Paradoxically, Culture Is Preserved By Impurity

I seldom speak Bangla around other Bangla speakers.

The reason for this is quite simple. I've been exposed to the Bengali language for more than a decade now. I know far more Bangla than people realize, and more importantly, when I choose to use a word, I know I'm using the right word and pronouncing it accurately enough that a reasonable person should be able to understand despite my accent. Despite this, however, every time I use a Bangla word with a Bengali speaker, they make a big production of saying, "Whaaaaat???"

At first, I thought it was my problem. Perhaps I used the wrong word, or pronounced the correct word very badly. As time went on, though, I realized that I was doing just fine. So, I tried a new approach: when people ask me, "Whaaaaat???" I now say nothing and simply wait. Invariably, without my even so much as hinting at what I had just said, my interlocutors suddenly, magically decide they know what I said.

How can I interpret this? One interpretation is that they're just being hard on me in an effort to get me to improve my Bangla. If so, their approach isn't working; rather than improving my Bangla, I'm simply discouraged from speaking. This brings me to a second interpretation: they don't really want me to speak Bangla.

Whatever the true interpretation might be, the fact of the matter is that Bangladesh is a small country, the greater Bengal region is not all that much bigger, and no one outside of Bengalis themselves speak Bangla. As the world's languages consolidate to only a handful, Bangla is becoming an increasingly irrelevant language on the international stage. When the language goes, so too will important Bengali cultural artifacts like poetry, music, and art; to say nothing of Bengali history and philosophy. Language is the doorway to culture. If that doorway remains tightly shut, outsiders will never be able to experience Bengali culture.

This closed-door approach to language might seem protective from an insider's perspective. Bangladeshis did, after all, fight a literal war to protect their language. I can understand how important the language is from a cultural perspective. Thus, I see why Bangla is a language worth saving from extinction.

The only question is: Is this the right way to save a language?

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English is, for all intents and purposes, the language of the world. Everyone knows English. Where business is to be conducted, it is conducted in English. Where politics is to be done, it is done in English. Peppering one's speech with English words and phrases is very much a status symbol or a power play in many cultures today. All the best music and movies are English-language music and films. How did English, of all languages, become the de facto language of the world?

While I'm sure the British Empire and the 20th Century rise of the United States as an economic power had a hand in this, it's not sufficient to explain the whole story. There must be a better explanation. Well, here's a theory...

Although English does have rules, everyone breaks those rules and nobody cares. For many, breaking the rules of the English language is expressive of their individual cultures. Every part of the English-speaking world has some unintelligible version of English, and for the most part, English speakers don't care. Nobody gets upset at a Southerner speaking like a Southerner. Nobody cares when a Newfie says Newfie things. Nobody bursts a vein upon hearing Caribbeans speak like Caribbeans. For the most part, we English speakers find such regionalisms charming or quaint.

Likewise, when immigrants speak English poorly, nobody really cares. It's true that some people get mad about the fact that some immigrants don't bother to learn English, but nobody gets mad when an immigrant makes a good, solid effort at speaking the language, no matter how poorly they speak it. I just saw an old European lady make conversation with the cashier in the grocery store yesterday. Was she Russian? Hungarian? I don't know. I couldn't hardly make out what she was saying. But, between the two of them, the cashier and the old lady made themselves understood and had a pleasant exchange. This is emblematic of all such exchanges I've ever encountered.

In short, English-speakers cut each other serious slack when it comes to speaking English. Only a real jerk corrects someone else's speech in the middle of talking to them. The rest of us just let things slide.

The impact of this is that it enables new English-speakers to learn the language in the context of safety. They can screw up, because no one bites their head off for screwing up. It's not like France, where people will stop talking to you if you botch your French. In the English-speaking world, people are allowed to make mistakes with the language. It's fine.

This encourages people to learn and practice English.

Does it come at a cost? Yes. The cost is that English isn't a very pure language. We get our vocabulary from virtually every other language on Earth, we add new slang terms to the dictionary every year, most of us have really noticeably bad grammar, and our best cultural output tends to be pop music and pop film, rather than, you know, LITERATURE.

In short, we give up the purity of our language, but what we get is pervasiveness. English is everywhere precisely because we don't invest a lot of energy gatekeeping people about what's allowed in the language. We overlook people's mistakes and we readily allow outside influence into our mother tongue.

Not so with Bangla.

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Interestingly enough, there are aspects of English-speaking culture that are incredibly closed. The two that come most readily to mind are: (1) British aristocracy and (2) American conservative, white, male-centric culture. Is it any surprise that these are the two cultural artifacts of the English-speaking world that are dying off the quickest and most completely in today's world?

Both of these micro-cultures are closed to outsiders. Both fiercely protect their special in-group language. Both have steep barriers to entry. And both are quickly becoming culturally irrelevant.

Now, whether you think this irrelevance is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of opinion, and quite beside the point. The real point is simply that it is no surprise that the most closed aspects of any culture are the ones that eventually disappear from the face of the Earth. If you want to preserve your culture, you have to open it up to outside influence. This definitely means that your culture will change noticeably; and maybe you don't want that. But what's worse -- a culture that changes over time, but lasts forever; or a culture that remains perfectly pristine, but disappears?

Those who wish for their culture to be preserved should take notice of the fact that only by accepting outside influence can a culture persist. Otherwise, it simply disappears. This is natural, isn't it? Those who want to shut outsiders out of the culture must accept that the culture will only appeal to an increasingly small number of people, all the way to oblivion. You may have wanted the outsiders to stay out, but if you don't let them in, there will be nothing left to  preserve.

Funnily enough, the Hutterites learned this lesson very well. Their numbers and gene pools shrunk so drastically that they were forced to recruit outsiders, famously offering them lucrative land deals in order to join the colonies. As far as I know, that practice is still going on. It has to, otherwise Hutterites, too, will disappear.

Cultures only survive if they indiscriminately accept outsiders.

Take The Time To Notice Your Loved Ones' Accomplishments

An ex-colleague of mine once told me that, when he had his first child, he created a spreadsheet that charted his son's first words. He listed each new word his young son learned, and the date on which it was observed. Then, after some time, he created a graph with time on the x-axis and the count of known words on the y-axis. He said it was interesting to see the line. It was roughly "exponential" in shape.

(I guess I should say that the line was convex and increasing. I have no idea whether it truly resembled an exponential function, and likely neither did my coworker. Hurray for pedantry.)

When you learn Bangla, it can be hard to learn all the different written verb conjugations that exist, and then to learn all the different spoken verb conjugations. Written and spoken conjugations in Bangla all line up one-to-one, but they're different. Khaisi is a different word than kheyechhi, even though they mean the same thing. One you'll only ever experience in written form, and the other you'll only ever experience in spoken form. Written and spoken conjugations each have their own rules, but luckily they both do have rules, and the rules can be learned and applied. The hard part is figuring out what the rules are. Once you know the rules, though, it's no more difficult to conjugate khawa than it is to conjugate kora or any other verb.

It took me about six months of daily practice to get good enough at playing chords on a guitar that I could learn and strum any old pop song I wanted to. That first six months was excruciating. My fingers hurt, and it wasn't any fun trying to sing and play a song because there was a large gap between the strumming of each new chord, as my fingers fumbled for the correct position. That, too, if I didn't have to look up how to play the chord in a book or chart! Memorizing a chordal lexicon and then training your hands to play each chord via muscle memory fast enough to be able to play a song on-tempo is a difficult and slow-going process on the guitar. But it's about six months of work. After that, the number of songs a person can learn increases at an increasing rate.

So, I think it's safe to say that the concepts described above generalize. The hardest part of learning anything is learning the fundamentals. Once you know them, applying them is a relatively straight-forward process. It takes more time to learn and understand the fundamentals than it does to apply the fundamentals to new concepts, so our rate of learning will tend to increase over time. When we know nothing, the learning is slow; when we know a little more, the learning comes much easier.

Of course, learning to communicate, learning to speak a new language, and learning to play a new instrument are activities that all involve much more than the fundamentals. There are subtleties and implications. There are inferences that must be made. There are greater levels of accomplishment to be had. Even though we learn at an increasing rate as time goes on, there are perhaps an infinite number of concepts leading up to mastery, if mastery is even possible. And thus, after a time, our additional accomplishments become less noticeable to outsiders even if we're learning more now than ever before.

This morning, my daughter correctly guessed how to spell the word "habitat." She's four years old, so this is somewhat impressive. She can read, and that was impressive when it finally happened. She knows some good words, words beyond what the average four-year-old knows, among which I count the word "habitat;" and her having a good vocabulary is impressive to me. Still, it doesn't elicit the same kind of emotional reaction in me the way it did when I heard her say "Dada" for the first time. That's not because it isn't equally as impressive, it's just because hearing a child's first word is a leap into interpersonal communication, whereas hearing a young child spell the word "habitat" is a fully anticipated outcome of her having been taught the phonic principles of reading.

Ironically, her spelling "habitat" is probably more impressive on objective terms, even though it didn't rock my world quite the same way. She spoke her first word at about an "age-appropriate" time. It was a developmental milestone that she crossed at roughly the time the average parent might expect. By contrast, she learned to read earlier than average, and I don't know any other four-year-old who knows the word "habitat," much less knows how to read it or spell it.

So, in fact, I am more impressed that she did this today, but it requires some introspection on my part to fully appreciate it. That got me thinking: How many other things will she learn today that would impress me this much, if I but merely took the time to think about it for a second?

I'm not writing this to brag to the world about cool stuff my daughter did. The lesson to be learned here is that I think we should occasionally take the time to appreciate the remarkable things our friends and loved ones do. We don't always notice what's going on. We don't always take the time to consider how impressive it is that they've managed to accomplish what they have. We're naturally impressed when people learn a new set of fundamentals, but after that, we stop paying attention. It becomes harder and harder to differentiate between a person's being able to play The Entertainer and The Moonlight Sonata, except to people familiar with piano-playing. But we don't have to be familiar with piano playing if we merely take the time to follow along with our loved ones as they work through their own sets of accomplishments.

So, the bottom line here is to take that time. Recognize what your loved ones have done. They'll amaze you, if you're paying attention!

Cowen On Happiness And The Internet

Tyler Cowen has a piece worth reading in Bloomberg about how the internet influences human happiness. His basic idea is that the internet incentivizes us to seek momentary happiness at the expense of long-term memory formation. That is, the internet tempts us to waste many hours scrolling through social media and cat videos when we ought to be spending those hours on quality time with friends, family, the community, and so on:

Consider the time I spend on Twitter. I can take a peek and have some fun pretty much anytime I want, and for free. Yet never do I think that I will someday look back and reminisce about all that time I spent scrolling through tweets.

 In contrast, I look back fondly on my time in high school, and how my friends used to ride bikes to each other’s homes to hang out and listen to record albums. I’m no longer sure how much fun it was at the time, or even if that matters — the glorious memories are in place. The same is true for the good travel experiences I have had, even (especially?) if at the time they were quite stressful or simply involved a lot of tedious legwork.

I have read other critiques of the internet and social media in the past, and one set of commentary that always arises in response to the critiques is this: Mostly, it's Baby Boomers and old people who struggle with social media use. Young people have no such problem. That response always rang hollow for me, but reading Cowen's piece, it finally sunk in. Maybe there's something to that criticism, after all.

For example, Cowen writes, "Online life is inducing us to invest less in our memories and long-term sense of satisfaction. It is pretty obvious from human behavior that, right now, the internet is doing more to boost short-term pleasures."

This is written from the perspective of a man who mainly uses the internet for the purposes of Twitter, blogging, and research. What's missing from this perspective are the opinions of those who use the internet to keep photo albums of all their most treasured memories. Or, how about people like me, who use the internet as a way to log exercise? Cowen actually uses exercise in his article as an example of long-term memory formation, but I just blogged the other day about how the internet and social media has inspired me to train harder than I have in years. That effect is real.

Long-time readers of Stationary Waves will even recall that I used the internet to help teach myself Bangla, and just yesterday, I started Hindi lessons on Duolingo. None of this would have been possible without the internet, of course, and all of it represents long-term undertakings toward the formation of memories and skills that can potentially last a lifetime.

Throughout the Nineties (for those of you who don't remember), we were frequently told that the Information Age was bringing with it untold economic growth, that that growth was real output, and that the world was changing in ways we were only beginning to understand. I'm not sure I believed it back then, but I do believe it now. More to today's point, though, is the fact that all this growth came with an absolutely enormous consumer surplus in the form of free maps, crowd-sourced information, product reviews, and so on. We have access to so much of the world's information now, without having to go somewhere and look it up, that the benefit to each individual is incalculable.

But I don't think Tyler Cowen is the kind of person who would attempt to learn a new language on the internet or take on a half marathon training schedule simply because it came pre-programmed into his smart watch's app. Not that he ought to be that kind of person, just that he isn't. Someone who doesn't use the internet in ways that facilitate long-term projects, someone who uses the internet mainly to "tweet," is bound to underestimate the internet's contribution to long-term happiness. I don't think a younger writer would have made the same mistake.

A Blue Valentine To Technology

Many years ago, I spent much of my time vying for the attention of a very lovely young woman. I showered her with gifts. I floated gently behind her on a cloud of euphoria the likes of which I had never experienced before. Willingly and ambitiously, I committed to remolding my weaknesses until I had transformed into a better version of myself in a daring plan to win her heart and build a perfect life together, filled with the promise of limitless possibilities. 

Young love is a language all its own, and we both proved to be multilingual. But it wasn’t just romance. I mean, she and I really were multilingual! I spoke English and Spanish, and dabbled in French. She spoke English and Bangla, and dabbled in many others. Our overlap was English, it was the language we shared, and thus became the language that defined our love affair. This didn’t seem right to me, though. In a truly epic love affair, I thought to myself, I’d speak her native tongue, too. Thus it happened that I started teaching myself Bangla.

The passion of youth is filled with optimism and hope, for despite there being no useful book or class for learning Bangla, I was certain it would be possible to master it. I searched the web deeply and uncovered a few important links. Then, with the help of my sweet paramour, I built my knowledge of Bangla from the ground up, one word at a time.

I leveraged Google’s technology for this. With their transliteration tool and their documents platform, I was able to achieve significant success in my undertaking, building language skills that would prove to be useful for a lifetime, a genuine lifetime. My heart swelled and the love between the young woman and I grew ever deeper. So, too, grew my love for the technology that made this possible.

Inevitably, however, the passion of young love fades. No, don’t worry: the young lady stuck with me. It’s my love affair with technology that soured over the years. Technology is the one that got away. She broke my heart. It’s a terrible tale.

Google swept me off my feet back then. It gave me the tools – free tools – with which to build a blossoming love affair into a lifelong romance; it helped me learn something that no teacher was available to teach me: a rare-to-North-America language that almost no one learns if they are not raised in Bangladesh. In Blogger, it gave me a platform with which to share my knowledge and perhaps acquire more through social networking. My use of Blogger soon opened doors to new opportunities in the form of occasional articles written for other websites. The future was unfolding her wings and flying me into the heart of the sun.

Then one day technology flew me to an entirely new high. My cell phone buzzed while I was driving. I glanced at the screen and saw a notification. I was headed straight for a traffic jam. That’s a useful alert, but Google took this even a step further: it automatically offered an alternative route, even though I wasn’t using the GPS system. That’s the power of technology working for me.

By god, it didn’t stop there! Soon all sorts of interesting and useful predictive technology was being used to improve my life. Google offered me reminders of things I had never expressly asked to be reminded of – and those reminders were just what I needed. I was getting updates on my package shipments. I was getting updates on, not only my own personal air flights, but also those of my friends and family members. This information was being funneled to me through my smart phone. I didn’t have to go searching for it, it was right there on my home screen.

Once I finally warmed up to this, I started taking it as far as it would go. I reveled in the sweet possibilities of what I had been offered. I voice-controlled Google into setting reminders for myself, which would translate into alarms on my phone. I created shopping lists, shared them with friends. I created a fillable online form that could track and predict my blood glucose levels. Everything was moving in the same wonderful direction. With a simple digital assistant, an artificial intelligence tucked into my smart phone, provided to me as a free feature on top of all the other things a smart phone “really” does, I was expanding my ability to live the good life. Technology and I really could build a future together.

It was beautiful.

And then it was gone.

As is so often the case for these relationships, I’m not exactly sure when it happened. The love faded gradually as all of that wonderful functionality disappeared, replaced with news stories and monetization. And boredom.

The truth is, I hadn’t really even noticed what I’d been missing until today, when I read an article about it at Computer World. “Google Now” fluttered away lethargically, like a lover who simply loses interest and grows cold. The passion of our earlier relationship had disappeared. Eventually I forgot that Google Now was even around. It took a wake-up call in the form of that Computer World article to remind me what I had lost, and what I had lost was truly wonderful.

Shuffling past the Amazon devices that now control my light bulbs, I felt a pang. Years ago, what Google and other technology firms were building was something that could have made for a genuinely epic marriage of human needs and algorithmic supplementation. Our mere acquainting ourselves with one another was enough to inspire a relationship between us that soon became something new unto itself. My relationship to technology wasn’t just that of a man and a computer in his pocket. I learned languages, improved my health, shortened my daily commute, made new friends. Every marriage should be what this was.

And now? Sure enough, I can voice-control my lightbulbs. I can set reminders and access my calendar. I can read a curated list of recent headlines. I do all this through sundry apps, none of which are powerful to offer me the future I had imagined, all of which are trying to monetize my interaction with it.

But what really hurts is the lost sense of limitless possibilities that I once had. If I had met my wife last year, I doubt I would ever have thought to leverage Google’s applications to teach myself a new language. I certainly wouldn’t have created my own blood glucose predictive analysis. Granted, I can hack together a lot of what I want to do with a combination of clunky apps. If I keep one eye occasionally dialed into my GPS system, I can watch for bad traffic; but I don’t get automatic notifications about it anymore, for example. And while I enjoy what Alexa can do for me, her user interface is slow and complicated compared to the old “Google Cards” interface.

In short, the romance is gone. I now look at the so-called Internet of Things and think to myself, why on earth do I need my refrigerator to me “smart?” A few years ago, I would have guessed that I’d one day live in a world in which a smart refrigerator could assemble my favorite ingredients before I even wake up. That really would be something. But algorithmic temperature control is definitely not worth dinner and movie, much less the hundreds of dollars extra I’d have to spend to buy the algorithm. My smart watch, a beautiful thing, has all the sensors required to predict my VO2 max. It doesn’t do it, though. Garmin reserves that particular algorithm for customers who buy one of their more expensive watches, despite the fact that this is a simple software operation. They’re withholding smart services from me that they could offer me, but don’t.

So this is the crushing weight of the end of a love affair. This is the moment, years after that sweet initial romance period, where I have discovered that my beloved was tantalizing me with gifts I would have to beg for – or pay for – later on; that every new desire in my affair with technology has become quid-pro-quo. I see in others pale and partial glimpses of the fire that engulfed me during the early years, whether it’s Alexa’s shopping lists or Android Auto’s voice-texting service; but these are only bits and pieces of what I thought I was getting. All these years later, we’re both tired of trying so damn hard. The future isn’t possibilities, it’s a few fond tools that can be called upon when we’re both willing to think about it at the same time. The eagerness to please, the dream we both once shared, is like a miasma that hangs in the periphery behind me.

Gradually and silently, I’ve admitted that, when it comes to technology, I hoped for more than I ended up with, and I dream that someone out there might come along with, if not the same functionality technology used to promise us all, at least that same sense of hope.

Mises Versus Rothbard On Mathematics and Economics

Within the community of adherent to the "Austrian school" of economic thought, there exists certain members of the community who are willing to accept only the Rothbardian conception of things. Unfortunately for all of us, these folks believe that Rothbard is the only post-Mises economist whose theories accurately capture, modernize, and improve upon the Misesian praxeological tradition. They will not tolerate any other point of view. They adhere to this point of view with a rabid dogmatism better befitting a religious fervor than an intellectual pursuit.

They also happen to be among the most vocal members of the Austrian school community. Consequently, there is a widespread idea that Rothbard's views are the same as or are improvements upon Mises' views, and that all other notions within the school are either wrong, "confused" (to use a term common among a particularly noteworthy Austrian school adherent), or bad in some way.

Now, it's one thing to believe the above, state the position, and defend it intellectually and civilly. It's quite another thing to shout down all opposition, to publicly berate those holding opposing viewpoints, and to be so intolerant to questioning that the rest of us get turned off to the conversation long before any truth presents itself.

In the following blog post, I will highlight one example of Rothbard's views being a rather paler send-up of Misesian praxeology, to the point of being - in my opinion - extremely mistaken, wrong, confused, and bad. In doing so, my hope is to break down some of the religious reverence some hold over Rothbard's views.

Why? Because no intellectual pursuit can ever hope to be advanced if the assumption is that it was fully and perfectly developed in 1959. If Rothbard was correct about everything and it's unacceptable to question him, then we are no longer talking about a study or a discipline, we're talking about a religion or a cult. (Yep, I said it. A cult. Pretty rich, if you ask me.)

Rothbard On Mathematics In Economics
Murray Rothbard, supposedly the great palladin of Austrian school economics and its last great innovator, rejected all forms of mathematics in economics. However, in saying so, I'm not really doing justice to complete and utter disdain Rothbard held for not just mathematical economic models, but even using mathematical notation to express logical ideas.

In Man, Economy, and State, Rothbard writes (footnotes eliminated for brevity):

The suggestion has been made that, since praxeology and economics are logical chains of reasoning based on a few universally known prem­ises, to be really scientific it should be elaborated according to the symbolic notations of mathematical logic. This represents a curious misconception of the role of mathematical logic, or “logistics.” In the first place, it is the great quality of verbal propositions that each one is meaningful. On the other hand, algebraic and logical symbols, as used in logistics, are not in themselves meaningful. Praxeology asserts the action axiom as true, and from this (together with a few empirical axioms—such as the existence of a variety of resources and individuals) are deduced, by the rules of logical inference, all the propositions of economics, each one of which is verbal and meaningful. If the logistic array of symbols were used, each proposition would not be meaningful. Logistics, therefore, is far more suited to the physical sciences, where, in contrast to the science of human action, the con­clusions rather than the axioms are known. In the physical sciences, the premises are only hypothetical, and logical deductions are made from them. In these cases, there is no purpose in having meaningful propositions at each step of the way, and therefore symbolic and mathematical language is more useful.

It is difficult to see where in this paragraph Rothbard made any correct statement about mathematical logic.

First, there is Rothbard's claim that the notation of formalized, mathematical logic is not in itself meaningful, whereas verbal statements are inherently (i.e. "in themselves") meaningful. For Rothbard to simply leave these claims standing without proving them is to have failed at the requirements of a praxeologist. One cannot simply state that one's own method is inherently meaningful while the method of one's contemporaries is not. One must prove it, or at least provide a compelling argument why this is so.

So, I will counter with the following argument:

• Rothbard claims that all verbal propositions are inherently meaningful.
• If I can establish one verbal proposition that is not inherently meaninful, I will have demonstrated that Rothbard was wrong.
• The following proposition is not inherently meaningful: If this sentence is true, Rothbard was an Objectivist.[Note: This is an example of Curry's Paradox. For further discussion regarding the meaninglessness of paradoxes, see this Stationary Waves post.]
• Therefore, Rothbard was wrong.

The reader may find it particularly pedantic to disprove Rothbard in this way, but I find it important to use this particular line of reasoning, since it is the only one Rothbard himself thought valid.

As to the allegation that the symbols of mathematical logic "are not in themselves meaningful," one could make the same claim about letters of the alphabet. That is, in the philosophy of language, we generally accept that words have specific definitions. That Om means "peace" in Hindi and "mango" in Bangla is a fact that essentially boils down to the fact that one community of people agrees that the associated noise means one thing, while the other community agrees that it means another thing. That is, the sound Om is not in itself meaningful, and is in fact quite meaningless in English.

But Rothbard isn't merely suggesting that mathematical logic clouds the issue. In fact, he states in the above quote that "If the logistic array of symbols were used, each proposition would not be meaningful." In Rothbard's view, merely using mathematical logic notation to express an idea at all is "not meaningful."

We may as well argue that the English language is the only "meaningful" way to engage in dialectics. Who would ever make such a claim?

To this absurdity, Rothbard offers only one defense:

Simply to develop economics verbally, then to translate into logistic symbols, and finally to retranslate the propositions back into English, makes no sense and violates the fundamental scientific principle of Occam’s razor, which calls for the greatest possible simplicity in sci­ence and the avoidance of unnecessary multiplication of entities or processes.

Rothbard calls the expression of ideas in a language other than verbal exposition a violation of Occam's razor (which, by the way, is hardly a law). By that line of reasoning, Human Action violates Occam's razor by virtue of its being a re-worked English-language version of Mises' Nationalokonomie, especially if read by a native English speaker who must translate the German text into English-based thoughts in order to understand them. Indeed, Man, Economy, and State itself began as an update to Human Action and could likewise be dismissed as a violation of Occam's razor.

But this is ridiculous!

Mises On Mathematics in Economics
The question arises, is this really praxeology in the Misesian tradition? Did Mises feel this way about mathematical economics? Some say yes. Let's take a look at what Mises did say.

In Human Action, he writes:

The mathematical method must be rejected not only on account of its barrenness. It is an entirely vicious method, starting from false assumptions and leading to fallacious inferences. Its syllogisms are not only sterile; they divert the mind from the study of the real problems and distort the relations between the various phenomena.

This is from a section of the book entitled "Logical Catallactics Versus Mathematical Catallactics." While this is a damning passage indeed, right away we notice that Mises is not attacking the use of the mathematical expression of ideas, but rather the mathematical method as it pertains to solving economic problems.

In other words, Mises would never childishly attack mathematical expression as being "inherently meaningless." Mises had great respect for mathematics and science. He simply felt that logical catallactics were a more appropriate methodology than mathematical catallactics.

And please note: Mises makes no reference to verbal logic. This is important because the use of mathematical logic is still an example of logical catallactics. This fact must be underscored several times over. The particular language used to express logical ideas does not impact the validity or "meaningfulness" of the logic itself. Whether we notate our dialectics using the Queen's English, mathematical notation, or street Bangla, we may freely engage in logical catallactics so long as we follow a logical chain.

Mises found three methodological problems with mathematical catallactics. The first problem was the use of econometrics as a tool of economic theory. As Mises put it:

Statistics is a method for the presentation of historical facts concerning prices and other relevant data of human action. It is not economics and cannot produce economic theorems and theories.

He further states that "The arrangement of various price data in groups and the computation of averages are guided by theoretical deliberations which are logically and temporally antecedent." In other words, a theory must be developed prior to the application of a statistical model.

This, however, is a far cry from condemning the use of mathematical symbols at all, as Rothbard did.

Mises' second objection to mathematical economic theory was rather complex, but I shall try to summarize it succinctly. First, Mises remarks that supply and demand equations implicitly assume the existence of money to arrive at a particular price or cost. One objection to this is that it ignores the case of non-monetary transactions and barter. But this first objection is merely a lead-in to a greater problem with mathematical economics, which is the (mathematical) assumption of (mathematical) continuity:

On the other hand prices--if this term is applicable at all to exchange ratios determined by barter--are the enumeration of quantities of various goods against which the "seller" can exchange a definite supply. The goods which are referred to in such "prices" are not the same to which the "costs" refer. A comparison of such prices in kind and costs in kind is not feasible.

Note that again this is not a problem with the notation of mathematical logic. Continuity is an assumption of calculus functions. The problem is not the symbolism used, but rather the theoretical assumptions.

Mises' third objection to mathematical economics is unique only to those mathematical economists who prefer to explore mathematical equations outside the particular context of economic theory:

The characteristic mark of this third group is that they are openly and consciously intent upon solving catallactic problems without any reference to the market process. Their ideal is to construct an economic theory according to the pattern of mechanics. They again and again resort to analogies with classical mechanics which in their opinion is the unique and absolute model of scientific inquiry. There is no need to explain again why this analogy is superficial and misleading and in what respects purposive human action radically differs from motion, the subject matter of mechanics. It is enough to stress one point, viz., the practical significance of the differential equations in both fields.

Conclusion
Thus, we see a large discrepancy between the views of Rothbard and those of Mises with respect to mathematical economics. While both economists were critical of mathematical analysis in the context of economics, Mises' objections were methodological, while Rothbard felt that mathematical notation itself is inherently meaningless.

It is important to stress this difference because Mises' views were epistemological in nature. He felt that mathematical models were inappropriate for tackling the abstract problems of economics.  Rothbard did not even address this point, but rather simply dismissed mathematical logic notation because he himself felt it was meaningless.

It is possible to come to the correct conclusion for the wrong reasons. Rothbard correctly adhered to a logical catallactic methodology, as well he should have. Yet, he quite incorrectly chose this methodology only because he himself didn't understand the meaning of mathematical symbols.

It is akin to claiming that the world is round based on the notion that "flat is a meaningless concept."

There are two important takeaways from this discussion:

1. This is one point of many on which Rothbard's views are wildly and importantly different from Mises' views. That is, Rothbard and Mises were not engaged in the same reasoning. Rothbard's work is not a "continuation" of Mises' work, nor is it in any way an "improvement" upon it.
2. This is one point of many on which Rothbard was not just wrong, but ridiculously wrong.

This second point is especially important because if we do not note important shortcomings in the theoretical works of famous Austrian school economists, the praxeological tradition will evaporate into the haze of cultish dogma.

The Sub-Continent's Influence Is Spreading

Although they don't explicitly say so, The Color Run - which I discovered this afternoon - shares obvious similarities with Holi, and I would guess come from a similar place. The degree of direct influence will perhaps remain a mystery.

Seriously, Bangladesh?

The Financial Express, a Bangladeshi online newspaper reports that the government of Bangladesh will no longer accept Rohingya refugees fleeing from violence in Burma:

"Our stand is clear; no more Myanmar refugees will be allowed to enter the country at the moment, as we are already hosting tens of thousands of Rohingyas who had entered Bangladesh over the past decades," said earlier a senior official of the ministry of foreign affairs (MoFA).

Some 10 boats with some 500 Rohingyas, including women, children and elderly people, some of whom also injured, were seen floating on the Naf river along Teknaf border town on Tuesday, according to witnesses.

So, over the span of multiple decades, a persecuted minority has fled to Bangladesh, and for that reason, those currently attempting to save their own lives (just ten boatloads of them, containing the equivalent of a third of the number of students at my former high school) are not to be allowed in the country.

I am sensitive to the limited amount of space in the already-over-populated Bangladesh, but to turn away refugees of war is utterly incomprehensible to me. These people aren't seeking anything more than the ability to cross an imaginary line separating them from people who are no more different from them than their own countrymen are.

This seems particularly unconscionable, considering Bangladesh's own history of refugees during the Liberation War and prior (among which we may count economic Nobel laureate Amartya Sen one of the many great world citizens who were there).

I cannot help but wonder, what on Earth are they thinking?

What Is The Point?

Bangla Word of the Day:
লাভ: [labh] n. - Point, purpose, etc.


Note that there is no inherent vowel sound after the "bh" consonant at the end of the word. Bangalis will often say "Labh ki?" which means, "What's the point?" It has the same connotation that it  has in English, meaning that it is frequently used as an expression of exasperation or hopelessness. While it's not a particularly optimistic thing to say, it's still a pretty handy phrase. 


No Really, What Is The Point?
Yesterday, I spent some time discussing the virtues of competition and self-improvement. In that post, I wrote:

This isn't because a person is always inadequate and needs to reach a "better place." Fitness gurus, coaches, self-help advisers and others often get this one wrong. It's not because your life sucks that you want your life to be better. If a person tries and tries and never improves, that person isn't a "failure," and I wouldn't automatically assume that such a person is unhappy or dissatisfied.

In hindsight, I realize that I may have glossed over the most important aspect of the matter, for this paragraph as a stand-alone statement is wholly unsatisfying.


So the question is posed: Why should we chase these dreams of self-improvement? Really, why should we undertake all this effort to try to make ourselves better people rather than simply accepting ourselves as we are living our lives accordingly? If you're not going to win a race, what is the point of trying to be competitive? If you're not going to be a rock star, why write songs and arrange for live performances? Why not just be happy with what life has given you and learn to exist as such?


In short, why bother?


It's a challenging question, one that I will attempt to answer here, at least partially.


External Influences On Self-Improvement
We in North American culture tend to focus - negatively - on the negative influences driving us to attempt to "fix ourselves." We have developed all sorts of epithets for these influences: "the rat-race," "our image-obsessed culture," "consumerism," "keeping up with the Joneses," and so on. Our communities both large and small exert an enormous amount of pressure on us to conform and fit in with the prevailing standards of the day.


I think we intuitively and universally know such pressures to be an unequivocal negative. None of us should feel like failures if we don't have a nice car like the family down the street, or as big a house, or as trim a waistline, or as high an income, or as high a standing in the community. People waste whole lifetimes chasing social status and seeking approval from others.


The reason this is a losing game is that no matter how much stuff you acquire, no matter how much status you have among your fellow men, there will always be critics trying to chop you back down to size. Even the epithets I mentioned two paragraphs ago were developed to try to diminish those people who have excelled the most at acquiring possessions, looking beautiful, having neat stuff, and earning lots of money.


If you're trying to please all these people, you just can't win.


But there are other external influences out there, too - positive ones.


Take for example the man driven to earn fabulous riches so that he can guarantee that his children have every convenience throughout their lifetimes. A very productive person in a free society can often earn so much wealth that his/her children and even grandchildren can live comfortably throughout their whole lives. Such an endeavor is a labor of love, and none of us could reasonably call this person's motives into question.


This is especially true since we are all so influenced, even if to a lesser degree. Our desire to leave our children with a better chance than we had is one of the most natural and fundamental of desires. Perhaps it is not even unique to human beings alone.


So this is one external influence on self-improvement. Another example might be an overweight parent or family member who successfully turns his/her health around in order to inspire his/her family not to make the same mistake. YouTube is replete with videos of amazing transformations, often posted by the very family members who were intended to be inspired. 


We've all seen the reality TV shows, showing people who take on unique and difficult challenges so that they can demonstrate to their friends and family that amazing things are possible in life if we set our sights on achieving them. 


Again, such motives are fundamentally external in nature. The driving force is not the person improving and achieving, but an intended spectator. I am not so sure that any of us would suggest this kind of external motivation is negative. But what is the difference between the "negative" and the "positive" external influences?


I would argue that the fundamental difference is specificity. 


If you spend your time trying to please a nebulous mass of people - a "community" or "people in general," for example - then you cannot hope to succeed, because there is always some fraction of any given population who want to see the exact opposite of what you intend to do. For everyone who will appreciate that you earned a raise, there is someone who will resent you or criticize your "materialistic" goals.


On the other hand, if you identify particular individuals whose approval you would like to win for noble reasons - your children, so that they may live a better life, or recipients of a local charity that matters to you, for example - then suddenly the goal is entirely within your reach.


You can't please everyone, but you can please someone. If that "someone" happens to matter a great deal to you and is worth pleasing, then such an external influence can be a powerful motivational factor that can inspire you to achieving great things.


Internal Influences on Self-Improvement
Of course, you can also waste a lifetime trying to win the approval of a loved one, too. A great many of us still suffer from the demons of our childhood, in which we feel we could never live up to the expectations of a few people we admired, from which we desperately wanted approval. If you realize that you may not ever get that approval - or even if you don't - you'll need more to keep you going in life than the approval of others. 


That is to say, external factors are important, but insufficient. Human satisfaction requires our own internal sense of worth. We need some internal influences to work their magic on us.


Here's where things get dicey. Just as we see that many external influences are highly negative, so our internal motivations can be similarly dangerous. An unattainable desire for beauty can lead a person toward many different kinds of personal deformity (plastic surgery, eating disorders, and the like). An overwhelming appetite for the finer things in life can take us down the slippery slope of intemperate greed. A quest for glory can become an unquenchable thirst for power.


Because we all spend so much time in our heads, it is far too easy to see the problems associated with personal motivations toward greatness. Our moral and ethical systems reinforce the level of importance we attach to these problems, too. Nearly all the world's major religions vehemently condemn "greed" and "vanity," and declare that we should not waste our time on such "worldly" endeavors, but should double up our efforts with respect to the external influences on self-improvement.


But as we saw above, returning to an externally focused sense of motivation is not a panacea. There are problems with relying too much on such things.


The fact of the matter is, you need some positive internal influences to maintain your mental health, and so I repeat: human satisfaction requires our own internal sense of worth.


Identifying Your Values
One of my favorite Ayn Rand quotes is this one: 

Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.

I cannot seem to source it. It has been floating around on the internet for a long time, and although I have read similar quotes throughout her work, I've never come across this one in writing. There is a wealth of wisdom in this quote, so I'd like to break it down into its most important concepts.

1. Humans deserve to be happy. You may not have met anyone who deliberately suffers because that person believes that only suffering is noble, but I have met plenty such people. It is sad, because these people often never come to terms with the fact that happiness is an achievable state of being, and that each one of us deserves it.
2. "Mindless self-indulgence," is not ethical, and is not the point. Ayn Rand was not a "do what you please" kind of a thinker. As a result, while she never (to my knowledge) wrote explicitly about temperance, there is a hefty implication of temperance throughout her work. Happiness, according to Rand, is not just cheap thrills and quick-fixes. Happiness is a lifelong endeavor to make yourself deeply satisfied in accordance with the things you actually value (in the long run).
3. Happiness comes from achieving your values. Whatever you truly value, that is what will make you happy. It's different for everyone. But everyone has something (or many things) that they value, and only those through those values will a person become happy.

So with respect to discovering your "internal influences for self-improvement," we are not really talking about latching onto some shallow motivational factor like, "I have to do a good job," or "I want to look good for the party." Instead, we are talking about the fundamentals. The philosophical mumbo-jumbo. Sorry. I know some of you didn't want to read that.

For ethical eudaimonists like myself, "the things we value" are virtues. We identify character traits that serve somewhat like "ideals." We're not perfect, but obviously, the more virtuous we are, the happier we become. Please note, the purpose here is not to be "as close to perfect as possible," but rather to have a concept in mind that describes what would make us happiest in any given situation. Once you get away from the specter of "perfection," it is actually more like guiding principles.

Conclusion

We have seen that the point of all this self-improvement stuff is to align our personal goals with the internal and external motivational factors we encounter every day. We have also seen that both kinds of factors can be either positive and negative, and that it is probably only healthy to focus on the good ones.

Hopefully, we have also managed to identify that the whole point of all of this is achieving a fundamental sense of human happiness. As a result, we have to identify some core values that we hold, so that we can align our endeavors to those values. 

Nonetheless, I have spent a little time discussing motivational factors and self-improvement, and still feel I have covered the topic inadequately. In a future post, I would like to provide some real-world examples of internal and virtue-centric motivation at work.

Stay tuned. I promise not to keep you waiting too long!