Mourning in the Hall

Today my uncle died, following complications resulting from brain surgery. He was a great man solely because he was a good man, and that is quite an achievement.

When he was young, in East Tennessee, he looked like Elvis at a time when that was desirable. My mother, his younger sister, told me once how she was always popular as a young girl because all the other girls wanted to have a reason to come visit the girl whose brother looked like Elvis.

He married young -- too young for his own mother's liking! A few years ago I attended my cousin's wedding, his granddaughter, and the band called for a dance only for married couples. As the song progressed, they began to name off years: one, two, five, ten, fifteen, twenty. The idea was that, as they gave the length of time you had been married, you would leave the floor. He and his wife were dancing at the very last but for one couple in their nineties.

He owned a small business in civil engineering, and by means of it raised a family. Twice at least his honest nature caused him to be defrauded by people he had elected to trust, but he stood good for all the debts they had run up in his name.

For the entire part of his life that I knew him, he was a deacon in his church. He lived according to the strict rule of Southern Baptists, which he was, not drinking nor smoking nor chasing after girls. He made one exception I can recall, allowing a keg onto his property to celebrate his son's graduation from college. He was invariably kind, and almost invariably full of a gentle good humor.

He is survived by his wife, two children, four grandchildren, and several great-grandchildren -- I am not sure of the number myself.

We will miss him.

Better suspension

In God We Trust: Everybody Else, Cash Only

Dad29 suggests that the DOJ aims to destroy the ability of ammunition manufacturers, among 30 types of worrisome businesses, to operate except on a cash-only basis. That's surprising if the goal is, as the DOJ says it is, better oversight of these allegedly-worrisome industries. Generally electronic transactions leave better records. The reason to force banks to stop dealing with them can't, then, be that it would enable better oversight.

It might be a desire to destroy the business, or the industry.

UPDATE: The Sage of Knoxville on the same topic. For some reason he prefers to describe it in terms of a war on pornography, though he notes that 30 different types of businesses are being targeted. (Perhaps he thinks that Americans won't care about ammunition sales in the same way they care about access to porn.)

Memorial Day

I spent the day with family, walking a battlefield and trying both to learn and to teach something about how we came to where we are.

It is a solemn day. I trust you all spent it well.

Low humor

Never mind the cause, we need a remedy!

Sheldon Richman expresses a grudging admiration for the staying power of Keynesian economics.   One explanation is that Hayek et al. made people feel gloomy, with their insistence that misallocations of resources had to work themselves out before the economy could return to health.  Who wants to wait for that to happen?  We need jobs now!

Rather than getting bogged down in an attempt to explain the dynamics of the business cycle—a subject that remains contentious to this day—Keynes focused on a question that could be answered.  And that was also the question that most needed an answer: given that overall demand is depressed—never mind why—how can we create more employment? 

Indeed, if you’re trying to end mass unemployment, why would you want to get bogged down trying to understand what actually caused the mass unemployment?  It’s not as though the cause could be expected to shed light on the remedy.

Enter the era of stimulus spending, which is always about to create sustainable jobs, if we just keep increasing it.  In some fields, unexpected results might lead us to rethink our theories of causation.  Well, not in education, or child-rearing, or climate science, of course, but there must still be some fields somewhere that remained tethered to reality on some level.

In which I agree with the President, for once

Shocking news:  I don't think the President's proposal for a ratings system for universities is lunacy:

The rating system, which the president called for in a speech last year and is under development, would compare schools on factors like how many of their students graduate, how much debt their students accumulate and how much money their students earn after graduating.  Ultimately, Mr. Obama wants Congress to agree to use the ratings to allocate the billions in federal student loans and grants.  Schools that earn a high rating on the government’s list would be able to offer more student aid than schools at the bottom. 

Many college presidents said a rating system like the one being considered at the White House would elevate financial concerns above academic ones and would punish schools with liberal arts programs and large numbers of students who major in programs like theater arts, social work or education, disciplines that do not typically lead to lucrative jobs.

This controversy will get derailed into the usual complaints that education is too ineffable to judge accurately, but that misses the point.  The ratings system is designed to help people decide whether the federal government should subsidize tuition.  No matter how ineffably fabulous a basket-weaving studies degree is (and it would appeal to me enormously), the federal subsidies should be tied in some rational way to an increased ability to earn a living.  Cold and bourgeois of me, I know.  But when you look at a university's rating in that light, it's no mystery how to craft it, and no need to confuse the result with whatever personal views one may hold about the abstract value of education.

How did we get to the point where we worry that a system for deciding how to allocate federal subsidies elevated financial concerns inappropriately?

A break for warmth

From Bookworm Room, two happy-making videos.  One is about inclusion:  not the kind where you pretend everyone is alike, but the kind where you take your blinders off, find out what people can do instead of what you expected they could do, make a place for it, and honor them for it.  The other is about what the Bible might call the "widow's mite":  gifts from the heart, with no strings attached or guilt invoked.

Feedback plus-or-minus

This link is to an interesting comment at Watts Up With That analyzing the difficulty of deciding whether the interaction of CO2 (a weak greenhouse gas) with water vapor (a much stronger greenhouse gas) produces a negative feedback loop, which would tend toward equilibrium, or a positive feedback loop, which would spiral into permanent warming.  The question is fraught, because water vapor can serve either to warm the atmosphere, via the greenhouse effect, or to cool it, via other well-observed mechanisms.  When all the dust settles, how do these effects net out?

All alarmist climastrology in recent decades has depended on climate models that assume a net positive sign on the "feedback" or "sensitivity" factor; most of the quarreling has been over the size of the factor, especially since the past 17 years of little or no warning have demonstrated that the factor has been grossly overestimated.  In fact, however, there's scant evidence one way or the other on the more fundamental question of whether the feedback is negative or positive.  No amount of tinkering with the exact size of the positive feedback factor will help the models' ability to predict real experience if the problem really is that the feedback is negative.

Overcoming Barriers

The Wilson Quarterly has an article on economic development, relative to our recent discussion of reparations in several ways. The most obvious is this:

Geography, however, doesn’t always play a direct role—sometimes its effects are more roundabout. Rugged, mountainous terrain isn’t great for growing crops or conducting trade, but one study from 2007 found that such regions in Africa nonetheless reached higher levels of development. Why? Because historically, that same treacherous landscape protected certain areas from slave traders.

So if the most successful regions of Africa are the least well-endowed, just because it was too hard for slavers to extract their wealth and human capital, how much of Africa's suffering is directly due to the slave trade?

But there's this, too:

Other studies have shown that people matter more than institutions or locations. Many poorly endowed lands have experienced a “reversal of fortune” since 1500, producing more income per capita than their past would have suggested. Those economies benefited from the European colonizers and their human capital—a familiarity with centralized state institutions, efficient agriculture techniques, and new technologies that let one generation build upon the advances of the last.

Now that seems to be a reversal of the first argument: Europeans colonized the parts of Africa that are worst-performing, too. I assume this is a way of talking about India, which wasn't subject to the slave trade and thus wasn't plundered in the same way. But India and Pakistan sit next door to one another, and were subject to the same British rule. There's an element of responsibility that goes beyond "what did the Europeans do to them?" and lies at the question of what they have done with their inheritance.

The piece ends on a note of hope, which is where I think we should aspire to go as well. The question shouldn't be one of punishment or vengeance, but of development of human capacities. We want people to come to flourish.

The Black Monster of Santa Barbara

It is no shame to die for love. It has been the mark of many a noble death. It need not be a shame to kill for love, though it often is, but there are times when it can be right.

The Lily Maid of Astolat begged Lancelot to love her, to marry her or -- if he would not -- at least to take her as paramour. He would do neither, the one for the love of Guinevere and the other out of respect for her virtue. She took herself to her bed and died, but revenged herself on him by having her body brought to Camelot with a letter complaining that he had refused her love. It is a bitter story and a sad one, but a better story than today's.

Elaine understood that her complaint, though the sorrow of it brought her to her death, imposed no duty on Lancelot. He might be ashamed to have caused her such pain, when she had done him only good. But his defense was valid, as Camelot agreed:

And when Sir Launcelot heard it word by word, he said: My lord Arthur, wit ye well I am right heavy of the death of this fair damosel: God knoweth I was never causer of her death by my willing, and that will I report me to her own brother: here he is, Sir Lavaine. I will not say nay, said Sir Launcelot, but that she was both fair and good, and much I was beholden unto her, but she loved me out of measure.

Ye might have shewed her, said the queen, some bounty and gentleness that might have preserved her life.

Madam, said Sir Launcelot, she would none other ways be answered but that she would be my wife, outher else my paramour; and of these two I would not grant her, but I proffered her, for her good love that she shewed me, a thousand pound yearly to her, and to her heirs, and to wed any manner knight that she could find best to love in her heart. For madam, said Sir Launcelot, I love not to be constrained to love; for love must arise of the heart, and not by no constraint.

That is truth, said the king.

Rewarding failure

Why and how an institution gets money directed to it may be more important than how much it gets.  This morning's Wall Street Journal article argues that the VA has gotten all the money it ever asked for, and yet it's failing.  The same disturbing pattern afflicts public school financing, which increases endlessly even as its results deteriorate. Paul Krugman argues that freeing the V.A. from the "perverse incentives" of "profit" should be a great thing, but Daniel Greenfield points out his lunacy:

“Crucially, the V.H.A. is an integrated system, which provides health care as well as paying for it,” Krugman wrote.  “So it’s free from the perverse incentives created when doctors and hospitals profit from expensive tests and procedures, whether or not those procedures actually make medical sense.” 

Of course ‘perverse’ profit motive incentives don’t go away.  They just morph into targets that have to be met at any cost.  A quick look at anything from Soviet agriculture to No Child Left Behind would show how that works. 

Krugman was either being dishonest or remaining steadfastly ignorant of how the world works.  And the VA met its targets and budget issues by rationing health care and killing patients. 

The way socialized medicine always does.

Or, frankly, any monopoly that manages to disconnect its funding from its performance by exempting itself from the rigors of competition and therefore from the discipline of consequences of failure.

"The more you tighten your grip . . ."

". . . Lord Vader, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."  This might be a good message for the author of "When Sprawl Hits the Wall," a piece in Urbanophile bemoaning the "doughnut" syndrome around dying cities.  Indianapolis, he claims, enacted a brilliant strategy of co-opting its suburbs some decades back.  You can't let those people move out to the outskirts without expanding your perimeter and trapping them in your tax-base, right?  But then the suburbs themselves inexplicably decay, too, which evidently has nothing whatever to do with their having been trapped in your crazy urban scheme to begin with.  Then new suburbs spring up even further out and, dang it, the people with all the money and resources insist on living there instead of in your demonstrably superior urban paradise.  Sometimes they even move to a completely new city or state.

The problem continues to be that choice thingy.

On Reparations

There's been some talk about this essay in the Atlantic, which makes an extended case for reparations from the perspective of the harm done to black Americans over several centuries. (A rebuttal from the National Review is here.) We should consider it, because I think the case is even stronger than the author makes it.

The strengthening element comes at the union of two points he does make, which I will quote. The first one is about the way in which black slaves were increasingly subject to an emerging racism:

When enslaved Africans, plundered of their bodies, plundered of their families, and plundered of their labor, were brought to the colony of Virginia in 1619, they did not initially endure the naked racism that would engulf their progeny. Some of them were freed. Some of them intermarried. Still others escaped with the white indentured servants who had suffered as they had. Some even rebelled together, allying under Nathaniel Bacon to torch Jamestown in 1676.

One hundred years later, the idea of slaves and poor whites joining forces would shock the senses, but in the early days of the English colonies, the two groups had much in common. English visitors to Virginia found that its masters “abuse their servantes with intollerable oppression and hard usage.” White servants were flogged, tricked into serving beyond their contracts, and traded in much the same manner as slaves.

Indeed it is no wonder that poor whites and blacks found themselves in a similar case in 1619, because racial theory in general did not exist at that time. The Wikipedia article on the subject alleges some 'classical' theories, but comes up with two very minor examples; and the choice of the word 'race' is the translator's, not the original author's. (The Latin is "gentium.") That different peoples are different is not news, but the idea that there was some sort of quasi-species difference is not an ancient concept.

It is certainly not a Medieval concept. The distinction that interested them most was not biological but religious. Indeed European society during the Middle Ages was much more diverse ethnically than we realize today without careful effort, largely because they themselves didn't make a big deal about it. Likewise in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, the hero's father's first wife is a black African princess. His half brother is half-black (literally, in the novel: half his skin is black and half white, in patches). The marriage isn't considered illegitimate because of the difference in skin color, but because the wife was of a pagan faith and Parzival's father was a Christian. Meanwhile, when he and his half-brother meet, they meet as equals and treat each other with great joy. That is not to say that there were never Medieval remarks about those differently-colored foreigners that were disparaging: the Jewish philosopher Maimonides makes some very vicious ones in his famous work Guide for the Perplexed. But there was no sense of this concept of "race."

The invention of racism in the Enlightenment is "early" during the life of Robert Boyle, who was not born until 1627. The concept was not well accepted even in his day. Three of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment did much to change that: Voltaire, Kant, and Hegel. (Kant, who advocated so strongly for universal rights coming from internal rational nature, is the most surprising name on this list; but nevertheless, as philosopher Charles Mills points out, he made a complete commitment).

So there was a move in philosophy, including natural philosophy -- father of the sciences -- toward racism. The sciences became enthusiastically embraced on this point by culture, politics, government, and art. Why? Because it provided slave owners with white support to help them suppress the danger of rebellion from a black population that greatly outnumbered them (as historian Kenneth S. Greenberg demonstrates), while also providing a justification for the generation of the greatest wealth in human history to that era.

In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white income was derived from slavery. By 1840, cotton produced by slave labor constituted 59 percent of the country’s exports. The web of this slave society extended north to the looms of New England, and across the Atlantic to Great Britain, where it powered a great economic transformation and altered the trajectory of world history. “Whoever says Industrial Revolution,” wrote the historian Eric J. Hobsbawm, “says cotton.”

The wealth accorded America by slavery was not just in what the slaves pulled from the land but in the slaves themselves. “In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together,” the Yale historian David W. Blight has noted. “Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy.” The sale of these slaves—“in whose bodies that money congealed,” writes Walter Johnson, a Harvard historian—generated even more ancillary wealth. Loans were taken out for purchase, to be repaid with interest. Insurance policies were drafted against the untimely death of a slave and the loss of potential profits. Slave sales were taxed and notarized. The vending of the black body and the sundering of the black family became an economy unto themselves, estimated to have brought in tens of millions of dollars to antebellum America. In 1860 there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country.

This telling dramatically understates the importance of slavery to the Industrial Revolution. Historian Eric Williams famously declared that the British participation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade underwrote the entire industrial program. American slave shipping followed the same model, developing a variation of the "Triangular Trade" that had funded the development of British industry. Based in the Northeast, it shipped rum to Africa to trade for slaves, slaves to the Carribean to trade for sugar cane, and sugar cane to New England to make into rum.

The American South was not much involved in that trade because it was involved in the British triangle, which took cotton to its mills to make into textiles, traded the textiles for slaves, and the slaves for cotton. It was not until the American Civil War that the South was brought into the North's economic system, as the northern American states had developed cotton mills of their own, and the blockade closed the South to British shipping for years, forcing the British to turn to India for cotton -- a change that was never undone, once it had finally been made. As a consequence, the market for Southern cotton after the war was in the North. The huge "gilded age" boom of industry was funded first by the slave trade, then by slavery, then by the oppressive systems of sharecropping and Jim Crow. Thus was there money to build factories and railroads!

The Atlantic piece makes much, rightly, of the suffering that attended sharecroppers under this new system. What the author misses is that this affliction was not entirely race-based. The intense racism was wielded as a way of keeping Southern poor whites -- who once again had very much in common with poor blacks -- on the side of the system run by the elite in places like Atlanta, capital of the "New South," which made business ties to New York its guiding light. Jim Crow was not just to keep blacks down, but to keep the poor divided and distrustful of each other. Official, government-enforced racism intensified during this era because it was the only thing holding the system together, as grinding poverty worsened every year under the law of monoculture: every year cotton production must go up, which means that -- supply and demand -- the price per bale came down. Until the Boll Wevil destroyed the crops three years running in the late 1920s, nothing got better in the South.

What all that means for reparations I couldn't say. The proposal is to study the issue. It's worth studying. It's worth understanding.

Off-road thinking

More on graphene:  How a greater fear of being boring than of being wrong led to levitating frogs and a Nobel prize.

Genes and culture

Reading half a dozen reviews of Nicholas Wade's new book "A Troublesome Inheritance" had almost reduced me to despair of ever finding one that didn't get stuck in the long-running "tastes great, less filling" quarrel between nature and nurture, or in sterile quibbles over whether the word "race" has any meaning.  (I can't say for sure when red becomes orange and orange becomes yellow, but I know that colors can be usefully distinguished.)

This New York Books review, amusingly entitled "Stretch Genes," avoids the usual excitable excesses.  Wade's book sounds like an interesting romp through theories about how traits like willingness to trust non-kin, or ability to delay gratification, can profoundly affect the structure of civilization.  It also sounds like an inexplicable effort to attribute to genes a number of global differences that could as easily be attributed to culture.  Wade looks, for instance, at the hesitance of some Southeast Asian cultures to adopt successful strategies from Chinese immigrants.  If it were only a matter of culture, he wonders, why wouldn't people readily adopt the new strategy as soon as they observe its success?  It must be genetic.  Or . . . could there maybe be some huge non-genetic hurdles to adults' ditching one culture and adopting another that seems to offer an advantage in one sliver of life?

There are fascinating studies involving identical twins separated at birth.  They are almost the only line of inquiry that I find persuasive on the knotty problems of disentangling nature from nurture.

Altamont

Two concerts stand at the very core of the Boomer mythos, Woodstock and Altamont. The one was good, the other evil. Woodstock was -- in spite of mud and hardships -- a festival of love and the new way of thinking. Altamont somehow became tainted, and the source of the darkness was pinned on the violence of the Hells Angels.

The matter is of interest because a new feature about them, which 'of course' will address the concert. The initial press is not encouraging.

Of course, the project will include the 1969 Altamont concert in Northern California where the Hells Angels provided a barrier to make sure that the crowd didn’t come onto the stage when the Rolling Stones played. As the story goes, their “payment” was in beer. The Angels got into brawls with the fans and a pregnant woman ended up with a skull fracture and another young man was stabbed to death. It was total chaos. After that, the Hells Angels were persona non grata, and public opinion about the club changed for the worse.

The woman was hit by a beer bottle thrown from the crowd, not by the Angels.

As for the other matter: 'A young man was stabbed to death.' True, as far as it goes.

Here's a documentary on the matter.



The young man in question had been thrown out of the concert for trying to climb onto the stage. He went somewhere and obtained a revolver, returned, drew the gun, and charged the stage again.

Another story built into the mind of the Boomer generation is the assassination of John Lennon. The Hells Angels stopped a similar attack on the Rolling Stones, perhaps the only band of equal stature to the Beatles.

The Angel who saved the Rolling Stones did it without shooting into the crowd, without hurting anyone else, and by charging a gun with a blade.

That's not bad. The failure to understand what they had seen right in front of their eyes was not the first such failure. We are still today living with the consequences of many other failures by just the same people, of just the same kind.

Hah!

'And then it hit me! By which I mean, my wife pointed it out.'

I wonder how much this insight applies to the one show -- which, like most television, I haven't seen at all -- and how much it is a barometer for the current society.

Confer:

Cyber(non)security

Well, this is encouraging.

Live by the Viral, Die by the Viral

One of the key problems in American foreign policy is always the maintenance of political will among the American people. It's hard to sustain a long-term and difficult operation if the American people's interest in or support for it wavers; harder still if the opposition party is actively undermining you.

It turns out a particular problem with the use of social media as the forefront of your diplomacy is that, on the Internet, interest wanders quickly.