Structure of Excuses By PAUL KRUGMAN

Structure of Excuses

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Thanks a lot to Paul Krugman for drawing his flawless logic just one notch too far in this article in the NYTIMES online. There's nothing that engages me more as a pupil, than when I see my teacher making a mistake.

How can I use words like "flawless logic" and "mistake" about the same article?

The way I see it, logic has some serious limitations. Unless we're very careful, we tend to end up with statements that are only true because of the definitions we put into our premises. Basically, "1+1=2" is true because "2" is defined as "1+1". I get the same feeling when I see Paul Krugman's statement that (emphasis added by me):

I’ve been looking at what self-proclaimed experts were saying about unemployment during the Great Depression; it was almost identical to what Very Serious People are saying now. Unemployment cannot be brought down rapidly, declared one 1935 analysis, because the work force is “unadaptable and untrained. It cannot respond to the opportunities which industry may offer.” A few years later, a large defense buildup finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs — and suddenly industry was eager to employ those “unadaptable and untrained” workers.

The problem here isn't the logic. It's the way the closed loop of reasoning includes only the premises that point in the desired direction.

I'm not arguing that employment is important. It's critically important for the well-being and coherence of our societies.

I'm not arguing against the stimulus spending either. Without it, the situation would have been catastrophic.

What I'm trying to say is that Paul Krugman is talking completely beside the point when he's trying to teach Republicans about stimulus spending. They know all about it. They just don't want the money to go through the Federal Government. They want the stimulus to come in the form of tax reductions, and not on the Democrats' watch.

The reason we are in a ditch right now, is that the Republicans put the economy on an artificial and completely unsustainable stimulus in the Bush years. This created the structural problems that Krugman was wise enough to write about in his follow-up notes: Too many jobs in sectors where they don't produce enough long-term benefit.

The last thing we need now is more of the same kind of stimulus. We don't need more oversize houses, particularly not in Floria. We don't need more financial wizardry. We don't need more luxury products. There are a lot of builders, electricians, real estate agents and bankers who need to get retrained and put to useful work, like digging up potatoes or building factories that produce things that people need, like cheap, reliable energy that doesn't subsidize terrorist-sponsoring regimes.

One of today's problems is that we've started to confuse "speculation" and "investment" with each other. We've actually come to the point where people no longer see "speculation" as parasitical behaviour, and where "investment" has become synonymous with buying something in the hope that someone will pay more for it tomorrow. No wonder why people have stopped "investing": We already have massive deflation in certain sectors of the economy. That means that other people are likely to pay less for your assets tomorrow, not more. And who cares about investments in the old-fashioned sense of the word any more?

We all need to care.

Yes: We could solve the unemployment problem immediately by starting another World War. What I'm trying to say is that there must be cheaper ways of solving the problem. Like creating new rules that discourage private waste and speculation (i.e. higher taxes), while encouraging real investments and ensuring an adequate level of spending on the things we need to spend money on.

About the long overdue death of an economic theory

Four Deformations of the Apocalypse

By DAVID STOCKMAN

Published: July 31, 2010

This article hit the top of the "most popular" list in the New York Times Online this morning, and it's easy to see why: Finally a compact and easy-to-understand overview of what's gone wrong with the American economy.

Stockman points out four ideas that have worked together, in a kind of synergy, to undermine our position. Together, they have created a false impression of prosperity that has enticed us to go further and further down the garden path into economic la-la land.

Sixty years ago, the people who lived in our house had to start laundry day by harnessing the horse and hitching it up to the wagon. Then they'd have to drive their laundry down to the river, stoke up the wood-fired boiler on the beach, do their laundry by hand, rinse it in the river, drive home, unhitch the horse and feed it, and then hang up the laundry to dry. That's the kind of effort it took to create modern, civilized society.

One of our problems today is that other people are still willing to work just as hard, for similar rewards. For a while, they've been content to be our servants, supplying us with almost everything we've wanted while we ran through our capital. It's going to be really interesting to see what happens in a generation or two, when they've saved some of what we've squandered, and invested enough of it in improved local infrastructure and education.


:-J

Afghanistan

View Is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal of War in Afghanistan

This article in the NYTIMES online by C. J. Chivers, Carlotta Gall, Andrew W. Lehren, Mark Mazzetti, Jane Perlez, and Eric Schmitt, with contributions from Jacob Harris and Alan McLean takes as its starting point the recent publication, through Wikileaks, of thousands of classified documents about the ongoing military operations in Afghanistan.

The article is unpleasant reading. It details, in example after example, how difficult it is to stabilize a country that doesn't seem to have any interest in stabilizing itself.


My reflections:

1) This is not about Afghanistan, but about every single nation in the world that is falling apart because it can't feed its population at a living standard they're willing to accept. While Islam is certainly adding flavour to the problem, the underlying problem is that people are fighting for control over resources. Afghanistan is too hot and too dry, and its population is too hungry. We either have to feed them or fight them.

2) The conflict is being shaped not so much by Islam, but by a lethal triangle of Western inventions. The first corner of the triangle is dirt cheap, mass-produced high-tech weaponry and explosives. The second is dirt cheap transportation. The third is dirt cheap communications. It's the combination of all three that enables modern insurgents to do things today that only national armies could do in the past.

Add to that, if you like, that our modern, industrial agriculture has pushed food prices so low down, that there's no way that Afghanistan can make a decent living from growing food for the world market.

3) The driving force behind the current conflict isn't so much Islam, as the money that the Afghans can manage to suck out of Western nations, in exchange for heroin. Until we learn to take care of our own heroin addicts, the Afghans are going to keep doing it for us.

4) Armies in a war are a little like businesses in a market place: If all else is equal, victory will go to the party with the lowest operating costs. In Afghanistan, our operating costs per shot fired are simply enormous, compared with what the enemy has to pay.

That much being said, all other things are of course not equal. Our weapons are more sophisticated, and we have more of them. The insurgents, on the other hand, can hide in the civilian population, and is free to torture and murder anyone they suspect of collaborating with us.

- o 0 o -

I'm left with a strong impression that the war in Afghanistan can't be won, because I can't imagine how anyone can manage to stabilize a place like that. Their education level is low. They have no fisheries. There's very little industry. It's too hot and too dry, and the soils probably way too saline for their agriculture to have any hope of competing with ours. There's no reliable civilian infrastructure. And yet, as long as there's a western market for expensive heroin, the place is a bubbling cauldron of money. This place is going to continue to mean TROUBLE.

:-J

"Gluten free" isn't the same as gluten free

"Gluten-free" foods may be contaminated

This article by Genevra Pittma brings our attention to a new study of supposedly naturally gluten free products. Unfortunately, many of these appear to contain gluten after all.

Researchers analyzed 22 naturally gluten-free grains, seeds, and flours off supermarket shelves. They tested the amount of gluten in those products against a proposed Food and Drug Administration limit for any product labeled gluten-free, 20 parts contaminant per million parts product.

Seven of the 22 products wouldn't pass the FDA's gluten-free test - and one product, a type of soy flour, had a gluten content of almost 3,000 parts per million, the authors found. Other products from the sample that weren't truly gluten-free included millet flour and grain, buckwheat flour, and sorghum flour.

My reflections: This study illustrates one possible reason why children on a GFCF diet don't improve more than they do: Gullible researchers think the children are on a Gluten Free diet, while they are, in reality, only on a "Gluten Free" diet.

:-J

Why argumements escalate

How facts backfire

One of the most thankless jobs a lawyer can take on, is to try to dampen, rather than escalate a conflict. This article by Joe Keohane sheds some light on why this is so.

Instead of giving you an explanation or a summary, I'll give you a few selected quotes.


"New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.

For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire."

"... people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are."

"A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong. Taber and Lodge found this alarming, because engaged, sophisticated thinkers are “the very folks on whom democratic theory relies most heavily.”"

"... relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting. Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts — inference, intuition, and so forth — to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done. Unfortunately, with them, we’re easily suckered by political falsehoods."

My reflections: This article explains all the main reasons why arguments tend to be self-reinforcing. The sentence "The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are" echoes particularly strongly with me. The more important it is for us to resolve a conflict, for example with someone we love and feel dependent on, the harder it is to do it. Our ability to catch our own mistakes are always at the weakest, when we need them the most.


:-J

The dangers of sitting

The Men Who Stare at Screens

This article in the NYTIMES by Gretchen Reynolds brought the insight that sitting too much involves dangers that can not be undone by bouts of exercise.

I'm SO glad I never got a TV.

:-J

News about the human microbiome

How Microbes Defend and Define Us

This article from the New York Times, by Carl Zimmer, should be obligatory reading for anybody who wants to characterize bacteriae as either good or bad.

Some quotes:

"Dr. Khoruts mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology last month, Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues reported that her diarrhea vanished in a day. Her Clostridium difficile infection disappeared as well and has not returned since. "

"In the mouth alone, Dr. Relman estimates, there are between 500 and 1,000 species. “It hasn’t reached a plateau yet: the more people you look at, the more species you get,” he said. The mouth in turn is divided up into smaller ecosystems, like the tongue, the gums, the teeth. Each tooth—and even each side of each tooth—has a different combination of species. "

"Scientists are even discovering ecosystems in our bodies where they weren’t supposed to exist. Lungs have traditionally been considered to be sterile because microbiologists have never been able to rear microbes from them. A team of scientists at Imperial College London recently went hunting for DNA instead. Analyzing lung samples from healthy volunteers, they discovered 128 species of bacteria. Every square centimeter of our lungs is home to 2,000 microbes. "

" Out of the 500 to 1,000 species of microbes identified in people’s mouths, for example, only about 100 to 200 live in any one person’s mouth at any given moment. Only 13 percent of the species on two people’s hands are the same. Only 17 percent of the species living on one person’s left hand also live on the right one. "

"One of those tasks is breaking down complex plant molecules. “We have a pathetic number of enzymes encoded in the human genome, whereas microbes have a large arsenal, ...”

"The Imperial College team that discovered microbes in the lungs, for example, also discovered that people with asthma have a different collection of microbes than healthy people. Obese people also have a different set of species in their guts than people of normal weight."

My reflection: It's going to take a LONG time before reductive science manages to make sense of the interactions between all these bacteriae and ourselves. In the mean time, we'd better approach the subject with some humility. Remember how the polio epidemic got started? It turned out that the main cause was cleanliness: People were meeting a new microbe later in life than they used to.

:-J