Education

The One Million Covid Victims Have a Message

/ ontheoutside / 1 Comment

At least half of these deaths were due to deliberate misinformation from political interests calling the whole pandemic a left-wing plot.  For month after month the most popular story in the Wall Street Journal was the latest reason why there was really nothing going on:  it was just like normal flu; it was worst in New York because it was only in disgusting cities full of disgusting people.

Everyone in the country suffered, including very many who bought into the party line because they thought the propagandists were on their side.  Since vaccines were coming, deaths delayed could be deaths avoided. What’s worse, almost of half the people who died were unvaccinated when they could have been, convinced by the arguments of people like the Fox hosts-who were actually vaccinated for themselves.

This Covid story is unfortunately typical of what’s happening in this country.  The “populists” are the Kochs and the Mercers and the Thiels—people with the money to fill newspapers with issues they don’t care about (abortion, guns) so they can ride them all the way to the bank.  The only major piece of legislation passed in the Trump years was the monumental tax cut for the rich.  As with Covid, the supporters drawn in with identity issues are the ones who will suffer—in jobs, healthcare, education, climate, you name it.

Taking this one step further, it is worth noting that the damage with Covid was not from action but from inaction.  Most of the endless discussions of our fractured political system are missing the point.  The country is ungovernable because they want it that way.  If government can’t act, the powers that be are running things.  As Steve Bannon put it, all we need to do is create chaos. 

This story isn’t complicated, just lost in the cacophony of bought media.

Elon Musk as Time’s Person of the Year

/ ontheoutside / Leave a comment

There is nothing wrong in celebrating Elon Musk, who has achieved much of real value.  There are even good messages to be drawn from those achievements.   However there are also plenty of wrong conclusions that can and are being drawn about Musk.  So it’s worth thinking about what’s wrong and what’s right.

Wrong message #1:  We don’t need government involvement in the economy; the private sector can be counted on to get the job done.

Fact:  Tesla was started with Obama-era seed money and Obama-era price subsidies for electric car sales.   SpaceX got going with NASA contracts.  Without government involvement we would have had neither. The major US automakers had to be dragged kicking and screaming to electric cars.   The private sector is not good at supporting novel projects without a near-term payoff.

Wrong message #2:  We can count on smart people like Musk to tell us what to do.

Fact:  High achievers have their limitations and blinders just like everyone else.  Musk’s statement that we don’t need “Build Back Better” because he himself never needed help from anyone is actually typical blindness of the class.  I worked for a successful startup where the four principals fell out with each other almost immediately after we went public—because each was sure he was the reason for success!

Wrong message #3:  In the end we can always count on American ingenuity.

Fact:  Musk is one more example of the importance of immigrants and children of immigrants to the American economy.   Same for Apple and Google.

Wrong message #4:  A few big heroes are what makes for national success.

Fact:  Musk was important as a technical visionary.  No one else recognized that the technological basis existed for an electric car company.  However he also fostered an environment where he could attract the best and brightest to his companies.   The achievements of Tesla and Space X have that broader basis.

What’s more, the Person of the Year could equally well have been given to the many scientists and technologists who gave us the Covid vaccines.  There are more than a few single heroes in our midst.  Big achievements reflect individual contributions of many able people.

I’ll limit the right messages to two:

Right message #1:  Technology matters, and things really can change

Both Tesla and SpaceX are fundamentally new businesses, rethought from the bottom up.  In a very few years they have changed the US economy.

As contrast, a recent book about the Boeing 737 MAX shows what happens a company loses track of the reality of its business in a blind race for profit.

Right message #2:  At all levels individuals can make a difference and should be rewarded accordingly

This is particularly important in technology-driven companies, but not only there.  As noted, that was important not just for Musk himself but also within Musk’s companies.   For contrast, my contacts at NASA and even JPL have described them as stiflingly bureaucratic.  The difference between the SpaceX and the SLS project is undeniable.

Both companies and countries have a tendency to ossify into hierarchical structures that declare themselves to be meritocracies.  Equality of opportunity—including opportunity for real success—is necessary both for individuals and for the success of the overall enterprise.   For society as a whole, we need both a safety net and true opportunities for individuals to succeed.

That, not the pronouncements of Elon Musk, is what makes for success as a nation.

Fixing Capitalism

/ ontheoutside / 4 Comments

44040355775_00e5b353ac_b

California Bank” by waltarrrrr is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

There’s a lot of talk these days about fixing capitalism.   However, there’s a problem with much of it—there are so many things to fix that it all becomes a daunting task.  The point of view here is simpler.  There are a great many things that aren’t happening, because capitalism just doesn’t do them—and we can start by making sure those get done.

At its source this problem comes from our being force-fed the wildly radical idea that the private sector—capitalism—will solve all problems by itself.  So even when we realize that capitalism needs to be fixed, we tend to be overly concerned with all the patches.

However, even Adam Smith had no delusions about the limitations of capitalism.  As he pointed out:

  1. The private sector will not police itself.

On the contrary it will do everything possible to corrupt the free market with monopolies and government influence: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”  We’re used to hearing “private sector” and “free market” used almost as synonyms.   In fact, as Smith recognized, the free market is an ideal that can only be achieved when government holds the private sector accountable.

  1. The private sector will not provide the environment for its own success.

Smith even advocated a government program of universal literacy, quite a stretch for the eighteenth century and a pointer for us today.  This is a serious matter, because it shows how dangerous it is for the economy to punt everything to the private sector.

  1. Much of what is needed for a successful society is simply out of scope for the private sector.

Capitalism will not provide any service where there is no competitive advantage in doing it.  Public health and welfare, environmental questions, basic science, etc. are all out of scope.

Fixing capitalism strictly speaking deals only with the first category.  No amount of fixing is going to make capitalism deal with the rest.  Those issues are ours to solve.

It’s instructive to think about needs in each category.

  1. Policing the private sector

Monopolies are still with us and have become an increasing problem due to technology changes and weakened anti-trust enforcement.  The same is also true of corruption due to business influence on government.  These days no one even apologizes for it.

This is particularly true in the financial sector where banking, for example, has evolved into speculative gambling with losses covered by the FDIC.  You can even argue that the financial sector overall has evolved in directions that make it predatory on productive business.  After decades of Republican-inspired hands-off attitudes toward business, there is no shortage of serious issues.  However fixing all of them makes progress look far away.

Taking a step back, there is a single biggest problem:  legal tax evasion.  This is a gating item for so much progress that it just has to be dealt with.  Even before Trump’s tax cuts (and despite nominal tax rates), American companies paid the lowest effective taxes as a percent of income of any developed country.  That was largely a result of multinationals’ ability to move income to tax shelter countries—reducing rates or hiding income entirely.  Apple is only one egregious case.  The recent tax cuts made matters worse with drastically-reduced business rates, arcane rule changes for overseas income, and the new pass-through income treatment.  That pumped up the deficit—thereby hobbling government’s ability to respond to the serious sins of omission in categories 2 & 3.

What’s more, despite the insistent propaganda, taxes are actually not a primary issue for American competitiveness:

– Many studies have shown that in most industries today business profit levels reflect monopoly power to set prices well above historic levels of margin.  That’s a trend we can expect to continue.  In other words, businesses have considerable financial room to pay taxes.

– Further, as frequently noted, the savings from the tax cuts went primarily into stock buybacks.  That is companies decided the best thing to do with the tax cut money was to give it back to their investors in higher stock prices.

Conclusion:   Get the private sector (particularly large multinationals) and its investors to pay taxes.  Then work through all the rest.

  1. Providing the environment for economic success

If taxes aren’t the issue for American competitiveness, what is?  As we’ve noted here before, what makes for success is the technological advantage that has kept us in many areas on top of the heap.  That supports both our standard of living and our military strength.

Our technical dominance is based on three factors:

i. The dynamism of our economic system in generating new products and technologies.

ii. Broadly-based government support of research and education

iii. Remaining the preferred destination for entrepreneurs and other ambitious people from everywhere to realize their dreams

Let’s look at the current status of all three:

i. Unchallenged influence of big companies on government has favored established companies over new entrants. In part this is an anti-trust enforcement issue, but it has many other aspects.  The demise of net neutrality is one highly-visible example.

On this issue the interest of big business is strongly opposed to what makes for long-term national success.

ii. The administration is actively hostile toward science, government-sponsored research, and broad-based education. This is shown in purging of scientists from government agencies and restricting their influence on public policy.  One obvious example is in climate change.  Also the new tax law punished major research universities with a targeted tax.

Public investment in research had a major role in the prosperity of the 1950’s and 60’s and kicked off the opportunities of internet today.  The same kind of public investment has remade China as a technology powerhouse.  But our dedication to research has eroded over time:

R_D_spending

Instead we’re waiting for the private sector to do the job, which by definition means catch-up.

The story for education is similar.   In the 1950’s and 60’s we were expanding educational opportunities to whole classes of people who had never before had the chance.   Now we rank far down on the list for upward mobility.  Student loan debt tells the same story, and that’s only about the people DID go to college, not about the ones who were deterred by cost and DIDN’T.  Finally, educational funding in the states has never recovered from the 2008 crash.

It’s worth mentioning in passing that the value of research is not only for international competitiveness.  Basic research is part of the global project of raising human standards of living. Even when one worries about national competitiveness, progress is generally so international that openness is the ante for remaining at the forefront of progress.  Current policy to restrict international participation of US scientists weakens the country in the name of national security.

iii.  As a final point we need to emphasize the critical role that foreigners and their children are playing in maintaining our national strengths.  Many studies have shown their role both in starting new companies and in supplying the technical underpinning that makes for success.  As Steve Bannon noted (for his own purposes) such people represent more than half of Silicon Valley activity.  Google (cofounded by a foreigner) and Apple (by the son of a foreigner) are only the most obvious examples.

The current xenophobic backlash is wildly off-target.  Particularly with the weakened support for research and education, those are the people keeping our place in the sun.  (To be clear, an immigration plan that only accepts people with degrees is no counterweight to the nationalist, nativist rhetoric.)

Conclusions:

– This area has got to be fixed or we risk losing our standard of living and dominant role.  These are traditional US values and as important as ever for US success.   It we’re worried about competing with Chinese, this is where the battle will be lost or won.

– If we can get our act together, items i and iii should remain as our advantages going forward.  So we shouldn’t be defeatist about a future that is in our hands.

  1. Spending for the common good

This has been a bastard child for so many decades now, that there is much that needs to be caught up.  Here is one short list:

– Infrastructure (Much discussed, but with more sides to it than you might think.  See here for a good overview.)

– Climate change (Evidence has become incontrovertible, but we still need a real plan.)

– Universal health care (Needed not only as a benefit but also as an enabler for equal opportunity.)

– Opioid crisis (Much discussed, but with radically inadequate funding)

– Environmental protection (Not a luxury)

– Transitional assistance (Helping people through changes—from technology, globalization, etc.)

There is enough essential work here to pose a major challenge for government.  We need to confront the unmet needs of the society, then we need concrete plans, and finally we need to manage major operations with competence and integrity.  Despite the propaganda there is nothing unusual about effective, government-sponsored work.  However as with any other enterprises, this needs to be scrupulously well-run.  Just because good people are running it doesn’t mean there is less risk of corruption.  We have to get serious about public enterprise.

That means we have to get past the idea that there is something intrinsically wrong about working for the public good.  That’s after all nothing more than the other side of the “private sector will solve everything” coin.  We live with the continued juxtaposition of vast under-employment (3.7% unemployment doesn’t change the good union jobs replaced by Walmart) together with vast unmet needs that the private sector won’t address.  We’ve got to take the initiative to match one with the other.  This is not “make work”.  It’s essential work that isn’t getting done, because the private sector won’t do it.

Until we take that initiative, it’s hard to assess where we are as a society.  Public enterprise helps in many ways.  It helps with inequality and the middle class.  It helps with leverage for workers and standards for employment.  Many public sector jobs of their nature will be hard to outsource.  It makes no sense to talk about abstractions such as Universal Basic Income until we see how things shake out in a fully-functional economy.  The future may be less strange or scary than it seems.  (This isn’t just about public sector employment; work done by the public sector helps other trends as well.  Even in Silicon Valley each job in tech creates 4.3 other jobs as well.)

Conclusion:   We need to create the full-scale machinery for government service to do what the private sector won’t.

It’s always hard to foresee the future.  I remember when I was in high school, Prince Philip gave a commencement address at UCLA in which he spoke (as world expert!) about leisure.  Already then he was thinking that machines would take over work, leaving as us all to spend the rest of our lives at the beach.

That’s certainly not what happened, but there’s still something to be said for the positive spin.  Historically technology and even globalization have been good for living standards, except where societies have chosen to deny the benefits to large segments of their populations.  Both domestically and internationally we have every opportunity to do this right.  We can either organize our economy–and the world order–so that all can benefit, or we can go down in flames of our own making.

Prosperity in Today’s Economy

/ ontheoutside / 8 Comments

14145037140_53a399bf56_z

The title of this article sounds rather ordinary, but in fact there’s more to say than you might expect.   There aren’t a lot of new facts here, but we bring together several strands of argument that don’t tend to be followed to conclusion.  It’s useful to think step-by-step about prosperity today and going forward.

  1. Our national standing today is largely determined by technology.

There are many aspects to this.  The most obvious one is the role of high-tech companies in the economy.  The NYTimes had an article a few months ago (on the occasion of Apple’s becoming the first $1 T company) with graphic displays showing the size of Apple (as well as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and many others) in the US economy.  The dominance of high-tech is unmistakable. That’s what supports our standard of living and always has. Railroads, steel, automobiles were all high-tech in their day.  (Note this is not saying that Google or Facebook are angels, it’s our national strength in technology that matters.)

It is only because we are on top of that heap that we have the money that supports the rest of the economy.  That includes much of small business and service industries.  It is from the strength of our competitive economic position that we can pay for the non-competitive industries we choose to support.  The aluminum and steel tariffs are being paid by us from the industries that don’t need them.  To state this somewhat differently—we are not going to build a dominant economy by selling each other stuff anyone can make at artificially high prices.

It’s also worth pointing out, given all the discussions of the military budget, that the technology argument applies in spades for the military.  Building new aircraft carriers is not going to make us safe.  One only has to think, theoretically of course, about the effect of a North Korean virus disabling the military’s command and control.  From the chart below, it is obvious that our level of military spending ought to quash everyone else hands down if money were the only object.  But it’s not doing the job, because that’s not the game anymore.  And it’s not just AI, it’s across the board.

20170424_Military_Expenditure

What all this means is that the people who support our technology position are critical resources who matter to all of us.

This is a lot less elitist than it sounds, because it’s not saying we shouldn’t care about or value everyone else (more on that later).   The point is that we shouldn’t be spending our time worrying about who is or isn’t supplanting whom.  Our success depends on nurturing and exploiting the best and the brightest—at least for these skills—and we had better spend our time trying to find them and encourage them, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation.  And if foreigners choose to come here and establish successful startup companies—mostly in high tech—we should be happy they do.  It is a major strength of the US economy that people find the US to be the best place to realize their ambitions.  We erode that strength at our peril.

Anger at elite technologists may be natural, but they are the wrong targets.  Their effect on the rest of us is positive.  What we need to avoid is a two-tiered society of haves and have-nots, as we’ll discuss later.

  1. Businesses today are different from the past in important ways.

Since we’ve identified the key role played by the tech sector, it’s worth thinking about what kind of businesses those are.  So let’s take a quick look at Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook.

– A first point to notice is that they are all some form of monopoly.  This is not surprising as they are all (even Amazon and Apple) essentially software companies.  Software businesses invite monopoly, because costs of production are minimal. In such cases, research and development costs become primary, and the company with largest market share can afford to offer products with more features than a smaller competitor can.  As automation continues, particularly with AI, similar arguments will apply to much of the rest of the economy.

Managing monopolies is a serious issue:

Monopolies squelch competition.   It is imperative for our success that established companies can’t limit the innovative power of new entrants.  That has been our historical advantage over foreign competitors and is a major factor in any discussion of how we deal with the rise of China.  This is not just a problem with Google, etc.  The demise of Net Neutrality is a classic case of giving in to established players, in this case the major telecom carriers.

Monopolies take more than their share of our money.  Monopoly power limits price sensitivity. Since the determining feature of competition is more often uniqueness more than price point, products are priced at what the market will bear—as with the iPhone or patented drugs.   Furthermore, through manipulation of assets including intellectual property, hi-tech monopolies have been tough to tax.   Apple’s success in this is legendary.   Their windfall from the recent corporate tax cuts is something to behold (and unnecessary as a spur to investment).  It is imperative we learn how to tax monopoly-level profits.

– Next, personal success in these companies requires a high-level of technical competence.   Amazon is obviously a case in point, with two completely different populations:  the mass of box fillers versus the corporate staff.  Note that technical competence is not just a matter for developers, but is also required for the many people in management, support, administration, and even sales.  As just noted, as automation proceeds, this trend will extend well outside of high-tech.

This represents the threat of a two-tiered society, as discussed earlier.  As a country this implies at the very least a basic responsibility for broad-based solid education and a livable minimum wage.

It should be emphasized that strengthening of education is required for both national success and personal prosperity.   Regardless of what advantages we have for staying on top of the heap, we cannot succeed if we don’t have the people to do it.

– Third, all of these business are intrinsically international.  With the growth of the world economy (and China in particular) economies of scale are such that we have to think in global terms.

– Finally our fourth and last comment for this section is about a different trend not limited to high-tech—the institutionalized irresponsibility of business.  It has become gospel that businesses have responsibility only to their investors, and all other considerations are more or less theft.  Businesses used to care about retirement, healthcare, training, even local charity.  But current reality is that if someone is going to care about those things, it’s out of the question for it to be them.

In addition, because of the sheer size of the country, the US more than anywhere else has to deal with the phenomenon of towns or regions where the economic base can just disappear. Company town are the obvious example. In an age of accelerating technology change, we can’t stop such things from happening.   And we can’t expect rescue to happen by all by itself.

However we emphasize this isn’t just about charity.  In the current state of affairs, the private sector is not be doing what’s necessary even to provide the environment for its own success.

That leads to the next topic—what do we need for national success?

  1. Our infrastructure problems mean more than we thought.

Infrastructure has to be thought of as whatever is necessary for national success and personal welfare.  I.e. much more than roads and bridges.  The educational system fits in this category as it is required for both personal and national success.  Declining upward mobility and the student loan crisis are two indications that there is a lot that needs to be done.

Support for theoretical research is in the same category.  It is precursor work for new technologies before they are ready for business. A point worth stressing it that it is not only the research itself that is important—research work assures that there will be a population ready to exploit new opportunities as they arise.

Continuing on, we list a few more significant infrastructure projects needing immediate attention.

– The American Society of Civil Engineers keeps a web site with a break down of national infrastructure requirements.  We currently rate a D+.

– To that we add the urgent needs of combatting climate change, which will be considerable, regardless of how the final plans work out.

– Healthcare is currently in flux with ACA under attack and nothing to replace it.

– Finally we have the general specter of a two-tiered society, with all the misery and threat of conflict that represents.  That too needs to be dealt with as a national problem, and there’s no one in this picture other than government to do it.

Government’s role in this picture is three-tiered:

i. Government needs to make sure everyone has the education and access to the opportunities to succeed.

ii. Government needs to support what is necessary for national infrastructure, much of which will not happen spontaneously in the private sector.

iii. Government needs to supply a last-line safety net for those who fall through the cracks.

This is a non-trivial task, and we emphasize that the biggest part of it is not charity.   We have a current mismatch between a dearth of good jobs and a growing backlog of infrastructure needs of all kinds.

From the point of view here our much-discussed infrastructure needs—back to the roads and bridges—have to be viewed as bellwethers.  The fact that we can’t deal even with roads and bridges means that we have a fundamental problem funding the common good, and we have to take that head on.

  1. There is a mismatch between the needs of our country and the forces that currently control it.

The governing ideology of this country is simple to summarize:  let the private sector do it and get out of the way.  All government regulation is bad, and taxes are just a brake on the private sector’s ability to make everything great.

The chief beneficiaries of this policy are the ultra-rich funders of the Republican Party, although the problem of money in politics (especially after Citizens United) transcends parties. In this enterprise Trump is largely a front man for the real forces running things.

For these people, with fortunes going back even into the nineteenth century, it’s natural to regard the country as a money-machine.  Taxes, regulations, and government services—except for the military—are deductions off the bottom line.

The problem with that view, even for them, is that it is the wrong model for the world we just described.  That set of policies would make sense in an extractive economy, where all that is necessary for success is a cadre of imported experts to arrange for pumping oil with purchased technology.  In that case you don’t need much from the national population in order to collect the proceeds.

That’s not our situation.  As described, we live in a technology-dominated world where the population must earn our national success.  For that world we’re currently going in the wrong direction.  Devaluing education, denying climate change, cutting research, encouraging xenophobia will get to us sooner than we’d like to think.  China is a formidable challenger.

However, it not so hard to be optimistic if we can just be serious about what needs to be done.  We have all the tools for success:  the money, the work to be done, even the means to avoid a two-tiered society.

The story is not complicated.  If we can return to exploiting our strengths, then we should be able to remain in the technological forefront for our chosen areas of focus.   If we can control the monopolies, then the associated margins in an expanding world economy should yield money enough (if we can collect it) to produce a workable society for everyone ready to participate.

There is certainly no shortage of work in the infrastructure area, and it needs all kinds of people.  In this respect the Green New Deal may be too glib in pinning everything on climate change, but their basic idea is correct.   If we play our cards right, the high technology future will provide the funds to support the infrastructure for its own success and for the prosperity of the nation.

We should not underestimate the job.  Careful and transparent planning is critical—defining exactly what needs to be done to support both the economy and the population.  And then determining how that work can be best supplied.

It should be emphasized is that we’re NOT talking about socializing away the free market economy.  If there’s one bad misconception that needs to be hammered down everywhere, it’s the idea that the private sector is magic for all problems.  We’ve just gone down a long list of things it’s not going to do.

Even Adam Smith was clear about this from the beginning.  The private sector is a participant in the public economy, but that economy will deliver the benefits of a free market only if #1 government keeps the private sector from corrupting the markets (e.g with monopolies and bribes) and #2 government provides the resources (e.g. education and other infrastructure) necessary for success.  That’s the definition of our job.

This will necessarily require a renewed focus on government and public service.  It’s interesting that a couple of recent mainstream books (Volker, Lewis) have recognized public service as an important issue.  In that respect “Green New Deal” isn’t a bad term:  we need to be as serious as Roosevelt’s brain trust in planning for the next stage for our country’s future.

This is a battle both old and new.   In Smith’s words, “The interest of [businessmen] is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public …The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention.”  Wealth of Nations is only achieved when government does its job.

Figure Skating and Math Textbooks

/ ontheoutside / Leave a comment

Biellmann-spin_svg.svg

This odd coupling of topics links two separate frustrations which seem to come from the same core problem.

For figure skating the problem is one particular feature of the new scoring system—the extra points given to jumps in the second half of a program.  There’s no question that those are harder to do—anything is harder to do when you’re dead tired.  The question is why that extra stamina should be rewarded as an achievement!  In the last Olympics, those extra points were primarily an opportunity to game the system.  What was missing in artistic achievement could be made up in pure stamina.  The winner of the woman’s gold medal had all of her jumps in the second half of the program.

The fundamental problem is that from within a system, people are tempted to put a value on anything hard, regardless of whether or not it means something to the outside world.  People who have spent their careers doing and teaching figure skating have a tendency to think that any hard jumps are achievements.

Having just had reason to work my way through a high school algebra textbook, I have to say (based on an admittedly small sample) that the textbook publishers have that problem in spades.  The book was filled with minutia that need to be memorized for exam questions.  Getting through all of that is certainly hard, but it’s not the stuff that will make kids confident and successful in mathematics.  And that certainly won’t make them like it or remember it.  (One more reason it’s tough to be a teacher!)

It seems to me that high school math has a pretty good story to tell.  Core algebra is based on a really brilliant idea, that an answer you are looking for can be handled just like a number.   That lets you create a simple kind of manual computer.  If you can write down the problem, then the manual computer can solve it.  Sort of like doing your taxes with turbo-tax.  The core ideas are simple and don’t need to become a challenge.  From there it’s straightforward to do linear systems, which are part of the vocabulary in science, engineering, finance, or just about anything else.  “Vocabulary” is actually the right word.  For most students, mathematics is a language in which they need to gain confidence and fluency.

Then with quadratic equations you hit a wall.  All the techniques you just learned fail.  But you’re saved by another really good idea you would (probably) never have come up with yourself.  You do a few exercises with that idea, working toward an answer that is basically all you need to know—the quadratic formula.  Any further messing around with higher-order polynomials and rational functions is only supplementary, examples of what you can do with other kinds of problems you might run into.  No more rules to learn.

Going beyond that you have topics with really exciting applications.  Conic sections are geometrically interesting and tied to the whole story of the Copernican revolution, Kepler’s laws (“equal areas swept out in equal time”), and Newton’s gravitation.  (You don’t need calculus to tell the story.)  Sequences and series cover ideas behind every financial analysis students will see.  Permutations and combinations are important for probability and statistics and introduce the first non-trivial example of a group.  Modular arithmetic is a useful feature of every programming language.   Trigonometry is important but can become unnecessarily confusing.   Sine and cosine functions are important parts of the vocabulary, but you can get lost forever in trigonometric identities and formulas.

Mathematics shouldn’t be a drag.  There are few core principles and very little actually to memorize.  You get to see some remarkable solutions to tough problems.  One famous mathematician said that mathematics should be “like floating down a river on your back.”  My father-in-law put it differently: “Mathematics is for people too lazy to do real work.”

Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now

/ ontheoutside / 2 Comments

enlightenment

There haven’t been any book reviews on this site before, but Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now is something of a special case.  This is a political book with a message that doesn’t quite fit into the current political environment, and it includes a large body of relevant history.  Not surprisingly, Pinker finds Trump antithetical to the Enlightenment precepts he is defending.  But he also finds plenty of guilt to go around.

To start with, the book seems to have two competing objectives:

  1. Validating the fact of human progress and documenting how it has been achieved. This is really a call to action based on humanistic goals.
  2. Providing reasons for optimism about the future. This is different—good things that are going to happen for reasons such as demographics, outside the scope of specific human actors.

On the face of it, a reader expects the first subject to be primary, if only because (at this point in time) you expect any political book to end up with recommendations for what to do.  But that’s not quite where Pinker is going.  He’s trying to view history not just as a demonstration of what works, but also as a way to understand where things are going longer term.  Since the two objectives are different, it helps to treat them one-by-one.

On the first subject, Pinker does a remarkable job of demonstrating the successes that humanity has achieved—In the longer term, in the last century, and in the past few decades. This involves health, security, standard of living, and many other quantitative measures of human welfare.   Much of this is unfamiliar because, as he says, this kind of thing just doesn’t make news.  The book is worth reading for this part alone.  Pinker does a good job of demonstrating progress and what is responsible for that progress:  science, rationality, and a broad-based desire to create a better world for everyone.  It is hard to argue with the historical fact that prosperity is not a zero-sum game.

In passing Pinker tries to dispose of past arguments against enlightenment humanism.  As examples:  Humans are inherently irrational (except when they want to make a point).  Humanism is a white racist production (its advocates were on the anti-imperialist side).   Science ignores human values (just plain not true).

Predicting the future is harder, and overall I’d say that Pinker is not well-served by his desire to make things look positive.  He tries to say that nuclear war is improbable, but we know that just one outlier is bad enough.  He treats the climate change movement as a kind of hysteria, because science will just take care of it in time (based on mostly anecdotal evidence).  He views the populist phenomenon as a brief episode of backsliding until more liberal generations take over from the ones now on the verge of dying out.

So in the end it seems a shame that the future predictions tend to dominate discussions of the book, when it’s the first part—the defense of progress—that is its greatest contribution.

And then there is the question of the call to action.  What Pinker espouses is humanism—the broad-based, rational process that has delivered progress.  The problem is that humanism doesn’t have a political party.

Pinker points out that much of the political process just doesn’t work:  Issue-based movements systematically deny progress for fear of losing momentum (even though that means they frequently get caught in the bind of asking for more money to continue going nowhere).  Discussion of issues is based on faulty statistics and dishonest patterns of argument.  Democracy as a whole is not as rational or responsive as we would like to think (the chapter on that subject is well worth reading).  He gives plenty of examples of bad behavior on both the left and the right.  Both sides contributed to the grim view of reality that was instrumental in producing Trump.

So where do we go from here?  Individuals can learn to be more rational in their behavior and in their evaluation of what they see and read.  They can work with the flawed organizations that are fighting bad actors such as Trump.  They can involve themselves with specific issues and help to push them along.  All told—incremental change but no miracle solution.

That’s actually the optimism of the book.   There’s no silver bullet, but the process has worked thus far.  And hopefully we will keep it going.

Private Sector Fantasies

/ ontheoutside / 8 Comments

Adam_Smith_The_Muir_portrait1

This note is about a subject with perhaps more deliberately-sown confusion than any other:  the role of government in a market economy.

We start with the saint of free markets Adam Smith.   Adam Smith had no delusions that the free market system would somehow manage itself.   He saw three roles for government in a market economy:  defense, justice, and education.  Further he understood that the private sector and the free market were not the same thing—one of the roles of justice was to prevent the private sector from creating monopolies and thus perverting the free market.  In other words even as an ideal, the free market was neither self -policing (it needed to be protected against its own tendency to create abuses) nor self-sustaining (it needed government to create the population of educated workers).

With that as introduction, we want to talk more about the relations of business and government.  There are three sections.  The first two expand on policing and sustaining of the free market, as just discussed.  The third talks about scope—what objectives for society are in or out of scope for the free market. The Trump administration has positioned itself as the defender of free markets against government.  Instead they are defenders of something rather different, with real dangers as a result.

 

Policing the free market

Monopolies are bad.  they raise prices and stifle progress.  They are also by many measures growing in power.  But they are not the only area where the free market needs to be protected from itself.   For example, lack of business transparency perverts the capital markets, so the SEC plays a crucial role.

A more complicated but equally crucial role is regulation of the boom and bust cycles (with bank failures and human misery) that used to be endemic to capitalism.  Government has two responsibilities for controlling those cycles:

  1. It needs to act “countercyclically”. Despite the jargon term, this is so basic as to be biblical—save in good times to prepare for bad. In a recession the government is the only party able to stop the spiral of low sales -> layoffs -> even lower sales-> even more layoffs.  It does that by injecting money into the economy to stabilize sales.  But in a recession, tax revenues are down, and the money has to come from somewhere–preferably savings but if necessary debt.  In 2008 George W. Bush had just fought an off-budget 3 trillion-dollar war, so the cupboard was bare.  Republicans screamed about increasing the deficit, even proposing constitutional amendments for balanced budgets.  Their line “real people tighten their belts when they have to” was a deliberate misrepresentation.  Real people save for bad times; otherwise they have to borrow to put food on the table.
  2. Government needs to recognize and control the excesses that can creep in to cause havoc in the business cycle. While many factors contributed to the 2008 crash, the most spectacularly deadly was the perversion of the banking system caused by mortgage-backed securities. In the giddiness of deregulation no one was looking.  The aftermath produced the Dodd-Frank legislation as an antidote.

Finally, as a last example, there are categories of risk where you can’t count on the business decision-making process to do the job.  Low-probability/high costs events (plane crashes, oil rig blow-outs) should in theory be prevented by rational decision-making, but in practice it’s hard to refrain from increasing profits by ignoring something that “really isn’t going to happen”.  So there is a role for government there too—protecting both the public and the businesses.

Current status:

– The administration’s anti-trust position remains to be seen.  Trump campaigned against mergers, but appointed an industry-representing trust lawyer to head the anti-trust division.

– There seems to be no recognition of business cycle issues.  Trump’s tax plan runs a big deficit to stimulate an economy close to full employment.  This runs the risk of repeating 2008 with an even worse debt position to fight it.  He also wants to repeal Dodd-Frank and says he won’t enforce it now.

– The general rule is that any regulation opposed by any business is bad.

=>  There is no serious recognition that the financial system needs policing.  Trump runs the show based on what he has wanted to see for his own businesses.  This is a blind dash into another 2008 or worse.

 

Sustaining the free market

Adam Smith pointed out the need for government to supply a suitably-trained workforce.   In the eighteenth century that meant simply literacy.   The definition of suitably-trained has changed over time.  By 1940 a then astounding 50% of American students finished high school.  In that era no other country approached that level of broad education support.   Then the GI bill made college possible for veterans, and public colleges expanded widely throughout the 1960’s and 70’s.  This coincided with unquestioned American economic dominance.  An educated workforce (at all levels) remains a critical national requirement.

You can take that one step farther.  Equality of opportunity is usually discussed in terms of social effects, but there is a corresponding benefit to the free market.   Business and the market benefit when all persons are able to achieve up to their capabilities.  The United States used to lead the world in upward mobility, but with rising inequality it now ranks behind most developed countries.

There is one more government role that fits here as well, namely research.  Government support of research produces people to be hired by cutting-edge businesses, and also supports the creation of new businesses to exploit the progress of science and technology.

Current status:

– For college, the student debt crisis speaks for itself.  A whole generation of students can’t imagine when they will be able to get out of debt.  This is compounded by De Vos’ support of shady lenders and weakening of controls on fraudulent educational institutions.

– For K- 12 education, states have retreated in funding, and De Vos is proposing a voucher system that will abandon the broader population.  Vouchers will be fixed in dollar value, to be augmented by surcharges at the now-privatized schools.   If you want a good education you pay for it; if you can’t, there is no guarantee of what you get.  This is institutionalized separate and unequal.

– Trump’s budget essentially abandons the government’s role in research, and his appointees have attempted to minimize the role of science.

=> There is surprisingly little recognition that government has an important role here at all–except to privatize it!

 

Scope of the free market

Adam Smith felt that the private sector could not be trusted even to defend free markets.  So it is not surprising that there are other aspects of society that need defending as well.

We give a few examples:

– Well-being of workers.   Smith describes effects of supply and demand on workers, and he even points out that adequately-paid workers may be more productive, but he makes no claim of utopia from the free market.   In fact in Smith’s description, workers’ welfare depends on a market for labor in which individuals have little bargaining power.

– Resources and the environment

Enterprises will use the environment for their own benefit, unless there are rules to the contrary.

– Infrastructure

Public resources such as roads, bridge, airports, internet, etc. should be built and maintained as needed by everyone.

Current status:

– Trump has pushed to limit OSHA workrules, opposes unions, and has no plans to raise the minimum wage.

– The EPA is being severely cut and redirected to helping businesses.

– The stated approach to infrastructure is via private investment, which will go where the money is.

=> There is no recognition that areas such as these can be out of scope for the private sector.  Instead there is a blind belief that growth solves everything.

 

From this summary it should be clear how far we are from free market economics.

The current national policy is that the private sector just needs to be encouraged to go do its thing.   We don’t have to care about policing its risk, we can let it take care of education and research, and nothing other than its success is needed to solve every other problem in society.  Just make sure it’s flush with cash and let it go.

That was the history of the nineteenth century, and for vast part of the population it was no picnic.  And it is worth remembering that 1929 really did happen.

Even thinking of the more recent past there’s an eerie familiarity about our situation.  We have a supremely confident lunatic fringe with the power to run amok.  The last lunatic fringe to take control of our government (remember the neocons?) gave us the Iraq war—which destabilized the Middle East and bankrupted the country—and the crash of 2008.

This time it could well be worse.