient will feel beholden to the community, to humanity, and since this is a religious philosophy, the recipient will possibly feel beholden to God as well.  This all adds to social cohesion and harmony.

With the state having a monopoly on giving, in some sense the giving is anonymous.  Unfortunately, the benefits of that anonymity is preempted by the fact that the giver is often doing so unwillingly (many resent paying taxes).  On the other side, while the "givers" or taxpayers are unknown to him, the recipient can be sure that the vast majority of the charity comes from outside his community and therefore feels no sense of obligation to that community.  Government replaces God as well.

And that's probably the point.  Reduce the capacity for societal cohesion at the family and community level and replace that with worship at the altar of government.  It's not about injustice, but power.

Might Makes Right.

Let's Party on eBay!

This brought a smile to my face.

"Let's Party" is a rock CD that I wrote, recorded and produced about 15 years ago.  I printed 1,000 of them and have given away most of them (I never tried to sell them).

So I'm quite surprised to see that one is being sold on eBay by an eBay "CD Store"! They're listing it for $22.99.  It's advertised as:

The real thing, not a CD-R.   (1187 is # on spine of case)
Cd is STILL SEALED AND UNPLAYED.  PERFECT SHAPE.  
NOT a cutout and NOT a record club edition.

Pretty funny! I wonder how it got there?

Quote of the Day

Any system that has unimaginable complexity can not be centrally planned or directed.

The Furnace and the Tax

My furnace recently quit.  Fortunately, it wasn't that big of a deal because I live in San Diego and it's just not that cold, even in the middle of winter.

It was obvious what was wrong.  A motor started making lots of noise and then quit completely.  I looked it up and it was the "Draft Inducer Motor".

I got a local furnace repair place that I qualified with Yelp to come start the repair process.  I told the dispatcher what was needed.  The repair guy showed up without the part ("We don't stock our trucks with that part").  He verified that it was indeed that the "Draft Inducer Motor" needed to be replaced.

The next day he gave me a quote of around $900 to fix the furnace.  I was in the middle of a meeting in the middle of some lettuce fields when he called so I told him I'd get back to him.

$900 sounded like a lot to me so I removed the motor assembly from the furnace (took 1 minute), got the part number off of the motor, and looked it up on the Internet.  I found it for well less than $100.  Ultimately, I bought from a place that seemed reputable and was able to deliver it overnight and from them the motor was $140.

When it arrived, I disassembled the draft inducer motor assembly and reassembled it with the new motor and put it back in the furnace.  Everything was very straightforward and easy and took me about an hour and the furnace works fine again.

A $900 estimate for a $100 part and an hour of time (or less for someone who does this frequently)?  Great work if you can get it!

I gave them a bad Yelp!  The owner commented to my Yelp!:

"We appreciate this members concern with regards to pricing.  However there are a lot of things to account for when running an HVAC business that this customer fails to see. 

"First of all the service call and diagnostic are totally refunded from the repair charge that I quoted at $865 bringing it down to $770 when all is said and done. Secondly of course when you buy a non factory part online that comes with no warranty and install it yourself you are going to get it for cheaper, much cheaper!  We only install factory parts from the manufacture that comes with a 5 year warranty not to mentioned installed by a licensed and insured contractor. 

"For example my son's braces cost me over $4,500 this year however all the parts and metal only cost the dentist $185.  Do I feel I got ripped off because of this?  Absolutely not!  When you acquire a professional service to perform work; you are paying for many things, not just the part. You are paying for the skill and technical know how of the technician.  Not to mention things like Insurance, trucks, liability, workers compensation, employee training, vehicle maintenance, gas, test equipment, state and federal taxes, employee compensation, advertising, tools, warehouse and  office rent, phones, lighting, warehouse and truck stock, management administration, office equipment, computerization, legal fees, employee benefits, office staff and supplies just to name a few. [...]"

The motor I ordered was new and an exact replacement part with a 5-year warranty.  I remembered his quote being $900, but maybe he said $865, not really a significant difference.  The braces analogy made me laugh - my kid's orthodontist and assistants spent many, many hours over a period of years working on my children's teeth.

But then he gets to some valid points: "Insurance, ..., liability, workers compensation, ..., state and federal taxes, ..., legal fees, employee benefits, ...".  A whole lot of costs imposed by government and lawyers.  I rather doubt they justify charging $900 for a $100 part and less than an hour of time, but it justifies part of it.

Now let's consider what I would have to earn in order to cover that $900 fee.  Since I'm a programmer and I do some hourly consulting, I actually can consider what it costs me on a marginal basis pre-tax.  Between FICA (15.3% - both halves since I'm a consultant),  Federal Taxes (36%), and State Taxes (11% in California), with AMT ensuring that there are no deductions, my marginal rate is 60+%.  In order to pay that $900, I'd have to earn $2,250 pre-tax.  Of that $1,350 off the top would go to various governments, $800 would go to the furnace repair company of which a significant portion would also go to various governments, I estimate that $15 would go to the motor distributor, and finally $85 would go to the motor manufacturer and much of the manufacturer's cost also would reflect taxes and costs imposed by various governments.

This is a great example of a simple transaction in which governments are sucking the life out the economy.  Probably near 80% of the money required for this simple repair would've gone to governments.  All for no real gain by me, rather just trying to repair a rather critical household item and get back to where I was before it broke.

Sailing, Sailing

I'm leaving this weekend for a family sailing vacation in the British Virgin Islands.  We're renting a 37 foot sailboat and will sail hither and thither around the islands for a week.  Hopefully, we won't run into any pirates!

Happy Holidays!

Public Shooting Musings

With any change in government policy there are always winners and losers.  Modifying gun control laws would be no exception whether making them stricter of less strict.  Different people will die at different times depending on the changes.

Whenever I put significant effort into yet again contemplating gun control, I start by re-reading "Of Holocausts and Gun Control".  There are many chilling excerpts in it, and the two I found most chilling and focusing are (emphasis added):

"Governments have exterminated or cooperated in the extermination of something like one hundred and seventy million of their own people in the twentieth century"; and

"...it is nevertheless an arresting reality that not one of the principal genocides of the twentieth century, and there have been dozens, has been inflicted on a population that was armed..."

If you think that something like that can't happen here, as explained by the essay mentioned above it almost did at least twice.  Examples include Japanese internment camps during World War II and the violence of the KKK in the south.

I then notice that:

"With a single exception, every multiple-victim public shooting in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed since at least 1950 has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry their own firearms."

This follows the genocide paradigm on a smaller scale.  In this case, the killings are too few to be a statistic, not too many to be a terrible tragedy (to paraphrase Joseph Stalin). We feel the pain of public shootings more intimately than a genocide lost in history, because they are more intimate.  We can watch each parent cry on TV and cry along with them.  We can read the notes that the small children wrote to their parents that they would meet them in heaven as tears well up in our eyes.  Anything but this, we say.  Anything but this, I say.

But then I dry my eyes and realize that the similarity is striking.  Unarmed people are sitting ducks, whether for populations of millions or for a building full of school children and unarmed teachers, administrators and other workers.  Predators are attracted to the easiest prey: the sick, the weak, the old, and the unarmed.  School-zone mass shootings didn’t begin until after passing Clinton’s Gun Free Schools Act. The gun-free zone designation is a giant neon sign to the predator: "We're here and helpless. Kill us."  And killed they were.

So the choices are: take weapons away from predators or arm as many people as possible so there's a chance of defense against the predators.  The former seems impossible.  Building guns is not rocket science. Even if every gun magically were confiscated, anyone with minimum determination could build one and each day it gets easier and easier to do so.

That leaves arming as many people as possible.  School teachers should be heavily encouraged to get concealed carry permits.  They should be reimbursed for training to use those weapons.  Same with administrators and even janitors.

But in the end it is a judgment call, a matter of opinion.  I'm not risk adverse, I value individual freedom and responsibility heavily, I don't trust governments, and I'm wildly skeptical that any form of gun control will substantially reduce access to guns by criminals and psychopaths.  If someone else believes the opposite on most or all of these things, they're likely to reach the opposite conclusion.

Since the process is incremental in either direction, there will be more mass killings, more tragedies and more tears.

Minimum Wage Arithmetic

A recent article in the Economist discusses minimum wage laws.  Some representative excerpts about the current state of empirical evidence include:  "... minimum wage has done little or no harm..." and "... a moderate minimum wage probably does not do much harm and may do some good...".

This hardly seem like a ringing endorsement of minimum wage laws to me.  I interpret the article as basically saying that this particular government intrusion and loss of freedom at best has little effect other than to increase the size and power of government and limit freedom of the populace.

While that seems like a bad thing to me, many are thrilled to know that their favored approach of having the government do as much as possible is probably not going to screw things up too badly in this particular instance.  The Economist, for example, seems quite happy with minimum wage laws.

Barbarism and Tolerance

Richard Fernandez describes a couple of events in far reaches of the world (Tunisia and the Philippines) and concludes that barbarism is at least partly made possible by tolerance.

Possibly that is because moderation itself — with its emphasis on tolerance and rational cogitation — is vulnerable to violence in ways that the raw human instinct is not.  The moderate Tunisians are far too well mannered to act against extremists. Like tolerant people the world over, they withhold judgment until the last. Their moment of presentiment never happens; rational thought is retrospective to start with and the decision point may come not at all.

The basic man still has some advantages over the supreme intellectual in the immediate face of danger. What saved [some people] was not their education or refinement. It was the memory of living in dangerous places and the instincts formed thereby. ... education as much as anything else, prepared many Jews to voluntarily walk into the gates of Auschwitz. They could not conceive of something as awful, as barbarous as that death camp, even as they passed it portals. Only the men who had seen others at their worst could perceive the danger and ready themselves to resist what rational man could not apprehend.

He explains in more detail (In the comments):

It is fundamentally a good thing to be tolerant and civilized. But in order for civilization to work, barbarism must be constantly kept at bay. In the state of nature tolerance is repaid with death. Hence, it is the duty of the King’s Justice to keep totalitarian influences in check in order to preserve the luxury of civility. You need a fund of safety in order to afford to be decent. Run out of safety and you run out of civility.

Tolerance spent wastefully may eventually so empower extremists that it will destroy the tolerance itself in the long run. So while tolerance is good it must shelter beneath a roof through which the rain must never pour.

Barbarism was defeated so thoroughly 70 years ago that most of the Western World think it is just a boogeyman story; something that never existed except in the stories of old people to scare children today. They feel so secure they can’t comprehend the dangers of letting the plague get a foothold again. It is unfortunate they cannot conceive of the Design Margin running out.

In Michigan today, barbarism reared its ugly head.  In addition to a union thug punching out conservative comedian Steven Crowder at a protest, the crowd pulled down a tent and began walking across without knowing whether or not people were left inside the tent.  If there had been people inside, they would've been killed.

We're seeing more violent protests like this one in the west and in the United States.  Violent mobs that don't meet violent resistance and/or rapid retribution and punishment for their violence are likely to embolden others who have a penchant and/or use for violence, possibly causing violence, intimidation, and terrorism to snowball.  Like the moderate Tunisians, conservatives in the west may also be too well mannered to resist effectively.  The curse of interesting times may be rapidly approaching.

Employer of Last Resort

Businesses are subjected to lots of constraints such as competition, regulation, and taxes for example.  Each of the constraints renders certain activities either unprofitable or unable to provide an adequate return on investment to be viable.  That's how the world works and it's no big deal.

From the perspective of a business, a minimum wage law falls in that category.  It makes certain activities not worth doing because the value that potential employees could provide does not provide an adequate return after taking the wages required by the minimum wage law into account.  Again, no big deal, just another constraint.

However, from the perspective of an unskilled and inexperienced person who cannot provide adequate value to justify being paid the minimum wage, minimum wage laws are egregiously unfair.  The minimum wage law says to that person, "you may not work for anybody, any time, under any circumstances since no rational business person can justify hiring you at the required wage".

One way to rectify this situation is to have the government offer employment to all takers at or somewhat below the minimum wage.  That way the incredible imposition of the minimum wage law on the unskilled worker is mitigated by providing employment in the public sector.  The concept is that the government becomes the "Employer of Last Resort" (ELR). 

As you can probably tell, I personally am strongly opposed to minimum wage laws because of their severe oppression of young, unskilled workers.  However, given that we're probably stuck with them, having an ELR sounds almost reasonable to me.  There have been some experiments with this sort of thing (for example, one in Britain), and the results haven't been terrible.

Nonetheless, I think the concept is very dangerous.

The problem I have with it is that setting it up puts us one very short step away from all out communism.  All a regime has to do once an ELR mechanism is in place is to begin raising the minimum wage.  This would cause layoffs requiring an expansion of the ELR program.  Further incremental increases in the minimum wage would drive even more workers out of the private sector into the ELR program.

The ELR program would need capital equipment, other assets, and an ever growing management structure to successfully employ the workers and would end up inefficiently producing ever more goods and services.   Eventually, this would drive the vast majority of companies out of business and we'd all end up working for the government and that'd be the end of history.

Might Makes Right: Marauding Bandits

Marauding bandits use violence or the threat of violence to steal and then use the resulting gains for whatever they fancy.  While marauding bandits are generally considered immoral, the legend of Robin Hood shows that marauding bandits are not universally considered inherently immoral, since Robin Hood and His Merry Men were nothing if not marauding bandits*.  In the case of Robin Hood, it seems that the ends can justify the means if the bandits take from those who are rich and/or not well-liked and/or not particularly innocent and the bandits give at least part of the plunder to the poor or other "deserving" group or cause (I suspect they kept most of the loot for themselves - that's why they were merry, or as Robin Hood sings in the animated film "Shrek", "I steal from the rich and give to the needy, I take a wee percentage, but I'm not greedy").  The tales of Robin Hood and other similar stories and legends transform Marauding Banditry from being immoral and despicable into at least sometimes being honorable and even heroic.

From a sheep's perspective, a shepherd and a wolf have a lot in common and they both look like marauding bandits.  One fleeces you and eats your young (and maybe you) and the other eats you and your young.  The sheep might be somewhat grateful to the shepherd for protecting it from the wolf, but that protection comes with a cost and if the shepherd is particularly incompetent or bad, the sheep might be better off with just the wolf.  The primary difference is that the shepherd is more powerful than the wolf and might makes right so "shepherd" has a good connotation while "wolf" has a bad one.

A government has many things in common with marauding bandits.  Both use violence or the threat of violence to take from those too weak to resist and use the resulting gains for whatever they fancy. "Government" generally has a better connotation than "bandit", but from the perspective of the populace, the government may actually be worse than bandits because the populace at least has a prayer of protecting themselves from bandits while the might of the government is overwhelming.  It's a popular notion that the government provides benefits that couldn't otherwise be obtained by the populace, while the bandit does not, but this notion assumes that the populace could not provide those benefits for themselves.  This notion seems unlikely to me, since the government is comprised of people - the same people that make up the populace, so it's unclear why those same people in government would suddenly be able to provide those benefits.

Each of us has some shepherd, wolf, and sheep in us.  Each of us is tempted to be part of the government to shepherd (and take from) others to do those things we think should be done (i.e. that which we fancy), each of us is tempted to swindle, loot, beg, borrow, or steal and play the part of the wolf, and each of us is consigned to live in society and play the part of the sheep.  In the end, each of us is going to attempt to maximise our power and the power of those people and things that are important to us by playing our roles as best we can.

Notes:
* Depending on exactly which version of the folklore of Robin Hood one is considering.

Assimilation Anecdote

My ancestors all came from Eastern Europe from what is now Poland, Belarus/Lithuania, and western Russia.  English was not the first language for three out of four of my grandparents.

By the time I came along, none of them had any foreign accent at all.  It was very important to them to adopt the language and culture of their new home when they immigrated here and they worked very hard at speaking English with perfect fluency and no accent.  They felt that opportunity, success and perhaps even survival were dependent on it.

I never once heard any of my grandparents speak anything but English (except for Hebrew during religious services).  In fact, it never occurred to me that they even knew another language.

Apparently, that they might know other languages never occurred to my sister either.  My sister is nine years younger than I am and when she was around four years old she was staying for a few days at our grandmother's house.  My grandmother received a call (extremely rare) from family back in Lithuania, and since the other party didn't speak any English, she began speaking Lithuanian (her native tongue).

My sister completely freaked out.  She had only ever heard grandma speak English and all of the sudden grandma was spewing forth what sounded like bizarre gibberish to my little sister.  My sister got really scared that something was seriously wrong with grandma and started crying and it took a while to get her to calm down.

That shows the extent to which my grandparents completely rejected their heritage and completely adopted as many aspects as they could of the United States.  You would never guess that they were immigrants.

The melting pot worked.

Now, the emphasis is on multiculturalism.  Immigrants and children of immigrants are encouraged to keep their language and culture.  They're not encouraged to assimilate.  Member of their group, sorted by culture, first; citizen of the United States second (or possibly third behind religious affiliation).

We'll see where that takes us, but as we seem to become ever more polarized and fractured, I wonder if that's part of the reason.

Breaking: CFTC Shuts Down Intrade in US

You've got to be kidding me.

From the Commodity Futures Trading Commission website:

Washington, DC – The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) today filed a civil complaint in federal district court in Washington, DC, charging Intrade The Prediction Market Limited (Intrade) and Trade Exchange Network Limited (TEN), Irish companies based in Dublin, Ireland, with offering commodity option contracts to U.S. customers for trading, as well as soliciting, accepting, and confirming the execution of orders from U.S. customers, all in violation of the CFTC’s ban on off-exchange options trading. ...

Why aren't prediction markets a form of free speech?

Update: Harry Eagar points out that Intrade claims that it will be back shortly with a U.S. compliant platform.

HT: Marginal Revolution

Resilience and Collapse

In 1992, Francis Fukuyama famously claimed that we're at "The End of History" because the "struggle between ideologies is largely at an end".  While not everyone agrees with Fukuyama's assessment, the end of history implies that western civilization will also have no end and will continue forever.  Forever is a long time, but perhaps the end of history could mean that the span of our current civilization might be measured in tens of millennia instead of the tens of decades that have measured the length of every civilization that began and ended before this one.

On the other hand, many scholars, including Joseph Tainter ("The Collapse of Complex Societies") and Mancur Olson ("The Rise and Decline of Nations") identify powerful forces inherent in the formation of civilizations that sow the seeds for the decline and eventual collapse of the extended order.

Civilization is a society that surpasses a minimum level of complexity where complexity is, according to Tainter, "generally understood to refer to such things as the size of a society, the number and distinctiveness of its parts, the variety of specialized social roles that it incorporates, the number of distinct social personalities present, and the variety of mechanisms for organizing these into a coherent, functioning whole. Augmenting any of these dimensions increases the complexity of a society."

Complexity is created in order to solve problems according to Tainter.  The main problem is to support ever more people with ever more material comfort but also includes problems such as competition and warfare.

Complexity has a cost.  Layers of management, analysis, research, and other functions are required, none of which directly produce anything but each layer requires energy and resources.  At this level, these resource are the same, in theory, whether or not they are part of private or public institutions.

At first the benefits of the added complexity far outweigh the costs.  For example, the minimal complexity needed to go from hunter/gatherer tribes to an agrarian society increase human edible food per acre by a large multiple without adding all that much cost.

But eventually, the incremental level of innovation and specialization to increase prosperity and/or populations or even maintain them at current levels in the face of decreasing natural resources per capita becomes ever more difficult and costly.  According to Tainter, once this diminishing marginal return for additional complexity is surpassed by the impact of declining resources, the civilization begins to decline.

During the decline, the civilization is less able to deal with new adversity and eventually a problem that might have been trivial to overcome a few decades or centuries earlier, becomes catastrophic and the civilization collapses.  In other words, the civilization becomes increasingly less resilient after complexity increases beyond a certain point and becomes unable to respond adequately to a wider range of shocks and events.

Collapse also has a specific definition in this context.  Collapse is the rapid simplification of society.  In other words, the society loses much or all of its complexity in a relatively short period of time, where the time frame is typically less than a couple of generations.  A great simplification is sometimes associated with a greatly reduced population, but not always - if the cost of maintaining the complexity prior to the collapse far outweighed the benefits, the population can be better off and better fed after the collapse.

Tainter's models are based on resource depletion.  All of the numerous civilizations he studied were ultimately unable to maintain even the status quo as the resources available given the technology of the era diminished on a per capita basis.

We're probably not terribly near the diminished resource per capita wall yet, and we probably won't be there for decades or centuries.  At least not according to Julian Simon who has been fairly accurate in his many predictions so far:

“Our supplies of natural resources are not finite in any economic sense. Nor does past experience give reason to expect natural resources to become more scarce. Rather, if history is any guide, natural resources will progressively become less costly, hence less scarce, and will constitute a smaller proportion of our expenses in future years.”

So maybe our current civilization is safe for a while, or at least won't collapse due to lack of resources.  Let's turn to the individual nations that make up our civilization.  Here we need to consider the structure of socio-economic complexity.  This is where Mancur Olson's work (and also the work of Public Choice Theorists) is important:

"The idea is that small distributional coalitions tend to form over time in countries. Groups like cotton-farmers, steel-producers, and labor unions will have the incentives to form lobby groups and influence policies in their favor. These policies will tend to be protectionist and anti-technology, and will therefore hurt economic growth; but since the benefits of these policies are selective incentives concentrated amongst the few coalitions members, while the costs are diffused throughout the whole population, the "Logic" dictates that there will be little public resistance to them. Hence as time goes on, and these distributional coalitions accumulate in greater and greater numbers, the nation burdened by them will fall into economic decline."

The burden imposed by the  lobby groups described by Olson has a similar effect to the burden of reduced resources per capita described by Tainter.  They both increase the cost and decrease the benefit derived from increasing complexity while decreasing the resilience of society.  The difference is that resource limitations may be a civilization-wide constraint (if Julian Simon is wrong) while the sclerosis Olson identified is primarily (but not completely) associated with governments within a nation state.  As a result, nation states can collapse without bringing the surrounding civilization down with them.

Perhaps even the United States could collapse without dragging the rest of western civilization down with it.  However, there's tremendous risk if the United States collapses because of a number of factors:

• As sclerotic and fragile as the United States government and economy are getting to be, most of the other governments that comprise western civilization are even worse - a US collapse could easily be the first domino to fall taking a slew of other countries with it;
• All bets are off regarding Simon's prediction of essentially infinite resources if the drivers of innovation in the US and other western countries suddenly find themselves without a functioning society in which they can continue to innovate putting civilization solidly into Tainter's reduced resources per capita state of decline coupled with the chaos of one or several non-functioning nations;
• Efficiency via specialization and resilience are often opposites and therefore the efficiencies gained by specialization within the global order can become an Achilles Heel when one or more nations collapse - an example was the 2011 Japanese tsunami (not all that huge of a natural disaster) that damaged global automobile production for months.

The last point deserves more elaboration.  In the short term, resilience is increased by redundancy since if a resource becomes unavailable a redundant resource can be used instead.  Redundancy is generally the opposite of efficiency as it implies either resources that are typically not used or at least not optimized for a specific use so they can be used for multiple functions.  Specialization generally increases efficiency since each component is optimized for its task but reduces redundancy and resilience since the component isn't as easily available for alternative uses.

However, in the bigger picture, in the longer time frame, efficiency in a complex society may increase overall resilience because it enables more rapid growth of knowledge, experience, and wealth which may be called upon to mitigate the impact of adverse events.  So efficiency can increase resilience in dealing with slow decline but can decrease resilience relative to short-term shocks or rapid collapse.

Centralization of resource and/or the management and control over those resources generally reduces resilience.  In addition to Olson's insight regarding the burdens of special interests that are both inherent to a central government and more easily extracted from the concentrated target represented by a large, centralized entity, damage to the command and control of the centralized entity is more difficult to recover from than a decentralized, redundant decision making regime.  Examples* include large and centralized mainframe servers versus the Internet (for which the primary design criteria was to be fault tolerant and resilient) and cloud computing; a single large distribution center for a given commodity such as gasoline which could cause grave problems in the case of failure or attack versus multiple production and distribution centers run by different organization and spread out in terms of geography; a single monopoly producing a product where poor and wasteful decisions can lead to both inefficiency and catastrophic failure of that market versus a vibrant competitive market with many companies involved where poor decisions lead to bankruptcy of some with the recycling of the associated resources but the probability of at least some companies making good decisions is increased; and so forth.

Yet in certain cases, centralization of resource can add to resilience.  In addition to obvious cases like defense, the re-insurance market with governments being the insurer of last resort comes to mind.  This alleviates the need for small communities and even entire regions to produce adequate savings to fund their entire redevelopment should catastrophe strike (note that this doesn't imply that the central government should be involved in actually performing disaster relief and redevelopment - only that it be able to make the resources, in this case money, available for disaster relief and redevelopment).

Overall, it's clear to me that the debate about whether or not various functions being performed by a central government make a society more or less resilient is going to be split along ideological lines with Libertarians and Conservatives claiming that virtually everything done by government makes society less resilient and Statists and Collectivists claiming the exact opposite.  But the framework above allows everybody to think through the different possibilities and come up with their own conclusions.

I've been thinking about the rise and fall of civilizations because I've encountered quite a number of libertarian/conservative/republican blogs and websites panicking about Obama's reelection because they are certain that collapse is now imminent for the United States and even Western Civilization:  "The Titanic is sinking" (where the Titanic is the United States) in a post by one of Instapundit's recent co-bloggers, Sarah Hoyt; "piling up our own funeral pyre" in an article by Roger Kimball (who was predicting a Romney landslide - oops!); etc.

Nothing has changed.  Same President, same Republican House (more or less), and the Senate is still run by Democrats and the level of sclerosis due to lobbying probably won't accelerate much due to split government.  We have stable or expanding exploitable resources per capita (with the exception of helium) so we're not a lot closer the style of collapse described by Tainter.  In my analysis, while we may well be getting ever less resilient, the process is very slow and near term collapse isn't much more likely than it was before the election.  Obamacare was and continues to be a large unknown and might easily make our health care system brittle, but as a society, we can probably easily survive that even if it's horrendously bad for individuals.

My advice?  Stop worrying, relax and enjoy life!

*Thank you readers for the examples!

Searching for Resilience

I'm trying to write a post on resilience, complexity, and (perhaps) self-organizing criticality and I'm looking for an example of a complex system that is or can be objectively made more resilient by decentralization.  I've done a google search and haven't found anything I like.

Anybody have any ideas?

Media Divergence

This dialog in the comments of a recent Great Guys post ("Congrats to Romney") has been enlightening to me.  The dialog involves a discussion of an event where Romney is helping deliver water to hurricane victims and allegedly ignored questions from reporters about his views regarding eliminating FEMA.

Loyal Great Guys commenter Harry Eagar sees Romney ignoring reporters while delivering water to hurricane victims as cowardice.  That's what Harry sees and those Harry associates with and writes for apparently see it the exact same way.

I look at the same event and see Romney as reasonably and perhaps even wisely ignoring the reporters and that his actions of working to deliver water were at worst somewhat staged to help his campaign and at best an honorable thing to do (and most likely a mix of the two).

While Harry and I often or even usually disagree, I can usually at least understand why Harry sees and thinks what he does.

In this case, I cannot.  I simply cannot look at the event described by Harry and see cowardice and dishonor in Romney.  I can see from the non-liberal commenters here that they cannot see cowardice and dishonor either.

It's becoming clear to me that there will ultimately be a liberal media for liberals and a conservative media for conservatives.  As this dialog has shown, I can't reliably glean any information from the liberal media.  And I know my liberal friends try and fail to ever get useful information from conservative media (fox news, townhall, etc.).

This media divergence is leading to hundreds of millions of Americans being completely unable and unwilling to communicate with each other excepts to shout epithets at each other when forced to interact.  Conservatives will only interact with conservatives, work with conservatives, and buy and sell from conservatives.  For example, I read a story where a business owner fired everybody with an Obama sticker on their car after the election.  Liberals already play the same game (conservatives rarely are able to get tenure at universities, for example) and the trend will intensify.  This will essentially be a cold civil war between liberals and conservatives.

I doubt there's a solution.  When people can't communicate, they can't interact, and they can't solve problems.

The one hope is forums like this one.  As long as we try to understand each other, though often failing, at least there's a chance.

Empowering, Sustaining, and Efficiency Innovations

Clayton Christensen, a Harvard business professor and author of "The Innovator's Dilemma" recently had a very interesting article in the NY Times.  He refines Schmupeter's Creative Destruction characterization of the economy into empowering, sustaining, and efficiency innovations where empowering innovations mostly generate new economic activity and employment, efficiency innovations liberate capital but reduce employment, and sustaining innovations have little effect on employment though they do increase wealth over time.  To create new jobs, one should therefore focus on empowering innovations.

He makes a second point as well: most government policy and private investment approaches were formulated when capital was extremely scarce.  Something has clearly changed in that the Fed is creating huge sums of money yet people are just sitting on the cash and not investing.  This implies that capital itself isn't nearly as scarce as it once was and that the policies and strategies of yesteryear no longer apply.  He makes some policy suggestions to push investors towards empowering innovations.

Definitely an interesting and well written read.

Congrats to Romney

No, you didn't misread the title and I didn't mistype it.  I mean it.

From my observations not only is Romney a pretty good guy who ran a pretty decent campaign (not flawless, but hey, nobody's perfect), he made this election a real and clear choice for the american people between ever increasing government "solutions" (spending) with reduced liberty (especially for the productive class) versus more limited government reach with more reliance on private sector and community based solutions.  For that, I believe Romney deserves a great deal of credit.

It was a clear choice and Americans clearly chose (though it was fairly close).

Now we know clearly what the game is and now we can optimize how we play the game given that we know what the rules are.  We can also guide our children (and descendants in general) to play the game as best possible.

Resilience and flexibility are the keys to surviving and thriving in any complex system and the political environment going forward is no exception.

Sorry about slow comment moderation

For some reason, blogger is identifying some of aog's and harry's comments as spam.  Unfortunately, I've been out of town a lot and have been slow to notice them in the "waiting for moderation" mailbox.

I apologize profusely for not keeping up with comments and appreciate all of your support.