Never Ending Good News

Economy Grows Better Than Expected:

The economy grew at a solid 3.8 percent annual rate in the final quarter of 2004 — stronger than previously estimated_ and an encouraging sign that the business expansion was firmly entrenched at the start of the new year. [...]

For all of 2004, the economy expanded by 4.4 percent, the best showing in five years. This annual estimate was the same as first reported last month. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, delivering the Fed's economic outlook to Congress last week, struck a fairly positive note about the economy's performance. "All told, the economy seems to have entered 2005 expanding at a reasonably good pace, with inflation and inflation expectations well anchored," he said.

On the other hand, other countries are having a little more trouble:

German unemployment rose to a postwar record in February as cold weather caused companies to lay off staff while labor-law changes swelled jobless registers, a member of the ruling Social Democratic Party said.

Not to mention:

France said Friday that its jobless rate reached 10 percent in January for the first time in five years...

I hope that those jobless aren't all immigrants from the mideast. That could be a seriously unstable situation.

Behavioral Conservatives

I just spent a couple of weeks in that most liberal of liberal European countries - The Netherlands. While the purpose of the trip was primarily business, I had the good fortune to spend some time with one of the guys I work with there and his family. I went to his house and hung out with him, his wife and their two kids. They consider themselves good liberal Europeans and classify Americans as being very right wing and conservative relative to themselves.

But I couldn't help noticing that their lifestyle was nearly identical to conservative Americans living in republican states. They live in a house, have two cars, one of which is a minivan. They have two kids, and though that is less than average for a conservative American family, it's by no means unusual. Their interactions with their kids didn't seem any different to me than what I observe here in the United States. They don't partake of any of the vices that The Netherlands if famous for.

Indeed, if an alien came down and observed this Dutch family and a conservative American one, the alien would be hard pressed to tell them apart. The only obvious differences are that this Dutch family was not religious and they didn't own any firearms (which are generally prohibited). They basically talk the liberal talk, but they don't really walk the liberal walk. So they may be ideological liberals, but they are behavioral conservatives.

I'm an "actions speak louder than words" kinda guy, so I find this very interesting. When I pointed it out to my Dutch friends, they were quite uncomfortable with the concept of being behavioral conservatives. They put a lot of thought into trying to come up with distinctions between themselves and conservative families in America. Religion and guns are about it.

Gay Marriage

I hadn't yet blogged on this particular topic because it simply doesn't matter all that much to me. Nonetheless, I've come to the conclusion that the government should get out of the marriage business, whether same-sex, heterosexual, etc. I think that these excerpts from a Reason article says it well:

Around 270 A.D.—according to one tradition, at least—St. Valentine, a Roman cleric, was imprisoned for his opposition to Emperor Claudius' decree that young men (his potential crop of soldiers) could no longer marry. Valentine performed their ceremonies anyway and was thrown in jail for his obstinacy. His belief was that marriage is too sacred a rite to relegate to the incompetence of state bureaucracy. And, on February 14, he was executed for that belief. [...]

As we approach the anniversary of Valentine's own rebellion and denial, shouldn't the nation that pioneered a popular government of the people, by the people, and for the people" be the one that finally stands to assert the pre-governmental primacy of matrimonial privacy?

It is time to privatize marriage. If the institution is really so sacred, it should lie beyond the withering hands of politicians and policy makers in Washington D.C. There should be no federal or state license that grants validity to love. There should be no state-run office that peers into our bedrooms and honeymoon suites. If the church thinks divorce and homosexuality are problematic, it should initiate the real dialogue to address these problems in-house rather than relying on state-sponsored coercion to affirm doctrinal beliefs. And if tax-codes and guardianships need some classification for couples, let's revise civil union standards to reflect those needs.

I fully realize that the devil's in the details regarding those tax-codes and guardianships, but nonetheless, it's a solution that eliminates the State supported discrimination against gay couples while allowing people to define and believe in marriage according to the mores of their community.

Don't Jump

Fewer Americans have died in the Iraq war than have died jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge (suicide) since it opened. Close down the bridge I say. It's clearly far too dangerous.

Laffing

Arthur Laffer, the "Father of Supply Side Economics", thinks things are great:

OK, let's take a look at what happened to marginal tax rates. The highest rate has gone from what -- 70 percent -- down to what, 35 percent? What's happened to inflation? What's happened to regulation restrictions? What's happened to America and the world? What's happened to the stock market? What's happened to everything you and I believe in? Do you remember what unemployment rates looked like back in 1979? Do you remember what the prime was when Ronald Reagan came into office on Jan. 20, 1981? It was 21 percent. [...]

When (Nobel Prize-winning economist) Bob Mundell and I sat there at the University of Chicago in 1967, '68 and '69, we dreamt of a world. That world is now. Can you imagine a world with no inflation? Everything that's happened. It's absolutely spectacular. I'm just so happy about what's happened to this world. [...]

If you looked at (House Minority Leader) Nancy Pelosi and you looked at (Senate Minority Leader) Harry Reid Wednesday night, they looked really, really uncomfortable. They were running everything in 1979. They had the president, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Fed chairman. They had every damn position in the world. They had everything -- the states, the houses, the governors. It was a Fabian redistributionist nightmare. Now it's really beautiful. I'm an old man, and old men are supposed to be curmudgeons and hate the modern day and love the ancient. But the truth of the matter is, we've won.

I have to say that that's how it looks to me too.

Exit Poll Analysis

There have been many claims of voting fraud and that Bush stole the election. The primary indicator of potential fraud was A study by Steven Freeman at the University of Pennsylvania looking at differences in exit polling results and counted votes. It states that:

"As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states [Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania] of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error."

Note that because the study only identified a discrepancy, Freeman concluded with the following:

"Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion ..."

With the release of a study analyzing exit polling for the last election, I'm now pretty convinced that fraudulent activities regarding voting and vote counting, if any, played an insignificant role and that the election was not stolen. The study is an internal report performed by the organizations that did the exit polling for the news services. The report identifies "some factors that appear to have contributed" to the discrepancy between exit polling and actual vote counts:

• Distance restrictions imposed upon our interviewers by election officials at the state and local level
• Weather conditions which lowered completion rates at certain polling locations
• Multiple precincts voting at the same location as the precinct in our sample
• Polling locations with a large number of total voters where a smaller portion of voters was selected to be asked to fill out questionnaires
• Interviewer characteristics such as age, which were more often related to precinct error this year than in past elections

The last point seems the most significant, and fortunately, the most easily corrected for future elections. Elaborating on the last point, the report states:

Older interviewers had lower WPE [Within Precinct Errors] than the youngest interviewers. They also had better completion rates. This does not necessarily mean that the younger interviewers did poorly at their task. It does indicate that in this election voters were less likely to complete questionnaires from younger interviewers.

And the younger interviewers seemed to have more trouble with the voters as well. Interviewers who were 18-24 years old found that only 27% of the voters were "very cooperative" while interviewers who were 55 or older found 69% of the voters "very cooperative".

The early exit poll numbers that were leaked to Drudge and other alternative media outlets during the afternoon of November 2nd that showed Kerry ahead by a wide margin were due to a "programming error":

Early in the afternoon on November 2nd, preliminary weightings for the national exit poll overstated the proportion of women in the electorate. This problem was caused by a programming error involving the gender composition that was being used for the absentee/early voter portion of the national exit poll. This error was discovered after the first two sets of weighting; subsequent weightings were corrected. This adjustment was made before NEP members and subscribers used exit poll results on-air or in print.

Another line of evidence for fraud is also addressed:

Some have suggested that the exit poll data could be used as evidence of voter fraud in the 2004 Election by showing error rates were higher in precincts with touch screen and optical scan voting equipment. Our evaluation does not support this hypothesis. In our exit poll sample overall, precincts with touch screens and optical scan voting have essentially the same error rates as those using punch card systems. In the larger urban areas these systems had lower WPEs than punch card precincts.

Of course, that's not to say that we shouldn't make our voting systems better.

The report lists some changes that will hopefully improve future exit polls but gives the following cautionary note:

Even with these improvements, differences in response rates between Democratic and Republican voters may still occur in future elections.

This is why we have people actually vote instead of just doing exit polling. If exit polling were perfect, we could save a lot of money by not bothering with the polls, except in exceptionally close races. I feel the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts, cited by the Freeman study, are now adequately explained.

Never Ending Good Economic News

Well, it's gotta end someday, but not yet:

Falling energy costs pulled down U.S. consumer prices last month, but core inflation inched up and housing starts surged, according to data on Wednesday that bolstered expectations for a steady diet of interest-rate rises.

In addition, initial claims for jobless aid plummeted by 48,000 last week, the biggest drop in more than three years.

Analysts said the plunge in claims likely overstated the strength of the job market, but said the reports taken as a whole suggested the economy was on solid ground.

"The economy continues in a recovery mode ...

"Recovery mode"? It's been in "recovery mode" for years. When will they consider it to be in "chugging right along mode"?

Religion is Like the Pox

I don't mean this in an insulting sense, just a metaphorical virus of the mind sort of sense. There are mild strains, like cowpox, and virulent, deadly strains, like smallpox. Exposure to cowpox gives immunity from smallpox. There's also a vaccine which gives immunity to all pox.

In my opinion, the variants of Christianity in the United States today are similar to cowpox as far as virulence goes, radical Islam similar to smallpox, and Reason (with a capital 'R') sort of like a vaccine.

I would personally just as soon everyone who's not naturally immune be infected with cowpox (Christianity) so that they develop an immunity to smallpox (radical Islam). Indeed, before the smallpox vaccine, people intentionally exposed themselves to cowpox in order to achieve smallpox immunity.

I prefer this approach to the vaccine (Reason) for two reasons. First, the vaccine doesn't seem to work very well. It seems impossible to innoculate some people and many of those that are innoculated still seem to become infected anyway.

Second, the vaccine of Reason has, in my opinion, at least one serious side effect. Those who do develop immunity seem to become relatively infertile. I realize that many on the Left think that having fewer children is a good thing, but I don't for a variety of reasons that I'm not going to go into here.

I say this as someone who has natural immunity (I'm not particularly religious and not Christian), but consider the disease of cowpox a small price to pay for immunity to things that are worse.

Shrinking Deficit

More from Larry Kudlow:

This week’s Treasury report on the nation’s finances for December shows a year-to-date fiscal 2005 deficit that is already $11 billion less than last year’s. In the first three months of the fiscal year that began last October, cash outlays by the federal government increased by 6.1 percent while tax collections grew by 10.5 percent. When more money comes in than goes out, the deficit shrinks.

At this pace, the 2005 deficit is on track to drop to $355 billion from $413 billion in fiscal year 2004. As a fraction of projected gross domestic product, the new-year deficit will descend to 2.9 percent compared with last year’s deficit share of 3.6 percent. [...]

By the way, Treasury Secretary John Snow just completed a Wall Street tour where leading bond traders told him not to sweat the transitional costs for personal accounts. The traders said that an additional $100 billion a year over the next decade for transitional financing will be easily manageable. “A rounding error,” one senior trader told Snow.

A supply-side tax-reform movement, a shrinking budget deficit, newfound spending discipline, and a determination to confound conventional wisdom by reforming Social Security has George W. Bush’s second term off to a roaring start -- even before he is officially sworn in.

Sounds good to me.

Goldilocks Economy

Larry Kudlow points out:

Using James Surowiecki’s theme of the wisdom of crowds, yesterday’s WSJ survey of 55 leading economists is to be taken seriously as a 2005 forecast. The average inflation-adjusted growth projection came to 3.6%. The mid-year CPI was pegged to 2.5%. Mid-year interest rates were 3.04% for the 91 day Treasury bill and 4.79% for the 10 Year Treasury bond. The dollar was expected to be stable. Mid-year unemployment down slightly to 5.3%. All in all, a very promising outlook.

No kidding. Sign me up!

The 6th Annual GMT New Millennium Party

First some background for those who have no idea what a GMT New Millennium Party is. A millennium is simply a period of one thousand years. So each year on December 31st, instead of simply celebrating a new year, we celebrate the beginning of a new millennium. This year, that new millennium is the period from January 1, 2005 till December 31, 3004. In addition, instead of arbitrarily choosing midnight San Diego time, we choose midnight Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the transition point. Conveniently, that happens to be the middle of the afternoon in San Diego - usually a fine time to go to the beach.

This year we had a bit of a light turnout due to some very slightly uncooperative weather. Here's the brave and hardy souls.

Here they are again, still only slightly wet and bedraggled (with a different photographer).

It was pretty windy when we started, but thinking quickly, I invoked Murphy's Law (anything that can go wrong will) in our favor. As soon as I got out my kite, the wind quit, and the weather was much more enjoyable (or maybe just tolerable).

The kids loved being able to play with their rain gear and umbrellas. They don't often get the chance in San Diego.

In fact, everybody seemed pretty happy.

Affectionate too!

When the sun came out, it sure was bright! I didn't think to bring sunglasses.

And then we got a spectacular double rainbow. It was far better in person (they usually are), with both ends ending at the horizon (cliffs) and the main bow was so bright that it reflected in the mist surrounding the rainbows giving the impression of continuous color. It was worth putting up with the rain to get the rainbows.

And for those who waited, not a bad sunset.

Looks almost tropical, doesn't it?

The last rays of 2004.

And the clouds light up for the final colors.

So those that persevered were amply rewarded by nature's colors. Thanks to those sixteen brave and adventurous souls who made the party.

The rest of you? Especially the ones in town? Can you spell 'wimpy'? That's W-I-M-P-Y, wimpy! Just kidding. We hope to see you next year!

The Poor Get Richer

I almost fell over when I read the title of a recent San Francisco Chronicle online (sfgate.com) article: Ignorance shrouds capitalism's profound impact on reducing poverty. Here are some excerpts:

It should come as heartening news that 2004 was one of the most prosperous years in history. Not because the U.S. economy grew by a solid 4.3 percent, but because developing countries experienced an explosive 6.1 percent economic growth.

According to a recent study by the World Bank, 2004's growth reflected "an expansion without precedent over the past 30 years." Equally encouraging, the report notes that "the rapid growth of developing economies ... has produced a spectacular, if not historic, fall in poverty."

Amazingly, the World Bank report did not get much coverage in our mainstream media. It seems the press was more interested in covering the evils of globalization than in taking notice of how world trade -- which grew by an astounding 10.2 percent this year -- is driving economic growth.

When Americans do hear about the World Bank, it's usually because an unruly mob is protesting against it. The protesters are long on rhetoric but short on facts.

But it's not just protesters who are misguided. Many of our nation's teachers also don't realize why poverty in developing countries is declining at such a rapid rate. Far too often, teachers are uneasy when they realize that free markets are the best way to help those in poverty.

For example, most Americans would be surprised to learn that millions of poor people who live on less than $1 per day would be better off if they could go into debt. [...]

It is undeniable that 2004 was a great year for the poor. The World Bank's prediction that global poverty will continue plummeting is particularly encouraging. But if we are ever to wipe poverty from the face of the Earth, our next generation of leaders must first understand what makes the global economy tick -- the fundamental relationship between free trade and economic growth.

I wouldn't have been surprised to see this in the Wall Street Journal, but in the San Francisco Chronicle? A paper published in one of the last holdouts of Leftist Socialism? Maybe there's hope yet.

Let's End 2004 on a Positive Note

According to Radley Balko, there's actually a lot of good news to be thankful for:

• America's kids are all right. Juvenile violent crime has fallen every year - and nearly halved - since 1995. The percentage of high school students who carry weapons to school is at a 10-year low. There were 14 homicides on school campuses in 2002-03, down from 34 10 years earlier. Teen birthrates are at a 20-year low, and high school dropout rates are at a 35-year low.
• America is healthier. Life expectancy in the U.S. is at an all-time high among men and women, black and white. People at every age can expect to live longer than anyone at their age in U.S. history. Heart disease, cardiovascular disease and stroke have fallen dramatically in the last 15 years. Incidence of, and deaths from, cancer have dropped every year since 1990.
• America is cleaner. Concentration levels of every major air pollutant have dropped dramatically since 1970, even as we drive more, consume more, and produce more. According to data analyzed by the Pacific Research Institute, U.S. water has been getting steadily cleaner for the last 20 years.
• The world is less violent. In his book, "A History of Force," the historian James L. Payne argues that when you adjust for population increases, over the course of history, the average citizen of the world has grown less likely to die a violent death caused by government, war or his fellow man. War, murder, genocide, sacrificial killing, rioting - all have tapered off over time.
• The trend continues even into recent years. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, there were just 19 major armed conflicts in 2003, down from 44 in 1995. Existing wars seem to be less violent, too. According to the Human Security Report, published by the University of British Columbia, 700,000 people died in battle in 1951. By the 1990s, the number had fallen to 40,000-100,000. In 2002, it was just 15,000. This, as the world's population increased.
• The world is freer. According to the United Nations, as of 2002, 70 percent of the world's nations were holding multi-party elections. Fifty-eight percent of the world's population lived under a fully democratic system of governance. Both of these figures are at their highest points in human history.
• The Freedom House think tank gave 89 countries containing 46 percent of the world's population a ranking of "free" in the 2003 edition of its annual Freedom of the World report. Both figures are at their highest in the 30-year history of the survey. Freedom House also reports that countries moving toward more freedom have outpaced countries moving away from freedom by three to one.
• The world is less poor. Yale University's David Dollar has pointed out that since 1980, the total number of people living on less than $1 per day has actually fallen by 200 million, despite the fact that the world's population increased by 1.8 billion. It's the first time in recorded history that that has happened. The UN's 2004 Human Development Report notes that real per capita incomes in the developing world have more than doubled since 1975. In some provinces in China, incomes are doubling every few months.
• The world is healthier. Between 1960 and 2000, life expectancy in developing countries increased from 46 to 63 years. Mortality rates of children under five are half of what they were forty years ago.
• The world is getting cleaner. Most economists now endorse the concept of a "green ceiling", which means that although the transition from a developing economy to a developed one requires some environmental exploitation, there is a point at which a country becomes wealthy enough that its citizens will begin to demand environmental protection.

Note that there are numerous links in the original article for those who like to check sources.

Happy New Year! Here's hoping that 2005 continues the trend.

How Time Flies

I see I haven't posted for a while. I post three sorts of entries: responses, snippets, and essays. Responses are posts that respond to someone else posting to this blog or possibly some other blog. Since there haven't been a lot of posts from anybody else, I haven't had the opportunity to post any responses. Snippets are excerpts from articles I find interesting and want to archive here at Great Guys. Since the election, articles to excerpt haven't been as passionate and interesting to me. I'm sure after the holidays things will get more interesting.

I'm currently working on two essays, both of which are getting quite long and I have quite a ways to go before I'm finished. The first shows a plausible economic model in which moderate federal government budget deficits, to the tune of 2% of GDP per year, are actually beneficial. The second essay deals with self organized super intelligence, using the metaphor that a neuron is to a human brain as a human is to the super intelligence of the planet. This last one is a little spacey but interesting.

Both essays will be posted in parts, but I can't begin posting until I'm more or less finished to ensure that the overall essay is coherent (as possible) and consistent. Hopefully, I'll be able to start posting one or the other by the end of January.

Left2Right

I've been enjoying a new liberal blog called Left2Right. They describe themselves as follows:

We're a bunch of academics, mostly philosophers but also some lawyers, political scientists, and economists. We're interested in liberal ideas, though we are probably far from unanimous about what "liberal" means, and our being interested in liberal ideas doesn't entail that each of us subscribes to all of them. We think that political debate in this country has deteriorated into a shouting match, a food fight, a flame war -- call it what you will. We'd like to consider whether liberal ideas should be somehow reconsidered -- in some respects revised, in others perhaps merely re-stated -- with the aim of increasing the overall ratio of dialog to diatribe in the American political forum. Some of us will be trying out various ways of re-thinking and re-formulating those ideas; others may end up arguing that such attempts are unnecessary, even counter-productive. And in the course of our discussion, there will be plenty of digressions and asides of the sort that naturally occur at the margins of a group discussion.

They've invited people from the Right to comment on their posts. The gyrations have been quite amusing so far, I highly recommend it. Hopefully, they won't get discouraged as easily as some other bloggers I know.

American Ignorance

I've seen repeatedly the claim that Americans (especially conservative Americans) are ignorant, based on various poll questions. Indeed, the claim is that if only Americans weren't so ignorant, they would be able to understand the issues adequately to make informed choices and then they would, of course, vote for Democrats. For example, Allan Hazlett writes:

"There's a plethora of issues on which Americans are misinformed, and the issue is not one of a clash of normative beliefs, but simple ignorance of the facts."

I'll agree that Americans (and not just Americans) mis-regurgitate information all the time, but I'm less convinced that it's because they're "misinformed" or have a "simple ignorance of the facts." I think it's perhaps a "complex ignorance". Let me explain.

One's worldview is constructed as one absorbs many millions of factoids, some true, some false, over one's lifetime. Each new factoid causes an extremely small shift in the worldview. One can't possibly recall all of the factoids, indeed one can only recall a tiny, tiny fraction of one-percent of those factoids. Nonetheless, the factoids have been absorbed and incorporated into the worldview.

If I've been exposed to information, have considered it and allowed it to affect my worldview, but then forget the details, do I have a simple ignorance of those facts? I think not, since the information persists within my worldview. That's what I mean by "complex ignorance."

Now, some pollster (PIPA in this case) comes along and asks me some question. I sort of have a vague recollection that I've heard of these things before but I am hesistant to answer. The pollster encourages me to give it a try. I apply the answer most consistent with my worldview. It happens to be wrong. I am American and answered incorrectly, thus the poll makes Americans seem ignorant.

You might say "well, Kyoto is incredibly important, everybody should know all about that." I have two responses. The Kyoto treaty is hundreds of pages. Quick, off the top of your head, in the last English version, what are the points that are made in the second paragraph on page 97? What? You don't know? You don't remember? You didn't read it? But if it's so important, why not? Ahhh, because there are other things that are important too and it's an unimportant detail.

And I don't hold it against you. I don't consider you ignorant because you don't know those particular details. I'm fully aware that you can look up the information if needed. Just as the people being asked questions by the pollster. If they were given 5 minutes they could google it and come up with the right answer too. And the details of whether or not Bush supports Kyoto are probably really not that important to the average American on a day to day basis. Even in terms of who to vote for in the last election, that particular factoid would rank low relative to Iraq, moral values, the economy, healthcare, etc. for most people.

So I think the concern of conservative voters being ignorant and not having access to basic information is quite mistaken.

A Lowering of Arms

Former Soviet dissident and hero Natan Sharansky has George Bush's ear. The following is an excerpt from an article Sharansky wrote for the National Review Online:

Our world has changed so much over the last fifteen years that it may be difficult for today’s reader to get a sense of the degree of skepticism there once was in the West over the possibility of a democratic transformation inside the Soviet Union. In the early 1980s, when some were actually arguing that the Soviet Union could be challenged, confronted, and broken, the possibility was dismissed out of hand. The distinguished historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., expressing the sentiments of nearly all of the Sovietologists, intellectuals, and opinion makers of the time, said that “those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse, ready with one small push to go over the brink are wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves.” [...]

In April 1989, just seven months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Senator J. William Fulbright, who had served for 15 years as chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, co-authored an article dismissing the views of those in the “evil empire school” who believed that Gorbachev’s reforms were “no more than the final, feeble, foredoomed effort to hold off the historically inevitable collapse of a wicked system based on an evil philosophy.”2 Instead, Fulbright offered insight into how the “détente school,” in which he included himself, understood the changes that were then taking place behind the Iron Curtain:

We suspect that the reforms being carried out in the Soviet Union and Hungary may be evidence not of the terminal enfeeblement of Marxism but of a hitherto unsuspected resiliency and adaptability, of something akin to Roosevelt’s New Deal, which revived and rejuvenated an apparently moribund capitalism in the years of Great Depression.

If scholars and leaders in the West could be so blind to what was happening only months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, imagine what the thinking was in 1975. Back then, the suggestion that the Soviet Union’s collapse was inevitable, much less imminent, would have been regarded as absurd by everyone.

Well, almost everyone.

In 1969, a Soviet dissident named Andrei Amalrik wrote Will The Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, in which he predicted the collapse of the USSR. Amalrik, to whom I would later have the privilege to teach English, explained that any state forced to devote so much of its energies to physically and psychologically controlling millions of its own subjects could not survive indefinitely. The unforgettable image he left the reader with was that of a soldier who must always point a gun at his enemy. His arms begin to tire until their weight becomes unbearable. Exhausted, he lowers his weapon and his prisoner escapes.

While many in the West hailed Amalrik’s courage — he was imprisoned for years and exiled for his observations — almost no one outside the Soviet Union took his ideas seriously. When he wrote his book, short-sighted democratic leaders were convinced the USSR would last forever, and according to many economic indicators, the Soviet Union appeared to be closing the gap on the U.S. Amalrik must have seemed downright delusional.

But inside the USSR, Amalrik’s book was not dismissed as the ranting of a lunatic. The leadership knew that Amalrik had exposed the Soviet regime’s soft underbelly. They understood their vulnerability to dissident ideas: Even the smallest spark of freedom could set their entire totalitarian world ablaze. That’s why dissidents were held in isolation, dissident books were confiscated, and every typewriter had to be registered with the authorities. The regime knew the volatile potential of free thought and speech, so they spared no effort at extinguishing the spark.

I was arrested in 1977 on charges of high treason as well as for “anti-Soviet” activities. After my own mock trial a year later, I was sentenced to thirteen years in prison. In 1984, my KGB jailers, swelling with pride, reminded me of Amalrik’s prediction: “You see, Amalrik is dead” — he had died in a car accident in France in 1980 — “and the USSR is still standing!”

But Almarik’s prediction had not missed by much. Within a few months of that encounter in the Gulag, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. Faced with an American administration ready to confront him and realizing that the Soviet regime no longer had the strength both to maintain control of its subjects and compete with the West, Gorbachev reluctantly implemented his “glasnost” reforms. This limited attempt at “openness” would usher in changes far beyond what Gorbachev intended. Just as Amalrik had predicted, the second the regime lowered its arms, the people it had terrorized for decades overwhelmed it.

I think Sharansky is where Bush gets some of his "radicalism", in other words his belief that the world can be changed if you only try.

Cost Benefit Analysis of War

From the beginning of time, whenever an individual or the leadership of a group has perceived the benefits of using violence as outweighing the costs, they have utilized violence. This will continue till the end of time, almost by definition. Organizations such as the UN are supposed to raise the costs of violence but that basic premise still holds. Therefore, I consider the distinctions between offensive, defensive, preemptive, and preventive war a distraction to the real argument.

If all we're trying to prevent is a few thousand or even a few tens of thousands of U.S. citizens murdered and a few big buildings knocked down every few years, then the cost of invading Iraq may not have been worth the benefits.

But what about the value of civilization itself? It's not inconceivable that a few well placed nukes could so shake the faith people have in civilizations and its institutions that the whole thing collapses like a house of cards. For example, currency only has value because: a) people think it does and b) people think that the issuing government will be around essentially forever. The latter could possibly be called into question with an attack not all that much bigger than 9/11. Many of civilization's institutions are like that so the whole thing could unravel fairly quickly.

If civilization collapses, then what? The planet would probably struggle to support even one billion people living without the structure and efficiencies of civilization. That means at least five billion dead, of all races and ethnicities. If you estimate the probability at one in ten-thousand, that's still an expected value of 500,000 dead. Even at one in a million, that's still 5,000 dead. That's how I look at the utility analysis. Thus I'm pretty easy to convince to give war a chance.

A Nation of Bushes

Turns out the French don't read much:

Even though the French take great pride in the writings of their intellectuals, few people read newspapers compared to other European nations, and the numbers are declining further.

Bush should feel right at home there. :-)

Rational Adoption of Irrationality

It can be perfectly rational to adopt an irrational, incoherent, incohesive, and conflicting worldview. In order to do so, the adopter may have to reduce cognitive dissonance by ignoring, or at least not taking too seriously, the conflicting evidence.

How can it be rational? One argument could be that worldview X has worked for the past N years even when exposed to radical change and conflict in an unfathomably complex universe with essentially unlimited uncertainty. Thus worldview X is robust if non-optimal. Worldview X has known inconsistencies but since it's impossible to truly know which particular item is right or wrong, or that it even may be that the inconsistencies are inherent to the robustness of the system, tweaking worldview X is risky. Perhaps the tweaking of X creates a more optimal system, at least in the short term, but creates fragility where robustness once existed.

I personally am a risk taker, so I think tweaking is worth it, but I fully understand the other view.