Imposing Law Upon the World, Two of Two (Economics)

So here is what the soccer article describes as the core German philosophical position as it relates to Greece:

Eucken's views are now known as ordoliberalism, and they're still very popular among German economists. A skepticism of debt is central to the philosophy, which many see influencing German policy today. As The Economist has explained in a brief history of ordoliberalism:

This is an offshoot of classical liberalism that sprouted during the Nazi period, when dissidents around Walter Eucken, an economist in Freiburg, dreamed of a better economic system. They reacted against the planned economies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. But they also rejected both pure laissez-faire and Keynesian demand management.

The result was a school that was close both in personal contacts and in its content to the Austrian school associated with Friedrich Hayek. The two shared a view that deficit spending for demand management was foolish. Ordoliberalism differed, however, in believing that capitalism requires a strong government to create a framework of rules which provide the order (ordo in Latin) that free markets need to function most efficiently.

From the original ordoliberals sprang one big idea for state intervention when cartels dominated the economy: a muscular antitrust policy. A second was a strict monetary policy that focused rigidly and exclusively on price stability. A third was the enforcement of Haftung, which means not just liability but also responsibility. Germany has tougher insolvency laws than America or Britain, for instance.

This showed up after the financial crisis of 2008. The Germans wrote a "debt brake" in their constitution, the Economist noted, that seeks to balance state and federal budgets, and they have tried to bring the philosophy to other European nations as well.

Although this is presented as an alternative to Keynesian thought, both attempt to control what is really a natural process according to what are alleged to be 'laws of economics.'  They are both trying to treat something organic as if the rules of reason and logic apply to it the same way that they do to mathematical structures.  As D29 was pointing out just the other day, there is an important fact about Keynes' full position that gets lost. We all know about the 'pump priming' part, but people forget (willfully, perhaps) that Keynes believed this could only work coupled with at least some protectionist policies. After all, if I'm going to deficit-spend to prime my economy, I have to make sure the money I'm taking on debt to spend is going to create activity within my economy.  That requires control.  Otherwise, even if Keynes' General Theory works, we're just taking on debt to prime the Chinese economy. We're only hurting our own, even in principle.

...the Great Thinker actually came out for stringent protectionism and economic autarky six years before he published the General Theory and for good and logical reasons that his contemporary followers choose to completely ignore. Namely, protectionism and autarky are an absolutely necessary correlate to state management of the business cycle and related efforts to improve upon the unguided results generated by business, labor and investors on the free market. Indeed, Keynes took special care to make sure that his works were always translated into German, and averred that Nazi Germany was the ideal test bed for his economic remedies.

Eighty years on from Keynes’ incomprehensible ode to statist economics and thorough-going protectionism, the idea of state management of the business cycle in one country is even more preposterous.

I wouldn't say it was entirely fair to suggest a necessary tie between Keynes and Nazis, but we can see that the German philosophical outlook is primed to believe in this kind of approach. They are thinking about economics in terms of lawlike relations between actors.  They are thinking about it in terms of an artificial environment of economic activity in which the laws of the mind apply with full force in spite of the nature of things.  An important part of keeping economics lawlike and predictable is to control the entry of non-lawlike forces. What kinds of forces are not lawlike? Self-love was Kant's great example: that force that calls us to make exceptions for ourselves from the rules.

So from the German perspective, the article is alleging, the important thing is to enforce the lawlike relations that allow for orderly economic progress.  If that causes short-term pain (and boy is it doing that), that's too bad:  we must resist the urge to allow the Greeks to make exceptions arising from self-love (i.e., not starving or having their economy choked to death because they can't spend money across borders).

Of course, the other problem is Taleb's problem of antifragility:  just because the laws we think we see are really in us, and not in the economic activities to which we've assigned them, we often go wrong.  We think we are considering an economic system with rational laws.  In fact, there's just a bunch of human activities, which is governed not by rational laws but by (often irrational) human nature.  If we don't structure the risk of going wrong in the right way, we create situations of systemic collapse when things do go wrong.  That's our fault.

The article doesn't really say what it thinks the Greek philosophical position would be.*  The alternative it poses is described as "Anglo-Saxon," and is the utilitarian position:  the right thing to do is whatever it takes to avoid pain and restore pleasure in economic relations.  Utilitarianism takes pleasure and the avoidance of pain to be the basic standard for human ethics, including economic ethics.  The Greek suffering is a problem that cries out, on this model, for action to put an end to the suffering.

So, let's put all this together.  The economic system we've set up isn't a thing in its own right.  It doesn't have a nature, and therefore it doesn't have laws of its own.  Economics is just a human activity.

Thus, the relevant laws to economics seem to be our laws, that is, they are consequences of our nature.  Human nature includes the danger of starvation and the suffering of pain.  It also includes this dangerous incapacity to always cleanly distinguish between what our mind tells us about the world and the world itself.  Where we've set up a system that is fragile instead of antifragile, systemic collapse is our fault and should be our responsibility.  In this case, the Germans' outsized influence on the system suggests outsized German responsibility.  They have created much of this problem by acting as if it were possible to impose laws on economics that don't take account of human nature. All economic laws are located in us.

On the other hand, human nature also includes a robust self-love that corrupts us when we try to treat each other fairly.  Greeks have behaved in accord with human nature, but not wisely or well.  Making exceptions for those who have behaved unwisely is a serious business.  It has to be done in a way that doesn't make exception-seeking an attractive proposition for other nations (such as Portugal or Spain).

If that can't be worked out, then we should bow to human nature and let the Greeks take care of themselves -- out of the Euro, and out from under the control of its rules.  The rules are unwise, and the philosophy behind them likewise.  Because it mistakes the locus of the laws, it thinks you can have economic laws that are detached from human nature.  That can only lead to systemic collapses such as this one.  We should expect to see more, whether the Germans or the Greeks "win," unless the whole set of rules is re-examined to take account of human nature in its fullness.


*  One reason he doesn't give you the Greek philosophical position is that the Ancient Greeks didn't have one.  Economics is really a modern production, and its focus on laws and lawlike relations is thoroughly modern.  We get only a little talk about economic problems in Plato and Aristotle.  Aristotle thinks that the household is the seat of economic production, and thus he would suggest that the problem is too much specialization:  no family should put itself willingly in a position in which it can't provide for its basic needs.  At the present moment, that position is untenable (though it may become tenable again in a more automated future).  Specialization is necessary for economics as we practice it given our current technology.

Greferendum

Early results suggest that the Greek people have issued a resounding statement:  "No, you must continue sending us boatloads of money."  Yay?

Taste and judgment

From C.S. Lewis, "The Seeing Eye," an essay on the difficulty of separating moral judgments from aesthetic or natural preferences:

Being fallen creatures we tend to resent offences against our taste, at least as much as, or even more than, offence against our conscience or reason; and we would dearly like to be able--if only we can find any plausible argument for doing so--to inflict upon the man whose writing (perhaps for reasons utterly unconnected with good and evil) has afflicted us like a bad smell, the same kind of condemnation which we can inflict on him who has uttered the false and the evil. The tendency is easily observed among children; friendship wavers when you discover that a hitherto trusted playmate actually likes prunes. But even for adults it is 'sweet, sweet, sweet poison' to feel able to imply 'thus saith the Lord' at the end of every expression of our pet aversions. To avoid this horrible danger we must perpetually try to distinguish, however closely they get entwined both by the subtle nature of the facts and by the secret importunity of our passions, those attitudes in a writer which we can honestly and confidently condemn as real evils, and those qualities in his writing which simply annoy and offend us as men of taste. This is difficult, beause the latter are often so much more obvious and provoke such a very violent response. The only safe course seems to me to be this: to reserve our condemnation of attitudes for attitudes univerally acknowledged to be bad by the Christian conscience speaking in agreement with Scripture and ecumenical tradition.... For our passions are always urging us in the opposite direction, and if we are not careful criticism may become a mere excuse for taking revenge on books whose smell we dislike by erecting our temperamental antipathies into pseudo-moral judgements.

Imposing Law Upon the World, One of Two (Metaphysics)

I was asked to talk about an article that tries to explain the Greek financial crisis using a Monty Python sketch about (Ancient) Greek versus (Modern) German philosophy. The Greeks are the good guys here, and the winners of the soccer match, but the author's whole point is to explain how the Germans are focused on trying to establish and enforce rules.

Unfortunately, I don't think the author correctly describes the philosophy, which is going to make it harder to understand. Here's what he says:

The basic question for all these thinkers is whether the patterns we see in the world around us really reflect patterns that exist in nature or are simply attempts by our minds to structure what we see. For many German philosophers, a key effort was to understand the principles governing societies.

This is a particular issue for economists, who seek patterns in the mass of statistics coming out of stock markets and labor surveys. It's not always enough, though, to look at how markets and prices behave and describe the mathematical patterns they seem to follow. In practice, there always seem to be exceptions to the rules, sometimes catastrophic ones, which suggest that those maybe patterns have more to do with our minds than the natural world itself.

"Anglo-Saxon economists are guided by the utilitarian philosophy of John Stuart Mill or Jeremy Bentham, asking merely if a policy works," The Economist recently wrote. "Germans side with Immanuel Kant, believing that nothing works except through law, and are horrified when the [European Central Bank] strays from its narrow mandate."

Kant is described as giving an account by which nothing happens except through law, and indeed he does say that in the Groundwork. However, Kant's already talking about the world as understood within the mind. What Kant argues in his first critique is that we can't understand the world as it really is, but only as it appears to us, at which it is already being filtered through what he called a "transcendental apperception." For example, your mind takes sound waves and light waves and a sensation of gravity and tactile sensations, and these are all coming in from different organs on different nerves. But it presents you a picture of a soccer game in which you are participating. Is there really a soccer game? You can't know that even in principle. You can only know about the appearances in the mind.

There is some truth to this position, as is made clear by the example of the banana. If the body were simply a physical instrument, such that the eyes were merely receiving light waves which were merely translated into images by the brain, bananas would change color with changing light conditions like other things do. That's the way this article from LiveScience describes the process, and it's what would be true if the process works the way they think it does: if the body was a machine, so to speak.

In fact, under any natural lighting condition, your mind will report it to you as banana yellow.

What color is a banana? A banana is yellow in the sunlight and in the moonlight. It is yellow on a sunny day, on a cloudy day, on a rainy day. It is yellow at dawn and at dusk. The color of the banana appears constant to the human eye under all these conditions, despite the fact that the actual wavelengths of the light reflected by the surface of the banana under these varied conditions are different. Objectively, they are not the same color all the time. However, the human eye and color recognition system can compensate for these varied conditions because they all occurred during the course of the evolution of the human vision system, and can perceive the objectively varied colors as constantly yellow.

So a banana looks yellow under all conditions, except in a parking lot at night. Under the sodium vapor lights commonly used to illuminate parking lots, a banana does not appear natural yellow. This is because the sodium vapor lights did not exist in the ancestral environment, during the course of the evolution of the human vision system, and the visual cortex is therefore incapable of compensating for them.

So the law we infer -- "if it is a banana, then it is yellow" -- is actually not a product of the world, but a product of the mind. The evolved mind is coloring the fruit in a lawlike way. Once we move to kinds of lighting that our eyes didn't evolve to see, the law turns out not to be real. It was only a product of our minds.

Now, the first thing you'll notice is that Kant isn't quite right: we have just managed to learn something about the thing itself, the thing outside of our minds. And we've managed to find, through science, an example of a place in which the apparent laws are products of the mind and not of the thing. There's this huge division in German philosophy since Kant, between those who think that lawlike ideas are real (Hegel) and those who think that ideas about the world are often totally unreliable (Wittgenstein). The science gives us a middle way.

Greek philosophy, being much older, believes the laws are in the things, and the things are real. If you kick a ball something different will happen than if you kick a dog, and the reason for the difference is that the ball and the dog have different natures. The things are different, and their natural or essential differences will produce different results.

That's more like the scientific position, oddly enough, than the Modern position is. It's why we can say that bananas aren't "really" yellow the way we think they are: we look at the thing, find out what wavelengths of light its skin are reflecting, and then see that our eyes are treating those wavelengths differently in some cases than in banana cases. Thus, we say (as the Greeks) that the nature of the banana produces skin that reflects light of a certain wavelength, but that it's our nature -- our evolved nature -- that makes us see a favored food source as brightly outlined in all the lighting conditions our ancestors would experience. Both are lawlike: the banana's genetics reliably produces skin of a certain kind, and our evolved nature reliably produces minds of a certain kind. The important question for answering the German problem is figuring out where the law is.

Pyrotechnics on the 4th

 

 

Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations

From ChicagoBoyz, John Adams's letter to his wife Abigail July 3, 1776:

I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. — I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. — Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

Late Night at the Star Club

Independence Day Storytime: You Could Learn a Lot From Julia Child

This article on women not apologizing -- but just telling people what they want, which by the way would be incredibly helpful -- ends with a citation.

We are not sorry to ask for an email that should have been sent to us weeks ago, or to expect to receive the item we paid for, or to be bumped into on the subway. Yes, we should take the shampoo commercial’s advice and weed out the word when it’s superfluous. But it’s just as important to articulate exactly what we mean in its place.

Julia Child, a consummate charmer, said it best: “Never apologize.”

Child was doubtless quoting John Wayne who said that too, fifty-five years earlier in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Nevertheless Julia Child is a great source for inspiration, although the linked article might give you an incomplete idea of just why she was so charming.

She had arrived in France in November 1948 not speaking the language or knowing how to cook. ''I had never even heard of a shallot,'' she said. ''I was there as Paul's extra baggage.'' Ten years older than Julia, he ran the visual presentation department at the United States Information Service. By the time they left for other postings six years later, Julia was fluent in French, ran a cooking school and was co-authoring a comprehensive cookbook that would later make her famous.

She learned many things in Paris, she said, one of the most important of which was how to shop like a Parisian. ''It was life-changing,'' she said, ''because shopping in France taught me about human relations.''...

With a smile, she added: ''I quickly learned how to communicate. If I wasn't willing to spend time to get to know the sellers and what they were selling, then I wouldn't go home with the freshest head of lettuce or best bit of steak in my basket. They really made me work for my supper. But what a supper -- yum! And it was such fun.''

The truth is that she had been carefully taught long before France.  What she doesn't explain in this rather modest interview is that by 1948 she had been working as an American spy for six years. She joined the OSS under Wild Bill Donovan during the war and served across Asia. She met Paul doing this work, which was at an extremely high level. She wasn't her husband's baggage -- the US Information Agency was our core propaganda outfit during the Cold War -- but it was sure helpful if she could appear that way.

American Comebacks

I'm not normally a fan of Buzzfeed's clickbait, but I'll make this exception for Freedom Day.

Celebrating the Rockets' Red Glare

Last night's celebration went well. Tonight's will be shot from a semi trailer.

View from the Celebration

The early rain finally broke, though it held off long enough for a good lesson in building a campfire with wet wood. Once that fire was lit it was used to start the charcoal. Andouille and firecracker brats have been cooked and eaten, basted with Yuengling lager (America's oldest brewery). Other American beers have also been drunk. Fireworks have been laid in. A cigar given me by Mr. Wolf has been assigned for fuse-lighting duty later in the evening.

Hope it looks good where you are, too.

Independence Day Celebration: Leadslingers Bourbon

If you're ever thirsty out in Indian Territory, let me recommend Leadslingers Bourbon Whiskey. It's perfectly enjoyable neat and can be found at larger liquor stores (a bit too niche for the smaller ones, I suppose).

From the back label: "Leadslingers Whiskey was founded in 2013 by seven combat veterans. When USAF TACPS, U.S. Army Rangers, Green Berets, and Paratroopers combined their love for America and fine whiskey, LSW was born."


It's crafted by Scissortail Distillery, in Moore, Oklahoma, whose bourbon I also recommend.

Continuing Our Musical Appreciation....

As usual with the Damn Few, trigger warnings include absolutely everything. You probably should pass right on without watching this.

Amazing Grace, with Condoleezza Rice and Jenny Oaks Baker

The Spirit of Rebellion

Happy Independence Day.  Today we celebrate treason, treason that prospered, treason that flourished, treason that created what was for a while -- what might someday be again -- the living symbol of virtuous human liberty.

"Going Armed To the Terror of the People"

Here's an offense I didn't know existed, but apparently in North Carolina you can be charged with a crime for doing something that is otherwise legal if it scares people.

What apparently happened was that a soldier from FT Bragg went to a local mall to have glamour shots made of himself with his body armor and rifle. The result was a complete panic, the closing of the mall, the arrest of the soldier, and his being charged with this obscure crime.

The Duffel Blog mocks the soldier for his lack of self-awareness, pointing out that this was right after a reported shooting at the Navy Yard. That story turned out to be false, of course, which suggests that a kind of public hysteria is at work. I suppose one has to be aware of the hysteria of one's fellow Americans as well, though frankly, at this time that requires a tremendous amount of awareness. America is hysterical about everything just now.

In any case, while scaring others is adequate for being arrested and charged with the crime, actual conviction will require proof that his intent was to terrify people. Assuming they don't manage to bluff him into pleading guilty, our boy ought to walk on that one.

Bikers Against Flag-Burning

Jazz Shaw has some video and commentary about a scuffle in New York this weekend, in which some bikers and veterans got together to disrupt a flag-burning. The group burning the flag looks to be an offshoot of the Black Lives Matter movement, one that claims its purposes is to disarm the NYPD. This group has put together a hoary collection of activists that makes this look just like an episode from the late 1960s, including devoted communists as you can see from their placards about capitalism.

Adding to the nostalgia, the veterans among the bikers seem to be Vietnam veterans. The largest group, though, are Hallowed Sons MC, which isn't an old group at all:

I’ve been riding for almost fifty years, but I’ve only been with the Hallowed Sons for a couple years. The club is new - we started up a few years in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. We got together to help. I spent two months living on the street in New Dorp (a neighborhood of Staten Island hard hit by Sandy) serving people food, helping with mold removal, doing whatever people needed. The Hallowed Sons are hard guys and we’ll fight when we have to but we don’t have to because we stand with strength and unity and brotherhood. We put our energy into the community, supporting first responders, vets, cleaning up the neighborhood, cleaning up the highways. We’re community driven.

This is the kind of guy whose conservatism and patriotism -- indeed whose presence, whose alliance -- is often found embarrassing by the well-educated Republican. Like early volunteer firefighters (who also have a very rough and tumble history entangled with a certain amount of brawling and politics), these guys put themselves together in response to a natural disaster to help their community. The kind of guys who do that have a sort of native love of home, of neighborhood, of village, of city, of country. It's not necessarily closely examined, but it is deeply felt, and they'll fight you if you insult it.

You know, these guys.



A lot of people find them embarrassing, but I love guys like this. It is important, in the right place and time, to reflect soberly on the history and be able to criticize your own where they deserve it. You might be able to analyze in a sophisticated way the history of American, and indeed of Western, policy in the Middle East and the way in which it ties in to the phenomena of terrorism and radical Islamic revival. That's important. It can even be helpful.

All the same, don't go talking about the queen on Independence Day.

UPDATE:  Heh.

"Weenies burn flag to protest cops, get attacked by bikers, need cops to save their asses."

Facta Non Verba

Seen on FB:

Yeah, OK.

The Navy Cross is presented to James H. Webb, Jr., First Lieutenant, U.S. Marine Corps, for extraordinary heroism while serving as a Platoon Commander with Company D, First Battalion, Fifth Marines, First Marine Division (Reinforced), Fleet Marine Force, in connection with combat operations against the enemy in the Republic of Vietnam. On July 10, 1969, while participating in a company-sized search and destroy operation deep in hostile territory, First Lieutenant Webb's platoon discovered a well-camouflaged bunker complex that appeared to be unoccupied. Deploying his men into defensive positions, First Lieutenant Webb was advancing to the first bunker when three enemy soldiers armed with hand grenades jumped out. Reacting instantly, he grabbed the closest man and, brandishing his .45 caliber pistol at the others, apprehended all three of the soldiers. Accompanied by one of his men, he then approached the second bunker and called for the enemy to surrender. When the hostile soldiers failed to answer him and threw a grenade that detonated dangerously close to him, First Lieutenant Webb detonated a claymore mine in the bunker aperture, accounting for two enemy casualties and disclosing the entrance to a tunnel. Despite the smoke and debris from the explosion and the possibility of enemy soldiers hiding in the tunnel, he then conducted a thorough search that yielded several items of equipment and numerous documents containing valuable intelligence data. Continuing the assault, he approached a third bunker and was preparing to fire into it when the enemy threw another grenade. Observing the grenade land dangerously close to his companion, First Lieutenant Webb simultaneously fired his weapon at the enemy, pushed the Marine away from the grenade, and shielded him from the explosion with his own body. Although sustaining painful fragmentation wounds from the explosion, he managed to throw a grenade into the aperture and completely destroy the remaining bunker. By his courage, aggressive leadership, and selfless devotion to duty, First Lieutenant Webb upheld the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and of the United States Naval Service.

Completely Missing the Point

George Takei, the actor most famous for having been Mr. Sulu, made a comment to the effect that Justice Thomas was a "clown in blackface." This occasioned some comment, as you might imagine. Mr. Takei has put out a statement on the subject.

A few fans have written wondering whether I intended to utter a racist remark by referring to Justice Thomas as a "clown in blackface."

"Blackface" is a lesser known theatrical term for a white actor who blackens his face to play a black buffoon. In traditional theater lingo, and in my view and intent, that is not racist. It is instead part of a racist history in this country.

I feel Justice Thomas has abdicated and abandoned his African American heritage by claiming slavery did not strip dignity from human beings. He made a similar remark about the Japanese American internment, of which I am a survivor. A sitting Justice of the Supreme Court ought to know better.

I have expressed my full thoughts on the matter here.

I'll leave it to others to decide whether "blackface" is, as he suggests, not a racist term in this context. (Whether it is "a lesser known theatrical term" as well.)

What strikes me as more important is that he completely misses Justice Thomas' point. What does it mean to say that the slave's dignity is not harmed by the chains? It is to say that the dignity of the human soul is a high thing, so high as to be beyond the grasp of tyrants. It is to say that all the human efforts to reduce the dignity of the slaves were wasted, were foolish as much as they were wrong.

Perhaps human dignity can be surrendered, but on this account it can never be stolen. It could, perhaps, be laid down. It cannot be taken away.

That is a very positive message and a very traditional one in the Christian church, which believes the Divinely-crafted soul is the seat of dignity. Such a faith in a human dignity that could not be destroyed was the deadly message of Christianity to the slaver, the consolation of the slave, the harbinger of the abolitionist. I'm surprised to find an educated man who is deaf to Justice Thomas' message.

War on Women! Part II (For Today)

The Secretary of the Navy has announced today that woman Marines and sailors will have 18 weeks of maternity leave, bringing the US Navy in line with Europe.

"In the Navy and the Marine Corps, we are continually looking for ways to recruit and retain the best people," Mabus said. "We have incredibly talented women who want to serve, and they also want to be mothers and have the time to fulfill that important role the right way. We can do that for them. Meaningful maternity leave when it matters most is one of the best ways that we can support the women who serve our county. This flexibility is an investment in our people and our Services, and a safeguard against losing skilled service members."

Paternity leave? Ten days. And that's only since 2008: before that, "paternity" was just a form of lawsuit for the Navy.

UPDATE: This policy will be even more fun once we get those new transgender rules in place.