As I work my way through The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, a familiar argument came up: the widening inequality was a technological problem, not social or political. In other words, our digital technologies, which power the new, information-based economy, create the economic inequality. The fraud of Wall Street, the bad policies, etc. should not be blamed for such a macro problem. This argument is nothing new. I first encountered it with The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb, who argued forcefully that mega-rich people are black swan of our economies, and that the current world (post-industrial, information-based) makes it easier and easier for black swans (including mega rich people) to happen. What a beautiful argument! It resembles the original sin, religion-is-root-of-all-violence, 9/11, and various other "explanations" of inescapable problems. For one, they acknowledge that the problems (inequality, hell, the amount of bloodshed between 15th and 20th centuries, and bad economy). However, instead of finding a human cause to resolve, they blame an nonhuman force (technologies, our nature, the jerk-face bishops, the first attack on American soil in half a century). Thus, nobody is to blamed, so no fixes are needed. And all we can do is to workaround or pray for serenity.
Now, I don't have enough space to discuss the original sin or religion or 9/11 (wait, the last one is easy, but it's not the topic here). However, the link between technologies and inequality is, at best, a coincidence. In fact, this link reminds me of the story of the Russian Tsar and the doctors. The story goes like this: the Tsar noticed from the statistics that plagued areas had many doctors; to reduce the plague, thus, he ordered the execution of all doctors. Oh Tsar, how smart were you! Similarly, the rise of inequality, which is a very recent phenomenon (since late 1970s), coincides with the rise of computer and digital technologies. And no one should be blamed for the rise of inequality, right? So the technologies get the scapegoat role.
However, look at the general trend of history and technologies, and you quickly realize this does not make sense at all. After all, technologies exist to reduce labor and increase productivity. Thus, applying the argument of digital technologies, all technologies should have increased inequality. But history worked out the reverse. Each and every technology (for now, except digital ones) reduced inequality. Don't believe me? Look at history again for inequality, and compare each era against its predecessor. Let's do it here.
First, we may think of our time is so unequal. However, the difference between an average Joe, or even a relatively poor Joe, and Bill Gates pales against the difference between an average citizen and his or her king (or emperor) at the eve of World War I. Back then, most states lived under a monarch, whose wealth dwarfed the meager lots of the common people. However, this difference, again, paled against the "enlightened absolutism" of the earlier age. I mean, the name alone should tell you the difference in wealth, status, and rights. Moving further into the Medieval, and we started dealing with serfs and lords. The complaints of free citizens in 17th century must have sounded like spoiled brats to those poor land-bound souls of the earlier ages. Moving past Medieval into Classical time, and slavery came into focal point. Or, at the very least, look at the difference between a Pharaoh, who could build fabulous tombs filled with precious goods, and the poor souls labored to build those tombs. Moving out of historical time frame, and inequality is magnified to genocides: whenever a stronger people moved into an area, they wiped all natives from the face of the Earth. Example: Indo-European arrival in Europe. Moving yet further, we see how Homo sapiens cleared off each and every last of other Homos, and dominate the Earth.
As we see, each age, wielding its signature technologies, improved upon the lives of the regular people, and reduced the inequality of the previous age. Agriculture, city building, writing, empires, industrial age, electricity. All of them unleashed eras where common men and women could have better lives, enjoy more rights, and possess more political power. This great progress accumulated into the so-called middle class of the 1970s: a mass of people all equally empowered to make a better life for themselves, their families, and their world. In fact, this law of equality-induced-technologies is so powerful that a broad and rich middle class becomes the sign and the jewel of a developed country.
Until late 1970s and early 1980s, that is.
Remember that all previous technological advances have the same inequality-inducing qualities of digital technologies. All of them increase the productivity (thus reduce the amount labor needed to produce same amount of goods) and speed up communication (concentration of population, written languages, better roads, printing, better mode of transportation, telegram). Most crucially, all of them required a different skill set from the last. Farmers work differently from hunters and gatherers; city dwellers live differently from rural and forest dwellers; industrial workers need skills and discipline that farmers don't. And somehow, we assert that digital technologies are just different from the rest? That is just absurb.
Furthermore, close observation of the inequality data reveals some inconsistencies with our beautiful argument. Two main issues stand out. One, not every country experiences the spread. For example, Japan, original launch site of the transistors, barely experienced any significant spread. Neither do France and the Netherlands. Germany, which was explicitly cited in the book, is a mixed case. It inequality rose from mid-1980s to early 1990s, but then reduced in mid-1990s to 2000 (interestingly, the share of income of the top 1% crashed in early 2000s, signifying the effect of the dot com bubble?). Secondly, clear spreads (US, UK, Australia) did not coincide with the rise of the computer. They started in late 1970s in UK, early 1980s in US, and mid 1980s in Australia. However, computer technologies did not hit its stride until 1990s! What happened in late 1970 and mid-1980, you ask? Well, Thatcher rose in 1979, Reagan won in 1982, and Bob Hawke won in 1983. Thus, political events matched inequality much much better than technologies.
Last important point on this argument: digital technologies don't necessarily increase inequality. How? First, a super star actually requires a lot of supporting people, much more than our culture usually portray. Let's take Instagram, the example that The Second Machine Age held up to contrast with industrial age Kodak. Maybe it was true that creating Instagram itself did not take that many people. However, in contrast with ancient Kodak, Instagram requires active wireless internet to function. This means countless labor for building and maintaining of the wireless network, plus countless other for the smart phone itself. When you take all of these into account, well, Instagram in fact requires quite a few human hands to succeed, but we just don't think of them. Similarly, for J.K. Rowling to succeed as a writer, she need editors, graphic designers, translators, distribution channels, etc. For a movie to succeed and a few movie stars to earn big bucks, the movie needs countless experts in lightning, camera, music, scripts, etc. as well as advertisement and distribution. The problem is actually this: we don't think of these invisible people. We just think of the stars, and thus they alone gain the wealth and wield the power. Second, being a super star may not always profit the star. As pointed out by Invisibles book (by David Zweig), a hit or two on social media do not guarantee any profit. Instead, all enduring income streams require a lot of work, thus should provide jobs and share the gain. But of course, super stars don't share. Lastly, digital advance should have increased the number of "super stars," and thus driven down the actual benefits of being a super star. After all, in the age of endless personalization, there is no reason why I should read the same book, listen to the same music, or play the same game as you do. If the hype of the digital age actualizes, each small producer should have been able to easily reach out to its small niche, and thus allow for a large number of small producers, and increase competition. And what happens when competition is high? Lower profit on the side of the producers, of course. But this did not happen. Rather, we increasingly idolize a few and willfully ignore the rest.
Let's face it, digital age has not been the paradise it promised to be. No age has been, frankly. However, to blame our inequality on the digital technologies is absurd. We have the tools and the resources to educate each and every young person to pursuit his or her dream, but we don't. We have the resources to help all seniors retire in dignity, but we don't. We can bring good health care to all, but we don't. Our inequality feeds on our social and political systems, not our technologies. Therefore, let's fix the world rather than praying for serenity.
Sunday, December 21, 2014
Wednesday, December 3, 2014
The Regression of Technologies
You know, when my Dell Venue 8 decided to shutdown Firefox out of nowhere for the upteenth time, I really need to vent my frustration somewhere. The state of our technologies is shameful, I tell you, shameful.
On the paper, my tablet has a 2.1 GHz dual core CPU with 1GB of RAM. Think about how marvelous this hardware is. This is above Windows Vista's recommended specification. Less than 10 years ago, with such system, I should expect a smoothly functional, graphical operating system on which I can work with office software, some small games, and read news. In parallel. And if you are willing to go just a bit back, this specification is like 5 times the recommended hardware for Windows XP, which, again, is a modern OS with graphical interface. On such powerful specification, you should be able to run suites of heavy applications (think Mozilla + Word + Outlook + games) at the same time, switching back and forth as you see fit.
However, Android could barely load itself on such capable system. And what do I run? A web-browser, a manga reader, and that's it. And, let's not pick on Dell either. My phone does similar things. Once, I was on the road, with Google Maps navigation and Audible running concurrently. At one point, the navigation told me that I will need to turn in about a mile. So I anticipated the signal to turn, and anticipated, and anticipated. After about 5 minutes (which should work about about at least 2 miles), I was confused why navigation has not told me which road to turn in yet. The mystery was easily seen once I looked at the phone: apparently, Android has decided that it ran out of memory or resources or whatever, and booted my navigation service out. No warning, no choices (seriously, given choice, Audible would go; I need navigation, no?), no nothing. Just kick it out.
I mean, guys, it's 2014. We know how to swap RAM to hard drive to emulate full memory. We have various web-based solution to divide the load between server and client. We have beautiful hardware that was unaffordable merely 10 years ago, and unthinkable 15 years ago (sounds long, but everyone using a smart phone once lived that time; it's in memory, for God's sake!). And the damned OS cannot have 2 services running at the same time. What gives?
And I don't mean Android is the only bad system, either. Have you heard of NodeJS? I still don't understand why people use it. It basically throws away every practical and theoretical advances of computer sciences in the last 20 or so years (no type checking, no multi-threading, no proper concurrent programming, no proper programming paradigm, etc.) and bills itself as, um, the greatest and latest. People talk about how fast NodeJS is. Seriously, guys. If you want to program without any modern features for speed, go and use assembly. I am about 200% sure it's faster. Hey, you can finally use more than 1 core!
The list of those "greatest and latest" go on and on. How about IDE? Emacs was ridiculed as "Eight Megabytes And Constant Swapping." How much memory any of your IDE takes? Or music. Once upon the time, people listened to vinyl. Then, it's CD. Then, it's MP3. Then, it's Youtube. Wanna talk about quality?
We keep talking about advances of technologies. However, there is this drive to reimplement everything on new platform, but the new implementation is slower, buggier, less capable than the last one. I still wonder why.
On the paper, my tablet has a 2.1 GHz dual core CPU with 1GB of RAM. Think about how marvelous this hardware is. This is above Windows Vista's recommended specification. Less than 10 years ago, with such system, I should expect a smoothly functional, graphical operating system on which I can work with office software, some small games, and read news. In parallel. And if you are willing to go just a bit back, this specification is like 5 times the recommended hardware for Windows XP, which, again, is a modern OS with graphical interface. On such powerful specification, you should be able to run suites of heavy applications (think Mozilla + Word + Outlook + games) at the same time, switching back and forth as you see fit.
However, Android could barely load itself on such capable system. And what do I run? A web-browser, a manga reader, and that's it. And, let's not pick on Dell either. My phone does similar things. Once, I was on the road, with Google Maps navigation and Audible running concurrently. At one point, the navigation told me that I will need to turn in about a mile. So I anticipated the signal to turn, and anticipated, and anticipated. After about 5 minutes (which should work about about at least 2 miles), I was confused why navigation has not told me which road to turn in yet. The mystery was easily seen once I looked at the phone: apparently, Android has decided that it ran out of memory or resources or whatever, and booted my navigation service out. No warning, no choices (seriously, given choice, Audible would go; I need navigation, no?), no nothing. Just kick it out.
I mean, guys, it's 2014. We know how to swap RAM to hard drive to emulate full memory. We have various web-based solution to divide the load between server and client. We have beautiful hardware that was unaffordable merely 10 years ago, and unthinkable 15 years ago (sounds long, but everyone using a smart phone once lived that time; it's in memory, for God's sake!). And the damned OS cannot have 2 services running at the same time. What gives?
And I don't mean Android is the only bad system, either. Have you heard of NodeJS? I still don't understand why people use it. It basically throws away every practical and theoretical advances of computer sciences in the last 20 or so years (no type checking, no multi-threading, no proper concurrent programming, no proper programming paradigm, etc.) and bills itself as, um, the greatest and latest. People talk about how fast NodeJS is. Seriously, guys. If you want to program without any modern features for speed, go and use assembly. I am about 200% sure it's faster. Hey, you can finally use more than 1 core!
The list of those "greatest and latest" go on and on. How about IDE? Emacs was ridiculed as "Eight Megabytes And Constant Swapping." How much memory any of your IDE takes? Or music. Once upon the time, people listened to vinyl. Then, it's CD. Then, it's MP3. Then, it's Youtube. Wanna talk about quality?
We keep talking about advances of technologies. However, there is this drive to reimplement everything on new platform, but the new implementation is slower, buggier, less capable than the last one. I still wonder why.
Saturday, November 29, 2014
The Problem of Republican Policies: Demand of Free Lunches
I don't know about you, but I have always struggled with this enigma: individual Republicans almost always seem intelligent and nice, but they support almost incomprehensibly terrible (either stupid, cruel, ungrounded, or all three) policies. I mean, Paul Krugman complained, again, about how Very Serious People mistake the economic world. But those same people are often extremely smart, very accomplished and hard-working, and affable if not outright caring. The contradiction between their personalities and policy choices is, for the longest time, my biggest confusion about how the world operates.
Then I have this insight: those people ain't stupid with their choices. In fact, they are being smart, albeit in a twisted way. You see, their choices are, essentially, free lunches (meaning there is no cost, only benefits). Thus, when compared with pragmatic policies, the free lunches win every time. It's like insisting that Venus de Milo is a real woman, then having her compete in a beauty pageant. Since the statue is the idealized feminine form, no other women can even come close to winning. Of course, the statue and Republican policies differ in 1 critical point: nobody expects a woman at her caliber exists, but Republicans insist that their policies are possible (ergo, optimum). Therefore, like all rational and intelligent beings, our Republicans decide, time after time, on free-lunch policies (Hey, it's free! What else do you want?).
First of (the most hotly debated one), budget. I mean, when I repeat to myself all of the promises of GOP ideas of budget, those ideas sound irresistible. They reduce the budget deficit, even the debt in the long run. They cut taxes for everyone (raise your hands if you like paying taxes, please). They create jobs. They preserve critical social program (Medicare, Social Security; remember, GOP needs each and every of those elder white voters). In fact, short of reviving Reagan, I am not sure what these budgets can't do. Nobody has to sacrifice anything. All people, rich, poor, middle, male, female, children, black, white, all get something. Perfect!
How about tort reform? Well, same story all over. It will cut healthcare spending (which quite literally goes through everyone's roof). It will punish the bad guys. It will promote job growth. In some lines, I even heard it will improve innovations (since healthcare providers don't fear law suits as much). I mean, only one group of people must pay: the dirty bastards who invent stupid law suits to extract money from honest companies (who, of course, extort money, with interest, from the rest of us). Who can argue against such beautiful and perfect policy?
Next up, regulations, or lack thereof. I mean, as an intelligent reader, you should guess out what I am about to write. Reduced government size, actually more effective, reduced governmental abuse, etc. All bow to the invisible hand of the market, please, for it is all-mighty. The only conceivable opponent of such might force is power hungry government agents, who should burn in hell for all eternity.
Even gold standard, when you think about it, is portrayed as more or less free lunches by its opponents these days. No dependency on big bad banks, no big government, no currency war, no inflation, only growth and stability reign. Only brain-dead, spend-thrift, power-hungry liberals can oppose such a beautiful and simple idea.
A few other policies are also presented as cost-free, but only to the majority of the population (the good side, of course). For example, cuts to social safety nets (such as food stamp and MedicAid) will punish those lazy bastards leeching on hard working people, and blessed the said people with everything short of revival of Washington himself. Those ain't truly free lunches (since there are still costs), but since the cost bearers are immoral, lazy, stupid, etc., they deserve it.
First, and most often, free lunches exaggerate a well-known, proven fact and principles. Think about tax-cuts-raise-money budgets. It is well proven that, given more money, people spend more. It is also well-proven that one dollar spent by consumer is amplified and grows the economy more than just a dollar (imagine you buying a dollar of grocery; this means that the employees at the store are paid; these employees then use their pay to buy something else; so on and so forth). Lastly, bigger economy increases tax income, given that everything else is equal. But of course, when you cut taxes, everything else is not equal. Thus, the real question of such tax-cuts-raise-money budgets should have been, "how much tax cuts will raise enough money to pay for themselves?" However, this question is extremely hard, because human behaviors (thus, the economy) are extremely complicated and dependent on specifics. For example, cutting tax rate from 90% to 80% is totally different from 33% to 31% (the first one doubles real income, the second one is rounding numbers for most); or, in debt ridden time like 2008, people save more. However, free lunches ignore the real questions and their difficulty, and cling onto simplistic ideas and stretch those ideas to cover the costs.
Talking about "all things equal," free lunches also often ignore changed or invalid assumptions. As seen above, cutting taxes at different rate and times produces different results. However, free lunches skip over the "all things equal" disclaimer, and proclaim the validity of a proven facts (always proven with a specific set of assumptions) over all situations. Another example of this: free market regulates. The idea is simple and intuitive: when a firm does something bad, consumers punish that firm, and put it out of business. Thus, the market regulates its participants. However, this assumes that the majority of the consumers know about the misconducts of a firm in a timely and actionable manner; otherwise, how can they avoid such firm? For example, let's say that a firm produces bad food that kill people. This means that for the market to regulate, two things must happen: 1. some people must die; 2. those deaths must be well publicized immediately. The bad firm can circumstance both: it can keep the poisoning low enough for massive amount of food to be sold before someone death; it can delay the analyses of the deaths; it can throw smoke and mirror to distract; it can cover up the news. Oh, this is just a severe, thus easy example. Imagine situations where bad products cannot be noticed for years, or decades (pollution comes to mind, as well as carcinogens). Market can't regulate these, since its assumptions can't apply. However, our lovely free lunches ignore such inconveniences, and loudly proclaim the unchanging "facts."
To distract people from the changing assumptions, free lunches rely on anecdotal evidences and demonizes of certain groups of people. The most obvious example is cutting social safety nets (I swear, every Republican has a library of neighbors and acquaintances who live off welfare). However, most other free lunches involve this to a certain degrees. Remember all of those stories about people putting fake fingers into their food to sue the restaurants? How about those story of Andrew Carnegie reducing steel price during his virtual monopoly? By the way, the anecdotes don't even need to be real. During the campaign against estate tax, various media watchdog groups reported that GOP made up stories about people paying huge taxes, and apparently those stories persuaded quite a few people over. Similar stories, of course, are told during the campaign against healthcare reform.
Another distraction is wrong intuition and common sense. Remember, public policies deal with the whole nation, and sometimes the whole world. In such situation, personal intuition and common sense often mislead. An analogy in physics is matter's behavior at speed approaching light speed; those behaviors are totally different from the normal, classical physics of everyday life, and thus daily intuition is often wrong. Similarly, right things for a person may not be correct for the whole nation. For example, Tragedy of the commons. Or, another example, a family save during hard time and splurge during good time; a nation does the reverse: splurge during bad time to make up for private sector, then save during good time to pay off the debt. To apply a family intuition onto a nation produces Ireland and Italy in 2011. Similarly, when talking about law suit, people imagine two sides battling out in front of a (clueless?) jury. In fact, a multi-billion corporation (the only worthy targets for suing for money) employ an army of lawyers and array of tactics to delay, justify, and publicly defend itself. The idea of an crafty individual, aided by a rogue lawyer, legally robbing innocent companies resonates with daily thugs, but not at the level of million-dollar-law-suits.
If anecdotal evidences fail, let's distort the history! For example, Reagan cut taxes, and boom, the economy went into ecstasy. Greece spent money, and boom, they are bankrupted. Better yet, let's read and interpret well-regarded (or, indeed, legal) documents in special light. From the Constitution to the Bible, those "literal readers" have wrecked the world over quite a few times with their awesome understanding that resembles neither the original creators (people, listen up, humans had slaves instead of high-speed internet connections back in those days!) nor the popular needs and demands (which, generally speaking, those documents read intentionally ambiguous to serve). History (very similar to statistics) proves lies. The difference lies in consequences and intentions. Lying through statistics is a crime, and only employed as the last resort. Improving history, on the other hand, is creative and original, indeed it is celebrated, and employed free as the arguments require.
But of course, when needs be, statistics works, too. Budget fights famously employ those (you know, we will make up the short falls with unspecified loop holes closing), but given their nature, all free lunches (or, at least those reaching policy form) stretch their numbers one way or another. However, frankly, this strategy has limited effects, and generally employed as the last line of defense. By the time a group of people put down numbers, they must have invested heavily onto the ideas to manipulate the numbers.
Basically, most of these strategies share one thing: lack of attention to details. They generally present a grand idea, whose footnotes totally contradict and destroy it. However, in our impatient world, who has time for foot notes, right?
Tragically, in many cases, the cost of those policies befalls upon the very people demanding them. Well, to be completely fair, since everyone lives together, the implementers of those policies will eventually feel the cost, but some cost comes sooner than others. For example, the "free market health care," which reigned the richest country in the world until 2008, maintained poor care at high prices. Tax cuts and war with random country (aka Iraq) vanquished the precious budget surplus and deprived the federal government of tools to fight later depression. Nonsensical monetary policies have dragged Europe back into the recession like twice now (and seems to do it again), and is a constant threat to American economy (look at China, people. When the economy is in depression, help it, not kick it).
Now, of course, there are various ways to soften the blows, so to speak. First, there is denial or blaming the other side. This actually works remarkably well. For example, Obama is responsible for the recession (that started before he took office) and the public debt (which his part was paying just before GOP went to war). Second, there is blaming environmental factions. Bush is a genius in this: economy tanking? 9/11; domestic liberty eroding? 9/11; Iraq war went south? 9/11. However, blaming only takes it so far. When dreams crash into reality, real money demands real victims. Thus the third stratagem: shift the cost to the others. As defined above, the others are people unessential to the policies, usually the poor, the minority, the disadvantaged. Occasionally, foreigners get to pay, too (for example, some town in Florida systematically extract money from driving-by; another example is Iraq war to distract people from the problems at home). Ironically, sometimes, to fix the problem, the proponents of a policy would claim that it is not applied rigorously enough, and thus needs a surge in application. A good example of this is the European demand for governmental cuts and strictly balanced budgets. In the good old days, Ireland used to be the example of good governmental. It crashed. I think Cyprus was held up for a while, who also crashed. Then Germany became the shining example. Meanwhile, the union spiral near death.
Free lunches are nice. To dream about, that is. In real life, though, we have no perpetual engine, and we have no free lunch. Instead, we have scientific method, statistics, rationality. Those can help us differentiate good and bad policies. Remember, we, as human, has about 3000 years of recorded history spanning 5 continents. Lots of policies have been tried. Gold standard, for example, has been tried, abandoned, and tried again quite a few times. Militarism has also been tried. Execution of "lazy people" has been carried out (albeit not this century). We know, with some degree of certainty, what lie ahead. So, let's look at it, and think rationally, rather than rely on "common sense" (what is common sense, anyway? Mob rule?) or fancy rhetoric (America is special! Remember, once upon a time, Rome was special, China was center of the universe, and Persia ruled the world) and theory. Maybe then smart people will stop demanding for free lunches and make stupid decisions.
Then I have this insight: those people ain't stupid with their choices. In fact, they are being smart, albeit in a twisted way. You see, their choices are, essentially, free lunches (meaning there is no cost, only benefits). Thus, when compared with pragmatic policies, the free lunches win every time. It's like insisting that Venus de Milo is a real woman, then having her compete in a beauty pageant. Since the statue is the idealized feminine form, no other women can even come close to winning. Of course, the statue and Republican policies differ in 1 critical point: nobody expects a woman at her caliber exists, but Republicans insist that their policies are possible (ergo, optimum). Therefore, like all rational and intelligent beings, our Republicans decide, time after time, on free-lunch policies (Hey, it's free! What else do you want?).
The free lunches
Let's look at the free lunches in more details.First of (the most hotly debated one), budget. I mean, when I repeat to myself all of the promises of GOP ideas of budget, those ideas sound irresistible. They reduce the budget deficit, even the debt in the long run. They cut taxes for everyone (raise your hands if you like paying taxes, please). They create jobs. They preserve critical social program (Medicare, Social Security; remember, GOP needs each and every of those elder white voters). In fact, short of reviving Reagan, I am not sure what these budgets can't do. Nobody has to sacrifice anything. All people, rich, poor, middle, male, female, children, black, white, all get something. Perfect!
How about tort reform? Well, same story all over. It will cut healthcare spending (which quite literally goes through everyone's roof). It will punish the bad guys. It will promote job growth. In some lines, I even heard it will improve innovations (since healthcare providers don't fear law suits as much). I mean, only one group of people must pay: the dirty bastards who invent stupid law suits to extract money from honest companies (who, of course, extort money, with interest, from the rest of us). Who can argue against such beautiful and perfect policy?
Next up, regulations, or lack thereof. I mean, as an intelligent reader, you should guess out what I am about to write. Reduced government size, actually more effective, reduced governmental abuse, etc. All bow to the invisible hand of the market, please, for it is all-mighty. The only conceivable opponent of such might force is power hungry government agents, who should burn in hell for all eternity.
Even gold standard, when you think about it, is portrayed as more or less free lunches by its opponents these days. No dependency on big bad banks, no big government, no currency war, no inflation, only growth and stability reign. Only brain-dead, spend-thrift, power-hungry liberals can oppose such a beautiful and simple idea.
A few other policies are also presented as cost-free, but only to the majority of the population (the good side, of course). For example, cuts to social safety nets (such as food stamp and MedicAid) will punish those lazy bastards leeching on hard working people, and blessed the said people with everything short of revival of Washington himself. Those ain't truly free lunches (since there are still costs), but since the cost bearers are immoral, lazy, stupid, etc., they deserve it.
Creation of Free Lunches
How, one may ask, did those intelligent people come to believe in free lunches? (By the way, given that intelligent people believe in pseudo-sciences and superstitions, one should not be that surprised; however, given the amount of discussion and debate those policies have received, as well as seriousness of their nature and consequences, they should not have inspired such fever following). I am no social scientists (or economists, who seem to be in just about any field these days), but I can summarize a few ways that free lunches are conceived. Since they are equivalent of unicorn in nature, each free lunch always deploys more than just one, often all of the below strategies to convince people to switch side.First, and most often, free lunches exaggerate a well-known, proven fact and principles. Think about tax-cuts-raise-money budgets. It is well proven that, given more money, people spend more. It is also well-proven that one dollar spent by consumer is amplified and grows the economy more than just a dollar (imagine you buying a dollar of grocery; this means that the employees at the store are paid; these employees then use their pay to buy something else; so on and so forth). Lastly, bigger economy increases tax income, given that everything else is equal. But of course, when you cut taxes, everything else is not equal. Thus, the real question of such tax-cuts-raise-money budgets should have been, "how much tax cuts will raise enough money to pay for themselves?" However, this question is extremely hard, because human behaviors (thus, the economy) are extremely complicated and dependent on specifics. For example, cutting tax rate from 90% to 80% is totally different from 33% to 31% (the first one doubles real income, the second one is rounding numbers for most); or, in debt ridden time like 2008, people save more. However, free lunches ignore the real questions and their difficulty, and cling onto simplistic ideas and stretch those ideas to cover the costs.
Talking about "all things equal," free lunches also often ignore changed or invalid assumptions. As seen above, cutting taxes at different rate and times produces different results. However, free lunches skip over the "all things equal" disclaimer, and proclaim the validity of a proven facts (always proven with a specific set of assumptions) over all situations. Another example of this: free market regulates. The idea is simple and intuitive: when a firm does something bad, consumers punish that firm, and put it out of business. Thus, the market regulates its participants. However, this assumes that the majority of the consumers know about the misconducts of a firm in a timely and actionable manner; otherwise, how can they avoid such firm? For example, let's say that a firm produces bad food that kill people. This means that for the market to regulate, two things must happen: 1. some people must die; 2. those deaths must be well publicized immediately. The bad firm can circumstance both: it can keep the poisoning low enough for massive amount of food to be sold before someone death; it can delay the analyses of the deaths; it can throw smoke and mirror to distract; it can cover up the news. Oh, this is just a severe, thus easy example. Imagine situations where bad products cannot be noticed for years, or decades (pollution comes to mind, as well as carcinogens). Market can't regulate these, since its assumptions can't apply. However, our lovely free lunches ignore such inconveniences, and loudly proclaim the unchanging "facts."
To distract people from the changing assumptions, free lunches rely on anecdotal evidences and demonizes of certain groups of people. The most obvious example is cutting social safety nets (I swear, every Republican has a library of neighbors and acquaintances who live off welfare). However, most other free lunches involve this to a certain degrees. Remember all of those stories about people putting fake fingers into their food to sue the restaurants? How about those story of Andrew Carnegie reducing steel price during his virtual monopoly? By the way, the anecdotes don't even need to be real. During the campaign against estate tax, various media watchdog groups reported that GOP made up stories about people paying huge taxes, and apparently those stories persuaded quite a few people over. Similar stories, of course, are told during the campaign against healthcare reform.
Another distraction is wrong intuition and common sense. Remember, public policies deal with the whole nation, and sometimes the whole world. In such situation, personal intuition and common sense often mislead. An analogy in physics is matter's behavior at speed approaching light speed; those behaviors are totally different from the normal, classical physics of everyday life, and thus daily intuition is often wrong. Similarly, right things for a person may not be correct for the whole nation. For example, Tragedy of the commons. Or, another example, a family save during hard time and splurge during good time; a nation does the reverse: splurge during bad time to make up for private sector, then save during good time to pay off the debt. To apply a family intuition onto a nation produces Ireland and Italy in 2011. Similarly, when talking about law suit, people imagine two sides battling out in front of a (clueless?) jury. In fact, a multi-billion corporation (the only worthy targets for suing for money) employ an army of lawyers and array of tactics to delay, justify, and publicly defend itself. The idea of an crafty individual, aided by a rogue lawyer, legally robbing innocent companies resonates with daily thugs, but not at the level of million-dollar-law-suits.
If anecdotal evidences fail, let's distort the history! For example, Reagan cut taxes, and boom, the economy went into ecstasy. Greece spent money, and boom, they are bankrupted. Better yet, let's read and interpret well-regarded (or, indeed, legal) documents in special light. From the Constitution to the Bible, those "literal readers" have wrecked the world over quite a few times with their awesome understanding that resembles neither the original creators (people, listen up, humans had slaves instead of high-speed internet connections back in those days!) nor the popular needs and demands (which, generally speaking, those documents read intentionally ambiguous to serve). History (very similar to statistics) proves lies. The difference lies in consequences and intentions. Lying through statistics is a crime, and only employed as the last resort. Improving history, on the other hand, is creative and original, indeed it is celebrated, and employed free as the arguments require.
But of course, when needs be, statistics works, too. Budget fights famously employ those (you know, we will make up the short falls with unspecified loop holes closing), but given their nature, all free lunches (or, at least those reaching policy form) stretch their numbers one way or another. However, frankly, this strategy has limited effects, and generally employed as the last line of defense. By the time a group of people put down numbers, they must have invested heavily onto the ideas to manipulate the numbers.
Basically, most of these strategies share one thing: lack of attention to details. They generally present a grand idea, whose footnotes totally contradict and destroy it. However, in our impatient world, who has time for foot notes, right?
The Cost of Free Lunches
Let's get one thing out of the way: there are no free lunches. Thus, "free-lunch" policies have costs somewhere. The most popular spots to hide costs are: the other people and the future. The other people, obviously, are those unessential to the continuation of the policies; i.e. the minority, the poor, the disadvantaged, etc. Sometimes, those people are specifically targeted (after being demonized and dehumanized, of course), such as in safety nets dismantle. Sometimes, they are simply collateral damage, such as tort reform and tax reform. Damage to the future usually comes with short-term benefits and long-term destruction. The benefits can be financial (tax reform) or spiritual (Iraq war, condemnation of certain group of people). The destruction, similarly, can be either financial and visible (such as public debt, deflation), or in social structure and degradation of social values (inequality, lack of social trust, terrorism), or loss to the entire human race (extinction, environmental change, nuclear threat).Tragically, in many cases, the cost of those policies befalls upon the very people demanding them. Well, to be completely fair, since everyone lives together, the implementers of those policies will eventually feel the cost, but some cost comes sooner than others. For example, the "free market health care," which reigned the richest country in the world until 2008, maintained poor care at high prices. Tax cuts and war with random country (aka Iraq) vanquished the precious budget surplus and deprived the federal government of tools to fight later depression. Nonsensical monetary policies have dragged Europe back into the recession like twice now (and seems to do it again), and is a constant threat to American economy (look at China, people. When the economy is in depression, help it, not kick it).
Now, of course, there are various ways to soften the blows, so to speak. First, there is denial or blaming the other side. This actually works remarkably well. For example, Obama is responsible for the recession (that started before he took office) and the public debt (which his part was paying just before GOP went to war). Second, there is blaming environmental factions. Bush is a genius in this: economy tanking? 9/11; domestic liberty eroding? 9/11; Iraq war went south? 9/11. However, blaming only takes it so far. When dreams crash into reality, real money demands real victims. Thus the third stratagem: shift the cost to the others. As defined above, the others are people unessential to the policies, usually the poor, the minority, the disadvantaged. Occasionally, foreigners get to pay, too (for example, some town in Florida systematically extract money from driving-by; another example is Iraq war to distract people from the problems at home). Ironically, sometimes, to fix the problem, the proponents of a policy would claim that it is not applied rigorously enough, and thus needs a surge in application. A good example of this is the European demand for governmental cuts and strictly balanced budgets. In the good old days, Ireland used to be the example of good governmental. It crashed. I think Cyprus was held up for a while, who also crashed. Then Germany became the shining example. Meanwhile, the union spiral near death.
Free lunches are nice. To dream about, that is. In real life, though, we have no perpetual engine, and we have no free lunch. Instead, we have scientific method, statistics, rationality. Those can help us differentiate good and bad policies. Remember, we, as human, has about 3000 years of recorded history spanning 5 continents. Lots of policies have been tried. Gold standard, for example, has been tried, abandoned, and tried again quite a few times. Militarism has also been tried. Execution of "lazy people" has been carried out (albeit not this century). We know, with some degree of certainty, what lie ahead. So, let's look at it, and think rationally, rather than rely on "common sense" (what is common sense, anyway? Mob rule?) or fancy rhetoric (America is special! Remember, once upon a time, Rome was special, China was center of the universe, and Persia ruled the world) and theory. Maybe then smart people will stop demanding for free lunches and make stupid decisions.
Friday, September 12, 2014
On Realness, or Why Paper Money is (Imaginatively) Bad
Paul Krugman is at it again over the inflation cult. Frankly, his complaint has changed so little that it starts to bore me these days. The essence of the complain is about a group of people either incapable of or unwilling to understand economics, along with the fact that low interest rate does not always translates into hyper-inflation. Mr. Krugman provides 2 explanations for this unwillingness (stupidity explains for itself). Usually, the explanation is about self-interest: when inflation harms your asset, it is your greatest enemy and always lurking around the corner. This time, it's about the close-mindedness of the conservative people.
I totally agree with Mr. Krugman regarding the existence of such inflation-mongers, but I frankly cannot agree with him on the explanations. You see, I happen to know a few people who are quite nuts over this issue. Most of you must know at least a few of them: the libertarians, especially Ron Paul supporters. In fact, these people don't just want tighter monetary policies. They want gold-standard! However, contrary to Mr. Krugman's hypothesis, they belong to a radically different demography than the obvious ones. Most of them are young, well-educated, socially open-minded. Every investment book advises them to put all of their 401K in stocks; if they follow this advice, damaging growth in favor of low inflation hinders their interest. Being young and well-educated, they are among the least racially and traditionally discriminating group living (in fact, they identify socially with liberals). This begs for a different explanation for why they dislike loose monetary policies and paper money.
Here is my hypothesis: conservative in generally distrust abstract ideas. In fact, this hypothesis explains more than just monetary preference. It also explains much of their political attitude and choices in general. However, for now, let's focus on the money.
An ounce of gold consists of (by definition) an ounce of gold, and it holds value by the virtue of the desirability of its material. This way, there is an intrinsic value to gold and silver, and this value gives a physical, a real meaning to the exchange value that we assign to that commodity. When you hold an ounce of gold, you physically touch and weight the value to pay for some other goods or services.
In contrast, a paper note of money possesses no such intrinsic value. When you hold an one-dollar note, all you hold is a piece of (usually crumbled) paper with some ink laid on top. If you take this piece of paper to, says, 300 years ago, its worth dropped to only a few cents (which, by the way, at least have some physical stuff to it). A dollar note is only worth a dollar because the US government says so. All of its value comes from the collective imagination of people.
The gap between the physical (aka intrinsic) value and the stated, exchange value causes distress in inflation mongers and gold-standard wishers. For them, the abstract, almost imaginative nature of this gap must be resolved eventually, like a debt that must be paid of. At resolving time, the exchange, imaginative value will collapse back down to the physical, intrinsic value.
Now, another analogy to debt should be mentioned here. When you delay paying your debts, the debts grow greater. Similarly, when the resolving of the value gap is delayed, the delay will magnify the scale of the eventual collapse. Think about a credit card bill. When you don't pay it in full (or just pay the minimum amount), the bank will still lend you money. However, eventually, the bill will grow to untenable amount and destroy your finance. Similarly, just because the gap does not collapse today (in form of, says, hyper-inflation), or tomorrow, or two years from now, or 5 years from now, the gap does not disappear or go away. It will only quietly accumulate more and more destructive power until Judgement Day comes.
When you look at money this way, the lack of inflation means nothing. No, the inflation rate has not blow up, just like your bank has not confiscated your house. But no, that does not mean your bill has disappear. It just means the bill just increased. Thus, as a concerned person, an inflation monger (or gold-standard supporter) must continue to warn others of the coming of Judgement Day, when the imaginary value collapses, and our society with it.
Now, have fun presenting evidences to such people.
I totally agree with Mr. Krugman regarding the existence of such inflation-mongers, but I frankly cannot agree with him on the explanations. You see, I happen to know a few people who are quite nuts over this issue. Most of you must know at least a few of them: the libertarians, especially Ron Paul supporters. In fact, these people don't just want tighter monetary policies. They want gold-standard! However, contrary to Mr. Krugman's hypothesis, they belong to a radically different demography than the obvious ones. Most of them are young, well-educated, socially open-minded. Every investment book advises them to put all of their 401K in stocks; if they follow this advice, damaging growth in favor of low inflation hinders their interest. Being young and well-educated, they are among the least racially and traditionally discriminating group living (in fact, they identify socially with liberals). This begs for a different explanation for why they dislike loose monetary policies and paper money.
Here is my hypothesis: conservative in generally distrust abstract ideas. In fact, this hypothesis explains more than just monetary preference. It also explains much of their political attitude and choices in general. However, for now, let's focus on the money.
An ounce of gold consists of (by definition) an ounce of gold, and it holds value by the virtue of the desirability of its material. This way, there is an intrinsic value to gold and silver, and this value gives a physical, a real meaning to the exchange value that we assign to that commodity. When you hold an ounce of gold, you physically touch and weight the value to pay for some other goods or services.
In contrast, a paper note of money possesses no such intrinsic value. When you hold an one-dollar note, all you hold is a piece of (usually crumbled) paper with some ink laid on top. If you take this piece of paper to, says, 300 years ago, its worth dropped to only a few cents (which, by the way, at least have some physical stuff to it). A dollar note is only worth a dollar because the US government says so. All of its value comes from the collective imagination of people.
The gap between the physical (aka intrinsic) value and the stated, exchange value causes distress in inflation mongers and gold-standard wishers. For them, the abstract, almost imaginative nature of this gap must be resolved eventually, like a debt that must be paid of. At resolving time, the exchange, imaginative value will collapse back down to the physical, intrinsic value.
Now, another analogy to debt should be mentioned here. When you delay paying your debts, the debts grow greater. Similarly, when the resolving of the value gap is delayed, the delay will magnify the scale of the eventual collapse. Think about a credit card bill. When you don't pay it in full (or just pay the minimum amount), the bank will still lend you money. However, eventually, the bill will grow to untenable amount and destroy your finance. Similarly, just because the gap does not collapse today (in form of, says, hyper-inflation), or tomorrow, or two years from now, or 5 years from now, the gap does not disappear or go away. It will only quietly accumulate more and more destructive power until Judgement Day comes.
When you look at money this way, the lack of inflation means nothing. No, the inflation rate has not blow up, just like your bank has not confiscated your house. But no, that does not mean your bill has disappear. It just means the bill just increased. Thus, as a concerned person, an inflation monger (or gold-standard supporter) must continue to warn others of the coming of Judgement Day, when the imaginary value collapses, and our society with it.
Now, have fun presenting evidences to such people.
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
On Social Trust in Democracy, or Why Republicans are Poisonous
When I first arrived in the US, one thing clearly stood out to me about American society (or, at the very least, Minnesotan society): how everyone trust everyone else. I actually experimented from time to time, just to feel the awesomeness of this trust: walking on the street, I would randomly say "Hi, how do you do? Is it not a beautiful day?" to people. I afraid that such behavior would earn little more than some guarded "are you trying to scam me off something" in Vietnam, but on American streets (from San Francisco to Minneapolis to Chicago to middle-of-nowhere Nevada), people would not miss a beat. Warm conversation would ensue between two strangers as if they have been friends since forever. Another instance of such trust: once, I was in San Francisco to apply for Visa, and happened to sit next to a lady. We chatted for about 5 minutes, then the lady needed to visit the restroom. She asked me, a guy she hardly knew for 5 minutes, to look after her bags while she was away. And that was San Francisco, where, I swear, I cannot go a mile without some jerk cutting me off.
There are evidences that such social trust is fundamental to an developed economy. In The Alchemists, Neil Irwin opined that British empire was built on British financial system, which in turn arose from the social trust among British people. Lacking the bloody revolutions prevalent in France, and the deep segregation between tiny states in Germany and Italy, that trust flourished, convinced the common people to entrust their savings into hands of others, who employed millions and millions of the small saving to build the greatest empire ever graced this planet. Today, in all advanced society, we (through our banks and investment funds) regularly hand over money to strangers to fund their strange ideas and business models. Such act speaks volume of how much we trust each other.
Nothing proves this trust more than a democracy. Democracy means "people's rule," which means that all citizens of a state get together to make political decisions together. Just imagine this: in the US, our democracy means that 300 million people, from all religions, all races, all cultures, all heritages ever existed on Earth (and I mean this literally), get together to decide on how to govern ourselves. Or think about Indian democracy: one billion people (more than the whole world population as late as 2 centuries ago), whose differences would shame the tiny squambles between Germans and Greeks, from all of the warring religions in the world, and some of whom are actively warring against each other, would periodically get together and form a government and to make decisions. If that fails to blow your mind, I don't know what would succeed.
Now, imagine for a minute to share decisions with, says, a dog. OK, dogs are quite stupid, so let's try something more intelligence. Try to share decisions with monkeys. They are closer to humans than dogs, no? Obviously, such thought exercise is only to prove a point. One can't share decisions with a monkey: it can't speak, it can't reason logically, and yes, it does throw shit. We only seriously listen to, debate with, and decide together with those whom we can trust to be fair, honorable, rational, and won't try to scam us.
Thus, democracy requires social trust. It requires all citizens to trust the system to make their voices matter, to count their opinions fairly, to empower their wisdom and actions. Most importantly, democracy requires citizens to trust one another, to consider each other worthy of listening to, of debating with, and of deciding important matters together. Without this trust, democracy can't exist. Just ask the Arab Spring uprisings. Yes, democracy temporarily formed, but the lack of trust quickly showed it the door. After all, the Muslims suspected liberals of destroying their values, while liberals suspected Muslims of religious lunacy; Shi'a wanted Sunnis gone, and Sunnis responded with passion. How can debates and mutual decisions, let alone governments and complex society, arise from such distrust?
Back to the US: we need to protect our trust! For our elections and democratic processes to function, we need to trust each other. This explains why we can't "protect" free speech by retaliating hate speech: free speech builds on trust, and all forms of debasement, including debasing hatred, will destroy that foundation. Unfortunately, the movement of conservatism, embodied by the Republican party, seems to do anything and everything to destroy that precious trust.
Now, I don't mind disagreements: it facilitates diversity, introduces perspective, and voices second opinions. What I mind is the name calling, the debasement of different groups, the conspiracy theories, and the active rejection of cooperation. After all, if Muslims worship Satan, homosexuals anger God, atheists have no morals, blacks rob, poor people steal, then there would be no point debating with them. Such people are barely above animals, so why share decision, why debate, why listen to them? Similarly, if the UN plans to invade my land, if the government oppresses my rights, then I should do everything to stop them, rather than contributing and understanding. Finally, when one's agenda is solely to grab power ("to make Obama one-term president"), then there is no point debating, since changing minds is impossible. Thus, conservatism, especially its spearhead (i.e. the Tea Parties), is sowing seeds of the destruction and disintegration of the whole democracy processes, and maybe even the economy and society.
The weird thing is this: normal Republicans are absolutely nice and polite people most of the time. All conservative people I know are perfectly rational and friendly and anything but racist. Until the politics comes. A friend of mine, who is extremely friendly and understanding, would sneer at President Obama's reference to his belief as "don't speak of God when you don't believe Him." Why? Why would you assume that he did not believe? Or, when some gun regulation debate raged, they would buy up and stash up all ammunition possible. They just assume that "the government is going to take away my guns," when the debate was about how to make gun ownership safe and meaningful. It blows my mind every time when this happens. Why can't those conservative, for a change, try to trust their distant fellow citizens a little bit? Why can't they trust the system, the government, the country a tiny bit? Why do they have to insist on distrust?
Like many concerned citizens, I believe there are much to be done with our government. However, different from many, I don't think big change is required. We don't need to change the Constitution, we don't need new election method, we certainly don't need finger pointing. All we need is a bit of trust.
There are evidences that such social trust is fundamental to an developed economy. In The Alchemists, Neil Irwin opined that British empire was built on British financial system, which in turn arose from the social trust among British people. Lacking the bloody revolutions prevalent in France, and the deep segregation between tiny states in Germany and Italy, that trust flourished, convinced the common people to entrust their savings into hands of others, who employed millions and millions of the small saving to build the greatest empire ever graced this planet. Today, in all advanced society, we (through our banks and investment funds) regularly hand over money to strangers to fund their strange ideas and business models. Such act speaks volume of how much we trust each other.
Nothing proves this trust more than a democracy. Democracy means "people's rule," which means that all citizens of a state get together to make political decisions together. Just imagine this: in the US, our democracy means that 300 million people, from all religions, all races, all cultures, all heritages ever existed on Earth (and I mean this literally), get together to decide on how to govern ourselves. Or think about Indian democracy: one billion people (more than the whole world population as late as 2 centuries ago), whose differences would shame the tiny squambles between Germans and Greeks, from all of the warring religions in the world, and some of whom are actively warring against each other, would periodically get together and form a government and to make decisions. If that fails to blow your mind, I don't know what would succeed.
Now, imagine for a minute to share decisions with, says, a dog. OK, dogs are quite stupid, so let's try something more intelligence. Try to share decisions with monkeys. They are closer to humans than dogs, no? Obviously, such thought exercise is only to prove a point. One can't share decisions with a monkey: it can't speak, it can't reason logically, and yes, it does throw shit. We only seriously listen to, debate with, and decide together with those whom we can trust to be fair, honorable, rational, and won't try to scam us.
Thus, democracy requires social trust. It requires all citizens to trust the system to make their voices matter, to count their opinions fairly, to empower their wisdom and actions. Most importantly, democracy requires citizens to trust one another, to consider each other worthy of listening to, of debating with, and of deciding important matters together. Without this trust, democracy can't exist. Just ask the Arab Spring uprisings. Yes, democracy temporarily formed, but the lack of trust quickly showed it the door. After all, the Muslims suspected liberals of destroying their values, while liberals suspected Muslims of religious lunacy; Shi'a wanted Sunnis gone, and Sunnis responded with passion. How can debates and mutual decisions, let alone governments and complex society, arise from such distrust?
Back to the US: we need to protect our trust! For our elections and democratic processes to function, we need to trust each other. This explains why we can't "protect" free speech by retaliating hate speech: free speech builds on trust, and all forms of debasement, including debasing hatred, will destroy that foundation. Unfortunately, the movement of conservatism, embodied by the Republican party, seems to do anything and everything to destroy that precious trust.
Now, I don't mind disagreements: it facilitates diversity, introduces perspective, and voices second opinions. What I mind is the name calling, the debasement of different groups, the conspiracy theories, and the active rejection of cooperation. After all, if Muslims worship Satan, homosexuals anger God, atheists have no morals, blacks rob, poor people steal, then there would be no point debating with them. Such people are barely above animals, so why share decision, why debate, why listen to them? Similarly, if the UN plans to invade my land, if the government oppresses my rights, then I should do everything to stop them, rather than contributing and understanding. Finally, when one's agenda is solely to grab power ("to make Obama one-term president"), then there is no point debating, since changing minds is impossible. Thus, conservatism, especially its spearhead (i.e. the Tea Parties), is sowing seeds of the destruction and disintegration of the whole democracy processes, and maybe even the economy and society.
The weird thing is this: normal Republicans are absolutely nice and polite people most of the time. All conservative people I know are perfectly rational and friendly and anything but racist. Until the politics comes. A friend of mine, who is extremely friendly and understanding, would sneer at President Obama's reference to his belief as "don't speak of God when you don't believe Him." Why? Why would you assume that he did not believe? Or, when some gun regulation debate raged, they would buy up and stash up all ammunition possible. They just assume that "the government is going to take away my guns," when the debate was about how to make gun ownership safe and meaningful. It blows my mind every time when this happens. Why can't those conservative, for a change, try to trust their distant fellow citizens a little bit? Why can't they trust the system, the government, the country a tiny bit? Why do they have to insist on distrust?
Like many concerned citizens, I believe there are much to be done with our government. However, different from many, I don't think big change is required. We don't need to change the Constitution, we don't need new election method, we certainly don't need finger pointing. All we need is a bit of trust.
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Why Knowing how to Code won't Save Virtual Citizens
I bet you have read this story somewhere: a man (usually from Texas, but all Confederate states host many candidates) proclaims that the government tries to take away his guns, and that he would stand and fight for his rights and freedom, with those guns that the government is trying to take away. Reading this type of stories entertains me on so many levels. And here is the funniest aspect: those guys actually believe that their puny guns can protect them from the most powerful army in the world's history. In fact, proclaiming their stupidity and ignorance actually thwarts the otherwise noble endeavor for personal rights and freedom, since it alienates them from their fellow citizens and political process. This alienation only serves as excuse to actually take them out with bombs and tanks. Now who has the bigger weapons, mister gun nut? (Given the amount of taxes I have paid, I sincerely hope the government would field bigger guns).
By now, if you still stick around, you might wonder aloud: what do gun nuts have to do with coding? A lot! Have you heard the latest round of "we live in digital world, so everyone should learn how to code"? Yeah. Knowing how to code to protect one's privacy is equivalent to pointing some puny guns at American army. It's useless. In fact, it serves little more than making you feel so superior that you fail to do other things, things that actually protect your privacy.
First, let's make something clear: I do not oppose learning to code. Coding is really fun, exercises the mind, and opens doors to many career paths. However, if you want to, says, prevent Facebook or Google or Microsoft or American government or Chinese government from spying on your data, ability to code is completely and utterly useless. Well, even if you want to feel in charge of your digital life (rather than being helpless at what the computer/smart phone does to you), coding would probably not help. The word "probably" is in there to account for a special case: experts. Real experts who can create OS and other systems from scratch (or, at least, debug into existing ones) do control their digital environment through coding. But it takes years (10 years or 10,000 hours, some people say) to reach that point, and a class or two online about programming is nowhere near enough.
Second, why does coding not help? Similar to why your puny guns (assault guns, shotguns, rifles, etc. included) do not help: when your opponents boasts bombs and intercontinental rockets, it's best not to fight them head on. Similarly, do you know the amount of code that makes up this so-called digital world? It consists trillions lines of code! Remember, hundreds (if not thousands or more) of man-years are required to build it, from the lowly firmware of your myriad of chips up to the javascript that drives your websites. Going through all of these to search for the spy is hopeless. Plus, can you discern if the hole is there intentionally or accidentally (as in buggy software)? By the way, so far, I assume that you can even see the human readable version of the code. Much of the digital world, however, is not available in such form. Proprietary software and obfuscated websites mean that even reading a line is extremely hard, if not impossible.
Third, let's dream for a minute and say that you find out something bad with your system. What can you do about it? As I asserted earlier, only a handful of experts can re-create complex systems at wills. The rest of us are stuck. Furthermore, in the majority of the cases, the system at fault is not even accessible to us! Let's imagine an example. Let's say that the music industry signs special deals with ISP to track your online traffic (in case you are sharing something they don't want you to share). In such case, what can you do? This is especially bad if your home has 2 choices of ISP, both of which signed onto the deal. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft et al present similar paradox. Yes, Facebook may be spying on you, but since all of your friends are there, what can you do? Apple may do something you dislike, but with all of your music is in their hands, dare you buck?
What actually protects your privacy and foster your control over the digital world, then? Again, I am talking about solution for the masses, the 99.9999% of people. Let's look our gun nuts again. What can he do to protect his rights and freedom? Certainly wielding guns alone is not enough. However, a well regulated militia (to quote the Constitution) is a different matter all together. Another solution involves working the political systems to ensure all members of the government (Americans do live in rather democratic society) to support personal rights and freedom. How do those solutions translate to our digital world?
First, we should promote understanding of the system. When our representative in Congress declared that the Internet was a series of tubes, there is a lot of work to do. A user should understand what his world includes, and which parts she can affect. Furthermore, people should know the ins and outs of their systems. Let's be frank here: how many of us truly know how to use Windows/Mac/Linux/BSD? When the system panics, how many of us know the steps to investigate, understand, and fix the problem? We have weird habits regarding technologies: so few people read manuals, yet fewer invest time and effort to understand the optimal usages for their products. Before learning how to code, how to create new system, everyone should learn how to use their systems.
Second, political actions should be considered to ensure our digital rights. We already wage political war for net neutrality. I strongly believe that further political actions are required. For example, the building of municipality infrastructure, the regulation of wireless network providers, the right of users over their digital identities, etc. all require public discussions as well as determined political efforts. We should demand all of our candidates for public office to explain their stances and proposed policies on digital rights and privacy. This is just my opinion, but we spend too much of our political bandwidth on abstract and far away issues, and not enough time on matters that affect us day in and day out.
Lastly, we should educate ourselves on our psychology blind spots and weaknesses, and train ourselves to use digital products in a smarter and freer ways. For example, advertisements have know how to subconsciously message us for decades, entertainment industries have pushed for restrictions on our enjoyment and ownership of the products that we pay for. Furthermore, we should use social networks not just to court followers and compete for popularity, but also to form alliances, to teach each other, and to unite in the fight for our digital rights and freedom.
A few months back, a rancher in Nevada seemed to finally understand the game. When demanded to pay back money he stole from local government (in form of unpaid usage of publicly cared for land), he instead called in his militia buddies, and the government had no choice but to back off. As I said, it's one thing for a gun nut to scream about his beloved weapons, it's another for them to band together. Here is the question: when will we, digital citizens of the coming digitized world, come to our senses, band up, and fight for our rights? I mean, let's not steal anything, but the challenges are the same: to do anything significant, we need to understand how the game is played, and play it together. Merely learning a tiny details of a complex game can't win. Coding alone has not, will not, and cannot save us. Education, understanding, and unity are the ways forward.
By now, if you still stick around, you might wonder aloud: what do gun nuts have to do with coding? A lot! Have you heard the latest round of "we live in digital world, so everyone should learn how to code"? Yeah. Knowing how to code to protect one's privacy is equivalent to pointing some puny guns at American army. It's useless. In fact, it serves little more than making you feel so superior that you fail to do other things, things that actually protect your privacy.
First, let's make something clear: I do not oppose learning to code. Coding is really fun, exercises the mind, and opens doors to many career paths. However, if you want to, says, prevent Facebook or Google or Microsoft or American government or Chinese government from spying on your data, ability to code is completely and utterly useless. Well, even if you want to feel in charge of your digital life (rather than being helpless at what the computer/smart phone does to you), coding would probably not help. The word "probably" is in there to account for a special case: experts. Real experts who can create OS and other systems from scratch (or, at least, debug into existing ones) do control their digital environment through coding. But it takes years (10 years or 10,000 hours, some people say) to reach that point, and a class or two online about programming is nowhere near enough.
Second, why does coding not help? Similar to why your puny guns (assault guns, shotguns, rifles, etc. included) do not help: when your opponents boasts bombs and intercontinental rockets, it's best not to fight them head on. Similarly, do you know the amount of code that makes up this so-called digital world? It consists trillions lines of code! Remember, hundreds (if not thousands or more) of man-years are required to build it, from the lowly firmware of your myriad of chips up to the javascript that drives your websites. Going through all of these to search for the spy is hopeless. Plus, can you discern if the hole is there intentionally or accidentally (as in buggy software)? By the way, so far, I assume that you can even see the human readable version of the code. Much of the digital world, however, is not available in such form. Proprietary software and obfuscated websites mean that even reading a line is extremely hard, if not impossible.
Third, let's dream for a minute and say that you find out something bad with your system. What can you do about it? As I asserted earlier, only a handful of experts can re-create complex systems at wills. The rest of us are stuck. Furthermore, in the majority of the cases, the system at fault is not even accessible to us! Let's imagine an example. Let's say that the music industry signs special deals with ISP to track your online traffic (in case you are sharing something they don't want you to share). In such case, what can you do? This is especially bad if your home has 2 choices of ISP, both of which signed onto the deal. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft et al present similar paradox. Yes, Facebook may be spying on you, but since all of your friends are there, what can you do? Apple may do something you dislike, but with all of your music is in their hands, dare you buck?
What actually protects your privacy and foster your control over the digital world, then? Again, I am talking about solution for the masses, the 99.9999% of people. Let's look our gun nuts again. What can he do to protect his rights and freedom? Certainly wielding guns alone is not enough. However, a well regulated militia (to quote the Constitution) is a different matter all together. Another solution involves working the political systems to ensure all members of the government (Americans do live in rather democratic society) to support personal rights and freedom. How do those solutions translate to our digital world?
First, we should promote understanding of the system. When our representative in Congress declared that the Internet was a series of tubes, there is a lot of work to do. A user should understand what his world includes, and which parts she can affect. Furthermore, people should know the ins and outs of their systems. Let's be frank here: how many of us truly know how to use Windows/Mac/Linux/BSD? When the system panics, how many of us know the steps to investigate, understand, and fix the problem? We have weird habits regarding technologies: so few people read manuals, yet fewer invest time and effort to understand the optimal usages for their products. Before learning how to code, how to create new system, everyone should learn how to use their systems.
Second, political actions should be considered to ensure our digital rights. We already wage political war for net neutrality. I strongly believe that further political actions are required. For example, the building of municipality infrastructure, the regulation of wireless network providers, the right of users over their digital identities, etc. all require public discussions as well as determined political efforts. We should demand all of our candidates for public office to explain their stances and proposed policies on digital rights and privacy. This is just my opinion, but we spend too much of our political bandwidth on abstract and far away issues, and not enough time on matters that affect us day in and day out.
Lastly, we should educate ourselves on our psychology blind spots and weaknesses, and train ourselves to use digital products in a smarter and freer ways. For example, advertisements have know how to subconsciously message us for decades, entertainment industries have pushed for restrictions on our enjoyment and ownership of the products that we pay for. Furthermore, we should use social networks not just to court followers and compete for popularity, but also to form alliances, to teach each other, and to unite in the fight for our digital rights and freedom.
A few months back, a rancher in Nevada seemed to finally understand the game. When demanded to pay back money he stole from local government (in form of unpaid usage of publicly cared for land), he instead called in his militia buddies, and the government had no choice but to back off. As I said, it's one thing for a gun nut to scream about his beloved weapons, it's another for them to band together. Here is the question: when will we, digital citizens of the coming digitized world, come to our senses, band up, and fight for our rights? I mean, let's not steal anything, but the challenges are the same: to do anything significant, we need to understand how the game is played, and play it together. Merely learning a tiny details of a complex game can't win. Coding alone has not, will not, and cannot save us. Education, understanding, and unity are the ways forward.
Saturday, February 22, 2014
Rent vs Passion
Every time coming across an article or an advertisement for exercise, I never fail to be astonished by the amount of care and attention paid to such a uninspiring, if not down right boring, activity. I mean, it's running/jogging on the treadmills, or lifting some deadweight, then shower in a communal shower! It's not world changing, dream pursuing, or self actualization. You don't need nice bag, good smelling soap, and perfume at the gym; you certainly don't need detailed note taking for what you have been doing; timing, what to eat/drink before and after, what precise routine don't deserve heated debates and arguments. Lastly, lifting some certain amount is certainly not worth bragging. By the way, exercise is not the only boring activity that people make a great deal out of. Work is another (especially when you don't like the work), where some people would work ridiculous hours, then use that as a badge to look down on others (coincidentally, those usually ain't the most effective; unhappy people rarely are).
Each activity usually has 2 dimensions: effort and reward. An activity is effortful if it demands a lot from the performer and tires him or her out. An activity is rewarding if it is enjoyable, either fun or fulfilling. As such, we can divide all activities into 4 groups:
| Low reward | High reward | |
| High effort | Rent | Passion |
| Low effort | Procastination | Entertainment |
A low effort, low reward activity is time filler; things that you do when you don't have resources or energy for anything else (eg. staring blankly at the TV, spacing out, etc.). A low effort, high reward is entertainment, where you just enjoy and don't exert much. Both of these ain't demanding, so they generally don't have much long term impact, and we also usually deem them less interesting and valuable.
The interesting categories are the high effort ones. Because they demand a lot, we don't do them "just because." We do them for a reason: either because we are passionate about them, or because not doing them would bring troubles. The first one is passion. They are the ones that try people, that bring people to greatness, that actualize dreams and realize happiness. They are the ones that we should spend most of hour time and effort (available) in. The latter type of high effort activities are what I call rent, since they resemble, well, rent: the payment must be made, usually regularly and costly. Normal rent (be it house rent, mortgage, utilities, or business fixed cost) is paid in money. Activity rent (exercise, cleaning, washing, laundry, and work) must be paid with time and effort.
Here is the thing: because we pay so much in rent (a normal person holding a full time job spends at least 8 hours/day for work, then an hour for cleaning and exercising on average), we may mistakenly assign a lot of meaning to them. It's like how we taste more expensive wine and cheese better, or food made by ourselves or our loved ones more delicious. However, such perception is ridiculous! Think about, do you brag on how much money you pay on rent? (except how little you pay) Or, do you grow up dreaming of, says, lifting 180lbs? In fact, you don't even dream of a thin body. You dream may be popularity and social pride, which requires a nice, thin body, which requires treadmill running. Or you may dream of some sort of success, which requires health and endurance (mentally and physically), which requires exercise. Or you may dream of being rich, which requires money, which require work. Always, the rent activities are just requirement to do something else, and that something else is usually in form of a passion activity.
Thus, when effort is required, we should determine if it is passion or rent, and treat it appropriately, like below:| Rent | Passion | |
| Attention | As little as possible | As much as possible |
| Timing | Minimized; preferably while waiting for something else;multitasking if possible | At best time possible; preferably sole attention when doing |
| Work load | Front loaded (starting hard, easier over time) | Back-loaded (more precisely, hardest work while "in the zone") |
| Investment | Bare minimum | As much as affordable |
Let's take a quick example: my jiu jutsu and aerobic exercise. I love judo and jiu-jutsu. On the other hand, to do these sports effectively and to have healthy life, I need to do aerobic exercise (it has amazing effects on my belly). Thus, the former is passion, and the latter rent. How do I spend time on them?
I think about martial arts virtually most of my waking hours. I read books and watch movies about them. If you happen to see me doing weird gesture, it might be a hand escape that I am contemplating on. I sometimes arrive at practice early to quiz my instructor, and almost always leave late. I love doing them with others as these are times for observing and learning.
On the other hand, for the aerobic exercise, I have a set time and goal for it, and never spend a second more. I read somewhere that minimum exercise time is 30 minutes (provided that the heart rate target is reached), and each of my aerobic session is precisely 40 min: 5 warm up, 30 at target heart rate, 5 cool down. Plus driving and walking, it's about 50 min in total. Yes, I checked the clock. I even minimize time at the gym: no shower there (why? it's nicer at home), no socialization, not even work out with others (high risk of injury; what's with my male ego and over running when others are around?). Outside of the gym, beside minimum reading and occasional articles on the news, I never think about aerobic exercise. See, just the rent, and not a cent more.
Guys, our dreams are always big and demanding. They are sources of endless hardwork, thinking, strategizing, and pride. We don't need to waste time and effort on rent! Get over it, pay the minimum amount, and move on. Our lives are waiting!
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