Lord's Prayer OE

"And Forgyf Us Ure Gyltas"

H/t: a friend I knew in Iraq, who also reads TYWKIWDBI.

Nano-Scale Solar Cell Structures

I feel like more geeky stuff today, so here goes: Stanford University reports that several of its nanotechnology gurus have published a new paper about a gimmick that may revolutionize solar cell technology.

Solar cells often employ a thin layer of light-absorbing material sandwiched between reflective plates. We've known for some time that their efficiency can be increased by certain tricks for making the light bounce around in there as long as possible, because it increases the chances that each photon will be absorbed and turned into electricity rather than spat back out unused. A common method is to scratch up the top plate so that it has lots and lots of sparkly faces oriented in all directions, which randomizes the reflective patterns. For reasons that are beyond me, but that follow from the wave equations that describe the behavior of bouncing and resonating lightwaves, there is a theoretical upper limit on how much benefit can be squeezed out of this trick. The formula that describes the efficiency veers wildly up and down for reflective film thicknesses very near zero, but quickly starts to squiggle back and forth in a narrow range that approximates the efficiency limit as the film thickness increases. The Stanford guys may have found a way to exploit that interesting behavior near the "zero."

Up to now, no one paid much attention to the eccentric behavior of the efficiency formula near zero, because a solar cell's reflective film has to be thinner than a single wavelength of typical sunlight for the off-the-charts tail-end of the formula to matter. These days, however, with the explosion of nanotechnology, it's getting possible to make films even thinner than the wavelength of visible light, which is between about 400 and 700 nanometers (one billionth of a meter). This is seriously small; a single nanometer is only 10 to 30 times longer than the radius of most atoms. It is about 1/50,000 as thick as a human hair. It's so small that many of the rules of thumb that work for structures that are many times as big as a single light wavelength start to break down.

Back to that theoretical limit: for relatively thick films, it settles down to four times the square of the refractive index of the transparent layer. As this nifty graph from the Stanford gurus' paper shows, there is an initial squiggle before the function settles down around its limit, which is shown as 4n² on the "y" axis. In this early "off the charts" territory, where the transparent layer has a thickness of less than a single wavelength of visible light (shown as "one" on the x-axis in the graph), the efficiency can be anything from very bad to very good. In the "sweet spot" between 0.5 and 1.0 wavelength (shown on the graph by the red vertical stripe), the efficiency is at least equal to the "ideal" 4n² and can go up as high as several times that much before dropping back to normal, where it then stays no matter how thick the reflective layer gets. The new idea is to cherry-pick the best efficiencies by building nano-thin solar cell layers with a thickness of between a half and a full light wavelength, which is to say a few hundred nanometers, or still only 1/100 of the thickness of a human hair. This approach not only promises to increase the efficiency of absorbing light but also to decrease the volume (and therefore cost) of materials needed for such thin layers. So this work may lead to much cheaper and more efficient solar panels.

In related news, the Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University in Houston will hold an event on Sunday, October 10, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the "buckyball," the foundation of carbon nanotechnology. This event honors the winners of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Robert Curl, Sir Harold Kroto, and the late Richard Smalley, who together demonstrated in 1986 that carbon vapor could condense in the form of 60-atom symmetrical balls called "buckminsterfullerenes" or "buckyballs." The idea of nanotechnology, which is not confined to carbon, dates back at least to Nobel laureate Richard Feynman's comments on the subject in the 1959. In 1981, physicists Heinrich Rohrer and Gerd Binning opened the door to great advances in the nano world by inventing the scanning tunnel microscope, a new type of electron microscope with a magnifying power of 10 million. (To the upper right is an STM image of a carbon nanotube, a stretched-out version of a buckyball.) For this accomplishment Rohrer and Binning were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1986. Today, nanotechnology is revolutionizing not only manufacturing but medicine. A young person casting about for a career could do far worse than this field.

Are the Rich Getting Richer, and Should I Care?

Are the Rich Getting Richer, and Should I Care?

Earlier this month, the Canadian Financial Post ran a column by Terence Corcoran on "The U.S. Income Divergence Myth." He started with graphs created by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, including one included in the Obama budget, appearing to show that the percentage of wealth controlled by the top tenth of the richest Americans hovered around 40% just before the Great Depression, plummeted afterwards and stayed relatively stable in the 30%-40% area until the 1980s, then spiked to nearly 50% recently. (I can say "plummeted" and "spiked" about a range of movements of this kind because the graph is helpfully truncated at 30% on the low side and 50% on the high side.) Corcoran pokes holes in a number of aspects of these conclusions, including the exclusion of any consideration of taxes and regional differences in cost of living. He also points out that the increase in the share of the top 10% is almost entirely driven by the top 1% and has a lot to do with the revolution in earnings by pop figures such as entertainers and sports stars.

Then he gets to the question that I think is the most interesting:

Why [does] inequality of incomes — before or after tax —— even matter in a market economy where no kings rule by force and no aristocracy plunders the people?

Formality

Formality:

So, we had an interesting discussion below about Wagner, and how an artificial thing might be 'more real' than reality. Let's talk a little more about that.

Let's say you have been sitting on rocks all your life. You are used to it, but you have noticed that some rocks serve the purpose of sitting better than others. For example, rocks that are flatter, and of a certain size, are superior for sitting purposes than rocks that are sharp or angled. At some point, you take this knowledge and sort out what the truth is about 'that which is good for sitting.' You use this knowledge to build something you decide to call a chair.

The chair is an artifact, not a thing found in nature. Yet it is superior for your purpose to any rock you will find in nature -- or any log -- or anything else you might sit upon. This is because you have extracted from reality, and purified, the truth about sitting and what kind of things are good to sit upon.

That same rather prosaic model can be applied to moral questions. Let's say I see three people do something that I admire, but in which I can see that they are acting from mixed motives. I can extract the thing I admire from their mixed motives, and hold it up pure in my mind. This is the thing I call "good," and in some way it is a more real good than any of the three things I saw.

An artist can do this too. Twain wrote: "I have never seen anything so great and fine and real as this devotion." What is it to be great? What is it to be fine? Well, what is it to be good? It's the same process of extraction and purification, so that we have the idea without adulteration. It makes perfect sense for art to be able to be greater and finer than reality.

Then, though, we come to "real." Here we have a question. Is it real? Is it "more real"? What would it mean for it to be "more real"? If it is extracted from reality, and purified of the admixture of impurities that we always ever find in reality, how is that making it "more real"? I think Twain is right, but it's important to understand just why and how he is right.

"You keep using that word. Somehow I don't think it means what you think it means."

The New York Times points to this 'poll' by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life:

"Researchers from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life phoned more than 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions, famous religious figures and the constitutional principles governing religion in public life."

And basically everybody they got to actually answer the questions "failed" the test.

Although you would not know that from these other commentors:

Want to know about religion? Go to your local atheist, not your priest.

Don't ask Christians about religion, ask atheists

Here are the percentages from the Pew poll:

So the average for the poll is 50% correct, and the highest average in the subgroups is 65%. I dunno about any of you, but that's a failing grade where I come from.

EVERYBODY FAILS.

Now, if you go here you can take a 15 question quiz and compare yourself to everybody else who took the longer quiz for this poll. I got 14 out of 15 (I dunno which one I missed--maybe the one about the great awakening) and that, apparently, is better than "97% of the public". These questions were not hard.

All this really tells me is that atheists and agnostics probably know more about various religions because the atheists like to refute everybody's beliefs, and the agnostics have probably shopped around looking for something agreeable. Therefore, more exposure. Mormons probably end up knowing more because what, every Mormon male able to has to go be a 'missionary' for 2 years? Therefore, more exposure. I'll bet that every Jew they talked to was a college graduate, which again means more exposure. The rest who identify with a particular religion are likely comfortable with it and most probably brought up in it, and are not curious about other beliefs, because, well, why would you be?

I'd love to see Pew go and try this in other countries, and see how they score.

Coming Soon

Coming Soon to a Court Near You:

There's got to be a way to shoehorn this into the 14th Amendment. I mean, they found gay marriage in there, so what's stopping this? It's an 'equal protection' decision too!

A Toronto judge has struck down Canada’s prostitution laws, effectively decriminalizing activities associated with the world’s oldest trade.

“These laws, individually and together, force prostitutes to choose between their liberty interest and their right to security of the person as protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” Justice Susan Himel of Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice said in Tuesday’s landmark decision.

The argument appears to be that criminalizing prostitution means that they are denied the equal protection of Canada's version of OSHA. If only they had licensed bawdy houses, they could have their workplaces inspected and certified too!

These attempts to 'perfect' the principle of equal protection are going to end up destroying it instead. There will come a time when the people will say, "You know what? If it really requires us to abandon every institution and assumption of our society, maybe 'equal protection' isn't so important after all."

Assignments Editor

Assignments Editor:

DB, I trust you understand that you will have a responsibility to attend and review this production. Yes, I know that it's fifteen hours long.

Wagner's Ring cycle has at least one singular honor. Mark Twain, as readers of this page well know, hated the whole business of enchantment. He wrote a famous, and very nasty, piece about Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe -- essentially suggesting that it was responsible for the Civil War. His "Connecticut Yankee" tale is mostly a mockery. So too he tried to mock Wagner, and the people who came to listen to him.

He sent home an essay that reads at first like a methodical takedown: he notes all the weirdness of the Wagner cult, the confounding aspects of the experience. “Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a community of the mad,” he writes. Then, just when he seems ready to give the knife a final twist, he reveals himself as another convert. “But by no means do I ever overlook or minify the fact that this is one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I have never seen anything like this before. I have never seen anything so great and fine and real as this devotion.”

You can read the journal of Twain's trip here.

"I have never seen anything so great and fine and real as this devotion." That is an interesting formulation, and one I'd like you to think about. The Ring is a work of art, and some would say that makes it at most a copy of what is real. Mark Twain saw many real things in his life. None of them, though, were "so real" as this thing -- this thing that was art and, therefore, 'artificial.'

Twain was a man who said what he meant. What might it mean for art to be 'more real' than reality? Is that right, or is it wrong, and why?

Day By Day

Day By Day, Today:

Today's DBD involves T99's "True the Vote" issue in Houston. The radio show asks about the little 'rounding error' of around 17,000 votes (in a sample of 25,000 votes).

The response is a good one, but it falls short of the standard set by Joliet Jake.

Are Nations with Rising Economies Less Vulnerable to Attack?

Assistant Village Idiot argues that they are, because of a kind of psychological deterrence that works in reverse when our enemies sense we lack the will to resist. In a post that addresses the pros and cons of a Tea Party whose foreign policy doesn't go far beyond "respect the military," he suggests that that may be good enough for now, and adds:

Respect for the military follows similar lines. The psychological aspect, in and of itself, seems to provide a warning to would-be attackers. In less-visible ways, a country's support for its businesses, schools, churches, or any other institution is a part of its effectiveness.

What do you guys think? Especially the part about how potential enemies view the strength of our non-military institutions, which I think is even more interesting than the main point, since my thoughts have been occupied this year with the notion that the way to keep government small is to keep private institutions various and strong.

On Names

On Names:

Via the always interesting Arts & Letters Daily, a piece on the subject of names. It starts off with how much names have changed in the last hundred and fifty years in England and America; but it ends up as a wide exploration of naming conventions in Europe, including during Anglo-Saxon England and ancient Greece.

One of my favorite facts about ancient Greek names is that you should always take a moment to find out what they mean. They often sound very much more dignified to us than the Greeks intended them to be. This isn't the case for the god-related names, but a surprising number of them translate in some interesting way. (The author makes the point that we often don't translate Greek names like we do Indian names: "Crazy Horse," for example.) Take noble Odysseus, for example. To a Greek ear, that name sounds like "Troublemaker." We have in the Iliad, then, 'noble Troublemaker, whose counsel is like the gods'.'

The other interesting comment is about the sudden shift in naming conventions following the Norman conquest. Names like "Lady Noble Beauty" were much more interesting, and would have been much more personally meaningful, than what the Saxons suddenly adopted following the conquest. "It is rather as if an orchestra had been replaced by a recorder ensemble."

Of course, more shocking than that to an American ear may be the practice in modern Italy, where a judge feels that he has the right to rename your child if he doesn't like the name you picked.

Funny Times

Funny Times:

Citizens burst into laughter when a Congressman describes Social Security as 'stable.'

Headline: Bars promote youth drinking by installing national debt clocks.

A report that the conversation at the local American Legion post is turning against the existence of Congress.

Washington Redskins pie charts, for those in D.C. trying to take refuge in sports.

Yet somehow the Onion is still talking about Bush. Reminds me of someone else, that.

Watch Those Polls

Watch Those Polls

A month ago I linked here to a Houston Chronicle story about a fire that burned up pretty much all of Harris County's voting machines in the middle of the night. No one has nailed down exactly how that happened and whether it was bad luck or malfeasance, though no accelerants have been found. The timing was more suspicious than I immediately realized, though.

A local watchdog group called "True the Vote" had formed after their experience as poll-watchers during the 2008 elections curdled their blood. They decided early to focus their attention on homes containing more than six registered voters. Most voting districts had a couple of thousand of these. One had 24,000. That's where the group found that a group called "Houston Votes," headed by an employee of SEIU, had submitted 25,000 voter registrations, fewer than 1,800 of which appeared to be valid. Houston Votes issued the usual "mistakes were made" press release and fired some workers.

Harris County's voter registrar announced in late August 2010 that "the integrity of the voting rolls in Harris County, Texas, appears to be under an organized and systematic attack by the group operating under the name Houston Votes." The next day, the county's voting-machine warehouse burned to the ground.

It's always a good idea to serve as an election judge or election clerk if you can possibly spare the time. Even better might be to volunteer as a poll watcher. A good voter registrar can catch a lot of registration fraud, but if there's rot at the precinct level, nothing short of eyes on the scene on election day can stop some of the abuses. Without poll watchers, "True the Vote" never would have gotten started.

The Houston Chronicle, in the meantime, seems to have a complete blackout on any coverage of this fraud. The only place you can find it mentioned is in the reader comment sections. Such a pitiful newspaper for the second largest county in the U.S.

Chesterton and Philosophy

Chesterton and Philosophy:

I see there's sort of a debate about the quality of Chesterton's philosophy. Mr. Austin Bramwell writes the case against:

In Orthodoxy, Chesterton’s chief tactical point was that the main Christian dogmas were more liberal in their implications than the self-consciously liberal dogmas by which they were assualted. . . . This was not put very well. But it was connected with a harder idea — that of Christianity as the “slash of the sword” which would destroy natural religion, the Arnoldian compromise, and the Inner Light, and establish that the world was a good deal less “regular” than it looked. It was to a world where “life” was “unreasonable” and superstition abounding, and where “earthquakes of emotion” could be unloosed about a word that Christian vigilance was presented as the response.

In other words, Chesterton is an irrationalist. His seeks to paralyze the intellect in order to make room for awe. Admittedly, there can be no religion without awe (at least I think that’s right). Still, if Cowling is right, Chesterton opposes the traditions of natural theology and faith seeking understanding. His Christianity tries to keep reason permanently cabined.

Mr. Ross Douthout replies in favor that Chesterton was more of a newspaperman than a philosopher.

Part of what makes Chesterton appealing to so many readers is also what makes him frustrating if you approach his writing looking for straightforward, syllogistic argument — namely, that his appeals on behalf of Christianity (or any other cause) tend to rove from history to philosophy to intuition to revelation to politics to aesthetics and then back to history again, with all different sorts of arguments crowding in together, and no necessary A=B=C thread to follow all the way through. He is not an “irrationalist,” as Bramwell suggests, but he isn’t Plato either. But then again neither are most people: They justify what they believe, whether it’s about God or political order or love or any other aspect of human affairs, based on a mishmash of different facts, ideas, experiences, premises, impulses, and so forth. And Chesterton succeeds as a polemicist, if not as a philosopher....

That's giving away too much to Mr. Bramwell's position. Chesterton is a better philosopher than either credit.

First, let's start with the suggestion that Chesterton "isn't Plato" because of his mode of argument, which mixes mythology and intuition, politics and aesthetics. So does Plato! In the Republic, he starts off the clash with a man who comes barreling in 'like a wild beast,' and raises a philosophical challenge using language appropriate for a duel. Plato's Socrates undertakes an argument that begins with a symbolic story about a magic ring that gives a wicked man the power to seem good, and a good man who is fated to be both imprisoned and scorned. How can we say that the virtuous man is really the happy one?

To answer this challenge, he then departs into an analogy -- the description of the ideal state. It's a double analogy, though, because the state is like a person and a person is like a state: they are divided into reason, spiritedness, and the more base drives. In the state, those most suited to reason should rule the spirited (who perform as the physical defenders of the state and its laws) and those less able to control base drives (who do labor). In the person, the reason is meant to rule over the spirit, which gives you strength to flourish; and over the base drives, which must be satisfied in a way that accords with reason.

(A point occasionally missed is that this analogy is to be operating at both levels, all the time. Thus, when Plato writes that soldiers should only be called courageous for obeying the orders of the rulers, it isn't the case that soldiers should have no initiative but should blindly obey orders. It is the case that, when they do act with initiative, they should be obeying the 'ruling' part of their soul, reason, which should guide their spirited actions. This is the difference between courage and rashness.)

Does this analogy actually solve the puzzle of the magic ring? Not that I can tell; but it certainly does give rise to a great deal of thought and exploration of ideas. There is no A=B=C at work, though. Plato's assertion of the primacy of reason doesn't mean either that he sets aside the aesthetic or the political, nor even that his ruling reason requires him to answer the questions he raises, or make sure his analogies are sufficient for a solution.

Likewise, in the Timeaus, Plato departs into a mythological analogy (or possibly into actual mythology) when trying to explain the nature and origin of time. He explains about a minor godlike figure crafting chaos in the image of eternity. Later Neoplatonists refining this image make a fairly baroque concoction: Plotinus, for example, wants us to hold in mind both a One, which exists wholly without dimensions, and Eternity, which does likewise, and where Intellect lives; and a World Soul, which invents the world and time; and of which our souls are part. So, the unextended things end up being present in all extended things, but somehow without losing their unextended nature: or else all extended things are present inside the unextended things, making them an illusion. It is sometimes suggested that the extended things emanate from the unextended ones, but that is not the answer, because he also says that the World Soul (which is unextended) is in every part of the world just as a man's soul is in every part of his body; or possibly the body is inside the soul, as he suggests elsewhere.

Chesterton, who is writing about ineffable things as well, does a better job of keeping them imaginable. Plotinus is asking us to believe that the true nature of the universe is something like a round square. Working through even how to construct his model is a mind expanding exercise partially because he is asking you to think what is rationally impossible (an unextended thing that is in every part of an extended thing without becoming multiple).

The point is that our reasoning and intuitions about the world are insufficient to the truth as he sees it: but insofar as this qualifies as grand philosophy, as it surely must, the proper complaint against Chesterton would be that his ineffability is too easy to imagine. It is that it is too reasonable, not that it is irrational.

Now, post-Enlightenment, we're supposed to believe that reason is indeed capable of being -- as Mr. Bramwell puts it -- being 'uncabined.' Yet Kant, that prince of Rationality, did not think so; he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason to lay out what some of the limits of human reason were. He ran into other, practical limits elsewhere: after his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, which asserted that rational nature would reliably produce morality, in the actual Metaphysics of Morals he ends up asserting that a number of emotions -- including what Mr. Bramwell is describing as awe, which is also variously translated as "reverence" or "respect" -- are necessary to human morality. Even if reason can tell us what the right thing to do is, we have to have a reason to ask what the right thing to do is. Rational nature alone does not provide it: for example, if you can imagine a tiger who was rational, his reason might well not suggest the Golden Rule or a Categorical Imperative.

Kant's second Critique ends on a similar note, which finds what he had doubted could be found in earlier writings: a reliable road to God. This he does not find in reason alone, though, but in reason as applied to the awe he feels at 'the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.'

Ultimately, very few philosophers in history have achieved the A=B=C precision of modern analytic philosophy. More importantly, none of the great ones have achieved it, and many appear not to have striven for it. Kierkegaard did not want it; St. Thomas Aquinas, for all of his love of reason, was willing to stand on ineffability when it came to the Trinity.

A second basic point: Chesterton was writing at the end of the Romantic period. As we were discussing a few days ago, the Romantic period responded to the Enlightenment by suggesting that there had been too much focus on rationality. Human nature is such that romance is necessary as well. Chesterton's two-phase approach -- liberality, but also the 'slash of the sword' -- is an attempt at dialectic synthesis, which is a highly philosophical thing to attempt.

It's also not clear to me that the Romantic thinkers were wrong. The Romantic period ended in World War I's killing fields: but not because it was disproven. In a sense, it was proven. People walked away from the Romantic period because it seemed to have given rise to fearful things: which is to say that they followed their hearts. Many of them followed their hearts right into Red Communism and the emotional intensity of fascism. When we see Wagner seized upon by the Nazis, we see the truth of Romanticism's critique of the Enlightenment -- but also Plato's remarks that the spirited nature should be guided by reason. The two must talk.

A philosophy that does not engage aesthetics, politics, and mythology is therefore incomplete in an especially dangerous way. Philosophy must engage these questions above all, insofar as it is philosophy in the service of humanity. Chesterton's ready ability to weave a binding strand between image and argument, aesthetic and ethic, is a strength. It doesn't abandon or 'cabin' reason. Rather, it is the kind of reason that knows how to approach the Beautiful as well as the True.

Language and Worldview

Language and Worldview

If our mother tongue does not actually restrict what we're able to think, as was the fashionable belief for a time in the last century, it does at least affect the sort of thing we're forced to practice thinking about daily, and therefore the sort of thing we learn to think about with ease and precision. Two articles on this subject appeared recently in the Big Apple's sister publications. A NY Times article pointed out that

if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.

Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin.

A similar Wall Street Journal article addressed the need in some languages to give more attention to tense and gender than ordinarily is required in English:

Take "Humpty Dumpty sat on a..." Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say "sat" rather than "sit." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) change the verb to mark tense.

In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.

In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you'd use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you'd use a different form.

Both articles noted that many languages lack a purely personal system of spatial references like "left," "right," "front," or "back," requiring the speaker instead to specify the directions of the compass even for immediately personal issues like which leg has the insect on it at the present moment. Speakers of these languages learn as very young children to keep track of the compass directions, to the point of having what seems a nearly supernatural ability to point to due north even after being spun around blindfolded. Anecdotes about bad drivers notwithstanding, this apparently is a skill within the grasp of all ordinary specimens of homo sapiens, but it is not one that comes naturally to most of us unless we are constantly drilled from early childhood.

So all that stylebook advice about avoiding the passive voice is important philosophically as well as grammatically: it gives us practice thinking about whether we can or cannot identify the cause for an event.

h/t Talk to YoUniverse

Maps of Ethnic Breakdowns

Maps of American Cities by Ethnic Breakdowns:

A very interesting project, but based on 2000 census data. The author says he will do new ones once the new tabs are available.

You can see the maps for the biggest 40 cities here. Atlanta, for those of you interested in Georgia, is here.

Black Swans

Taleb on the Stimulus:

Our favorite living economist, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, thinks the stimulus made the economy worse. It's hard to argue with the reasoning. Unemployment is not only worse than it was in 2008, it's far worse than the projections made by the administration for what their stimulus would accomplish. (I suggest the excellent blog PoliticalMath for examining this question. There are many posts in his series.)

Nor did we de-leverage, which you will recall is Taleb's normal advice for people operating in the fourth quadrant. Instead, as a nation we vastly increased our debt.

Article V

Article V is also part of the Constitution:

There has been a slew of commentary criticizing the TEA Party movement for being shackled to the Constitution. I'd like to go over two points that the comments seem to miss entirely.

Mr. Ezra Klein's formulation of the idea is this:

Before people start tut-tutting me for even posting such heresies, I'd just add that Klarman is stating an obvious reality that others hide. The GOP says, "We pledge to honor the Constitution as constructed by its framers," and then promotes an amendment to change birthright citizenship. The Tea Parties are largely based on reverence for the Constitution but are simultaneously pushing for a Balanced Budget amendment. I think this sort of instrumentalist approach to the Constitution is proper, of course, but I also think people should be honest about the underlying assumptions.

The distinction between amending the constitution and ignoring it is not a small one, but it seems to be lost on some of these authors. Perhaps someone, somewhere has suggested that the Constitution is a divinely received document that must never be altered. By Mr. Klein's own examples, though, the TEA Party is not guilty of this. The idea is not that the Constitution should never change; it is that it should change always and only through the means laid out in the Constitution.

Article V provides the rules for this process. Notice how Mr. Klein's examples work. If there is a Balanced Budget Amendment, it will be an actual amendment to the Constitution. If there is a revision to birthright citizenship, it will result from an amendment to alter the language of the 14th Amendment.

The TEA Party's commitment to the Constitution should be comforting, not only to progressives but to everyone. Amendments through the Article V process can only succeed if they have both wide and deep support. There's no reason to be afraid of a movement that is committed to that process.

The only radical changes that a movement committed to the Article V process can create are in areas where the government is already in wide variance from the provisions of the Constitution. Of course, that is just why our progressive friends might be alarmed. They know they haven't bothered to amend the Constitution before instituting their program.

The young progressives often argue that it is nearly impossible to get simple legislation passed, with the Senate requiring sixty votes to accomplish anything. That is true, if you are trying to do something so radical that sixty Senators don't want to sign on for it. Part of the point of emphasizing the Constitution is to take stress off the Republic by limiting the use of the Federal government as a bludgeon to beat other Americans into conformity.

Consider the other bugaboo of these articles, which is the TEA Party's invocation of the 10th Amendment. Let's look at the text of that amendment.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The good news for the young progressive is that the 10th Amendment shows that every program they might like to institute is fully Constitutional. Almost anything you can dream of can be enacted -- at the state level.

If the 10th Amendment were fully enforced, it would result in a massive reduction of the size and power of the Federal government. The power to shape the social safety net would reappear at the state level, where state governments could consider the realities of their budget and carefully sort out just what kind of net they really want. We would have fifty models instead of one. Mr. Klein could have his preference, and so could the staunchest conservative.

A perennial problem with democracy is that it always leaves an unhappy minority. This model has the advantage, though, of letting that minority move to somewhere that suits them better. American's diversity means that when we use the Federal government to try to modify behavior, we force people with very different morals and values to comply with our own. The 10th Amendment gives us a way of avoiding that tension almost entirely. People can live just as they like, in the state of their choosing -- whichever one suits them best.

Once that is accomplished, America will be a more stable place. Stability is part of the goal. The TEA Party movement is mostly made up of established, middle class families. They don't want to destroy the country. They just want to stabilize it. The best way to do that is by a clean adherence to the permanent will of the People, as codified in -- and occasionally amended by -- the Constitution.

Andrew Jackson

The TEA Party and Andy-By-God Jackson:

It's enough to make a politician nervous, these historic similarities.

Established politicians dismissed his candidacy: Former President Thomas Jefferson called Jackson “one of the most unfit men I know of” for the presidency.

Jackson’s campaign responded with charges that the political establishment had become a corrupt and unresponsive elite. Only an outsider such as he, Jackson insisted, could bring to bear the common sense and virtue of the common people.

Events proved that no one liked Jackson — except the voting public....

The Jacksonians charged that Adams was an effete intellectual and questioned his Christian faith.

The Adams campaign responded by revealing a variety of skeletons in Jackson’s closet — everything from a man he had killed in a duel to six soldiers he had executed when they went AWOL after the War of 1812.

That's a little more serious a charge than "dabbling into witchcraft." Or being able to see Russia from one's house. Not that it mattered; as you know, Jackson was in fact elected, and proceeded to institute a number of populist reforms.

1930s

1930s Fun:

Arts & Letters Daily often has book reviews, but this is their first catalog review that I can recall.

Today, left-leaning progressives insist our consumerist culture is not only trashing the planet but also leaving us less happy than earlier generations of Americans. Conservative Christians tell us we cannot find meaning or purpose in mere material abundance but must make God the center of our lives, as our Founding Fathers did. Our shopping orgies and wanton spending habits have purportedly left us broke, isolated, and starving for richer friendships, deeper community ties, a higher degree of civic engagement than Groupon can deliver.

But look at how our supposedly more enlightened forebears created the social connectedness we long for. As the DeMoulin catalog suggests, they were literally manufacturing and selling it! An industrialized economy may have left early-20th-century urbanites with fewer opportunities to display their masculine prowess and develop meaningful bonds with each other, but the industrialized economy could also produce that which it had erased — in a more efficient, potent, culturally relevant form.

Like, ah, spanking machines. And exploding cigars. Actually, a lot of these things seem to involve blank cartridges in one caliber or another. Not the fake branding iron, though.

Unemployment & Education

What's going on with the Asians? How come they're employed at roughly similar levels no matter what kind of education they manage to get?

h/t Laura at 11D via Megan McCardle