No Boston Post

I have no plans to write a post about the bombing of the Boston Marathon. For one thing, too little is known about the crime. All we know is that it was horrific. For another thing, the entire world is speculating about who did this and why, and the answer to those questions is simpler than the speculation merits. The perpetrator was a deeply disturbed individual who did it because he wanted to hurt innocent people. Whether that kind of perversion has a professed political objective is irrelevant. We will not better-understand these atrocities by dividing them up into criminal acts vs. terrorist acts. Sick people slaughter innocent victims. The story ends there.

I, for one, refuse to stare into the void.

Uncle Zeus

I wanted to write a song that told a story. I considered various topics, but ultimately found the prospect of tying Greek mythology to the modern dysfunctional family proved too attractive an idea to pass up.

As a sidenote, I particularly liked my guitar solo in this song. About half the notes you hear were composed deliberately, and the other half were improvised. I like having a direction, while still maintaining sufficient freedom to explore the song "in the moment."

Enjoy!

It's Hard To See Myself Buying Another Amplifier

I've been mulling over the idea of building my own guitar amplifier. There are a multitude of amp-building kits out there, and a rich library of schematics. I don't completely suck at soldering, and I have a decent head on my shoulders. I also have several engineer friends and acquaintances who have successfully built their own amplifiers in the past, so I believe I would have the moral and technical support I'd need to pull it off.

This would, of course, be a labor of love, just something to do for my own personal entertainment. In the year 2013, it is not particularly cost effective to build your own amplifier from scratch. Of course, the skills developed in such a process could certainly save me amplifier maintenance money in the future. But that is more of a bonus, rather than a core feature.

Anyway, while looking around for schematics for an appropriate first build, I surfed over to the Carvin Service website and discovered that they have posted the schematic for the original (and now discontinued) Steve Vai Legacy amplifier, otherwise known to fans as the "Legacy 1." (There have since been Legacy 2 and Legacy 3 updates to the original design.)

One idea I was considering was to build a single-channel amp based on the Lead channel of the original Carvin Legacy 1. (My general dislike for clean-toned electric guitars is destined to become fodder for a future blog post. It's not that I dislike clean tones, it's that I greatly prefer the sound of acoustic guitars over the "twinkle twinkle" tones of a clean electric guitar.) Because I have no use for a clean channel, a guitar amp that is basically an awesome overdrive tone with gain sensitivity appeals to me greatly.

But last night, after listening to some great sound samples of the Legacy 1, (see this awesome clip, for example) I fired up my Egnater Rebel 20 amplifier, tweaked the gain and tube selection settings a bit, and promptly spent an hour making gorgeous, gorgeous love to the beautiful tones emanating from my speaker.

Every tone I am even remotely interested in can be had from my Rebel 20. The amplifier is almost perfect. I can't think of a single thing I dislike about it. It could be that this amplifier has ruined me in the same way that my Carvin guitars have ruined me. In fact, when I think about how pleased I am by my amplifier, it makes me reluctant to bother with building my own amplifier at all.

What can I say? I love having great gear.

You're More Of A Libertarian Than You Think

A consistent theme on my blog (and in my interactions with people elsewhere) is my belief that nearly all people are basically libertarians, at least in a nutshell. Politicians do a good job of hiding this fact, of course, by using wedge issues to convince us of a vast ideological divide between American "liberals" and American "conservatives."

In truth, Americans share a common history, a common cultural narrative, and a common sense of individuality. Our feelings of patriotism are all wrapped-up in ideas about liberty and individual rights, no matter what our political affiliation is. Whether we are rightist, leftist, or something else, we all frame our political debates in the language of the "classical liberalism" and Enlightenment-era philosophy of our country's founding.

By international standards, this is an anomaly. It cannot be said that every political discussion in every other country leans so heavily on the language of the John Stuart Mills and Jeremy Benthams and Thomas Paines of those countries. In many cases, there were no such figures. The central liberating figure in Cuba, for example, is Fidel Castro. For better or for worse, communist and formerly communist countries term their political issues in the lexicon of revolution, progress, and equality of result. This is not exactly how it is in the United States. In fact, the more exposure one gets to foreign politics, the more obvious it is that Americans are more politically similar than they are different.

Reading the op-ed pages, though, you'd hardly know it.

This language issue is not small potatoes. Economists frequently use their familiar internal jargon to express free market concepts, and this jargon seems silly - and even downright objectionable - to "ordinary people" out there who hear about it.

A great example of this is F.A. Hayek's "Knowledge Problem." The whole problem might be phrased thusly: No one person or group possesses all the knowledge required to improve upon the inherent conditions of a free market. In other words, free trade creates a superior outcome precisely because small elements of partial knowledge is dispersed across the entire market. Each tiny piece of knowledge marginally impacts market trends and equilibria (assuming the existence of equilibria). To "improve" upon a free market by placing greater control in the hands of the few is to diminish the optimality of the market situation precisely because a smaller group possesses less knowledge.

Now, if you're not an economist, your eyes probably just glazed over and you kind of stopped paying attention.

But if I told you that the best way to find the answer to a question is to take to a social network and crowd-source your question, you wouldn't even blink. You crowd-source for answers every time you ask a question on Facebook, search for something on Wikipedia, or create a new thread on StackOverflow.com. What's more, you thoroughly understand this process and you don't need it explained to you. You completely understand that everyone out there has a slightly different expertise, so if you ask your question "publicly enough" you will soon get your answer.

Now, if I told you that Barack Obama wanted the US government to purchase Wikipedia so that the information it contained could be vetted by experts before it was published, you would cringe. [Note: To my knowledge, no such thing is happening; this is just a hypothetical scenario.] The reason you would cringe is because you know that the whole strength of Wikipedia - the genius of it, in fact - is that all people can publicly alter the information according to what they know, and because everyone is constantly doing this, the quality of the information consistently improves.

Take out that magic ingredient, and what you're left with is a small group of government bureaucrats attempting to write an electronic encyclopedia on everything. And what are the odds that such a group, no matter what their qualifications or methodology might be, will be able to improve upon the already-excellent Wikipedia?

On a gut level, we all accept the plain truth of Hayek's Knowledge Problem. So long as we use modern language to express what we're talking about, everyone is on-board. But the minute we frame it in economic terms, people start to choose ideological "sides" based on preconceived notions of what it means to be "pro-market" or "libertarian."

Hence, I think it's important for free market advocates to make their case using as little jargon as humanly possible.

Does Type 1 Diabetes Need A New Name?

The hat tip goes to the always-excellent Wendy Morgan. It appears that there is a new petition out there to rename type 1 and type 2 diabetes mellitus. Whether you should sign the petition or not, is naturally a matter of personal choice and preference. I have no strong opinions on the survey itself.

I will say, however, that I don't see the point of signing the petition. My reasoning is as follows.

Reason #1: Type 1 And Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Is Already Thoroughly Descriptive
The petition's website says the following:

There are other forms of Diabetes with names that more accurately reflect their nature, such as Gestational Diabetes, Maturity-Onset Diabetes of the Young (MODY)and Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults (LADA). What nature does Type 1 and Type 2 indicate? They are the most common forms of Diabetes, yet their names remain the most generic and are easily confused.

I am not sure this is 100% true. My understanding was that the "Type 1" nomenclature referred to pancreatic failure, while the "Type 2" descriptor referred to insulin resistance. Therefore, Gestational Diabetes is a special case of Type 2 diabetes, while LADA and MODY are special cases of Type 1 diabetes. I just perused the website of the American Diabetes Association to verify this and found nothing to contradict my claim.

Perhaps the confusion stems not from the Type 1/Type 2 nomenclature, but rather from the newly recognized, special-case scenarios of Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. Gestational diabetes gets a special name because, even though it is a form of insulin resistance (i.e. Type 2), it is not "forever diabetes" like more traditional cases of Type 2. LADA gets a special name because its more gradual and adult onset makes those of us who have it more susceptible to medical misdiagnosis. MODY is nothing more than traditional Type 1 diabetes diagnosed at a different age.

Yet the language is entirely consistent: Type 1 refers to the death of pancreatic beta cells and the resulting inability to produce insulin; Type 2 refers to situations in which the pancreas and its ability to produce insulin is not the core problem, but rather the body's insulin response is inhibited for non-pancreatic reasons.

No matter how one acquires diabetes mellitus, that person's body will reflect one of two scenarios: the inability to produce insulin, or the inability to absorb insulin. Stunted production is Type 1; stunted absorption is Type 2.

Reason #2: Diabetes Nomenclature Is For Doctors, Not Society At Large
Wendy Morgan makes a great point that I'm sure anyone with Type 1 diabetes understands full well:

I've been annoyed for years. Whenever I'm in public and pull out my pump or CGM, I get, "what's that?" I explain and then, just yesterday and almost every single time, I get, "Oh! So it runs in your family?" Or, " My sister got it from eating too much candy." Or, "So you have to watch your sugar, don't cha?"

Nooo! Type 1 diabetes isn't like that! We all want to grab people by the shoulders and shake them when they say this stuff to us. She continues:

You've seen my posts about my tween. In 7th grade and she does everything possible to avoid letting anyone see her manage her diabetes. Few know and she wants to keep it that way for now. The main reason, other students only know about type 2. It's what grandma has or Uncle Joe. He's real overweight and had his big toe cut off. "It's real gross." 

That is what my daughter wants to avoid. What do you say to that? Communicate with fellow 12 and 13 year olds? "Oh! You have this all wrong. I don't have what your grandma has, I have something that is completely out of my control. It's an autoimmune disorder..." Glare. "Whatever." On goes life. Misconceptions remain. 

This poses a safety hazard, too. If friends don't know, what if there is an emergency. Wi makes the call for help? Maybes teacher who thinks the same thing?

Ms. Morgan's point is spot-on, and her perspective is basically this: Wouldn't it be great if we had something more descriptive to tell people when they see us injecting our insulin or futzing around with our pump or CGM? Wouldn't it be great when we were asked what we're doing to have an answer that doesn't make people think about their fat grandma who can't keep her hands off the tub of ice cream in the freezer?

It's a valid concern, but renaming what doctors call Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes will have no impact on this. It has been years since doctors changed the name of "manic depression" to "bipolar disorder," and yet we still hear the term "manic depression" being thrown around. VD is now called STI, but still people talk about VD.

And suppose I told someone that I have LADA. What do you think would happen next? I actually know the answer to this already, because I have told people that I have LADA. They simply ask, "What's that?" And then I have to describe how it is a type of adult-onset juvenile diabetes, and then they're back to talking about their fat grandmother. So the name does not actually solve the core problem.

But that doesn't mean we can't find something better to tell people. I, for one, have occasionally opted to describe my condition as "pancreatic failure" instead of "diabetes." That usually suffices to indicate that my condition is different from their grandmother's.

Another option is to simply not make an issue of it. When asked "Whatcha doin'?" simply reply, "Taking my insulin," and proceed as usual. If you get the follow-ups, you can simply say, "Well, I have a totally different condition than your grandmother has. I won't bore you with the gory details, but they are two completely different diseases." End of conversation.

Remember, most people are really just curious. They don't want to embarrass or frustrate us, they are genuinely interested. I know that doesn't help a teenager feel "normal," but teenagers do eventually grow up and find their groove in life. This is a life-long challenge. Learning how to talk about it without feeling frustrated or embarrassed is an important part of coming to terms with your condition.

Conclusion
I firmly believe that we diabetics have to make the best choices for ourselves, based on our own personal experiences. So if your experience leads you to believe that this petition will do some good, please do surf over to the website and sign it. One thing is for sure: signing that petition will not adversely impact my life at all. Just because I don't think it will solve the problems it aims to solve doesn't mean I think it's a bad idea. After all, it comes from a good place that every diabetic can easily understand.

Having said that, I do believe that we diabetics individually need to make the difference in our lives. It's not always easy to explain our condition to others. It's not always easy to explain how some of us Type 1 diabetics have figured out how to eat ice cream without experiencing hyperglycemia while others haven't.

But learning how to relate information to others in a way that makes them understand and feel more comfortable with how we individually prefer to manage our condition is part of having diabetes in the first place. There will always be ignorance and confusion out there. It's not as if a name-change will suddenly educate society about something they simply will never understand.

Far better to simply come to terms with how life is, and make the best of it.

Contrapositive Influence

What if you turned on the television tonight to discover that Ann Coulter (if you're a liberal) or Michael Moore (if you're a conservative) was arguing passionately in favor of a policy that you yourself supported? How would you react? Would you cheer? Would you smile in pleasant surprise as one of your most infamous political opposites made a passionate case for your own point of view?

Or, would you second-guess yourself? Is it possible that merely hearing the phrase "Universal health care for all!" from someone like Ann Coulter would be enough to get you to think twice about your own stance on the issue?

My guess is that for wedge issues like abortion and universal socialist health care, you would be perhaps shocked, but not swayed in the opposite direction. Yet, for more plastic issues such as tax policy, I think it would probably be easy for you to switch sides based on the fact that someone you greatly dislike has taken the position you typically favor and argued for it before you had a chance to really consider it. I actually think this happens all the time.

Obvious examples would be Bill Clinton's many free trade initiatives and George W. Bush's many tax and spending increases. In the heat of the moment, leftists hardly batted an eye at Bill Clinton when he lowered taxes and opened borders. (Well, they certainly batted their eyes, but not in that way...) Meanwhile, it was only toward the end of W. Bush's 8-year rein of terror that some Republicans began resisting all that warring-and-spending. But the average person just stuck to their party affiliations, however loose they may even have been.

Positive And Contra-Positive
The reason for this is straight-forward enough. Many of us out-source a lot of our thinking to respectable thought-leaders. This can happen in a positive way (such as when someone we admire says something new, and we decide we agree) or in a contrapositive way (such as when someone who repulses us says something new, and we decide we disagree).

I have the impression that many of us will take a stronger stance on a given issue if someone we admire makes the case for an even stronger version of our own stance than we have previously considered. For example, if we believe in reducing human CO2 emissions, and we respect Bill Nye the Science Guy, then if Bill Nye made the case that CO2 should not only be taxed, but taxed at an increasing rate (the more CO2 you emit, the higher your carbon tax rate), we might find ourselves agreeing with that position vehemently, even if we had never even considered that to be a viable prospect before.

Similarly, if someone who repulses us makes a weaker claim than we expect, we might find ourselves polarizing our views to an even larger extreme. For example, if Michael Moore suggests that we ought to let the Bush tax cuts expire, we might find ourselves more in favor of a steeper tax reduction than we would have wanted if Moore had made the case that taxes should be raised to 98% on all millionaires.

What I'm getting at is that arguments against what we prefer can be just as persuasive for us as arguments in favor of what we prefer. We might call this "Contrapositive Influence."

Understanding Contrapositive Influence
In order for this phenomenon to occur, the person making the opposing argument must be one whose reputation precedes him/her in a decidedly negative way.

To get a handle on this, consider someone who occasionally says something loony, but who for the most part is well-respected. How about Tom Cruise? If Tom Cruise goes on record as saying that the US government should engage in a modest increase in infrastructure spending, hardly anyone would care. The proposition is modest, and Cruise himself is not a repellent person. But if that same argument were made by, say, Adolf Hitler, then most people would find themselves vehemently opposing modest increases in infrastructure spending. This is due to the fact that, to the modern mind, Adolf Hitler is basically the archetypical "guy who is wrong about absolutely everything." (Cf. Godwin's Law)

Thus, it stands to reason that if Hitler says we should call for the overthrow of the Egyptian government, most people are comfortable saying, "Absolutely not! We should content ourselves with sanctions." But if Hitler proposes sanctions at the beginning, then people who would have argued for sanctions in the first place will soon find themselves arguing against taking any actions against Egypt at all.

But note that if we change "Egypt" to "Libya" and "Hitler" to "Barack Obama" suddenly our whole perspective switches around. This is because most people understand that compared to Hitler, Obama is a moderate, and vice-versa.

Conclusion
The key message here is that we must take the utmost care to guard against our own biases, not just when we might be unduly influenced by someone we agree with, but also when we might be polarizing our own beliefs in response to someone we perceive to be "extreme." It is often said that a stopped watch is right twice a day. During those two times a day, you wouldn't want to be the person denying the time of day merely because you know that a particular watch is broken, right?

Similarly, throwing out certain ideas merely because the person giving voice to them is not entirely trustworthy can prove to be a grievous error, not just because you'd be wrong, but also because you may end up taking a stronger position on the topic than wisdom would dictate. You may fall victim to what we here at Stationary Waves term Contrapositive Influence.

At Least I'm Not The Only One

This may just be a thought experiment for Tyler Cowen, and most of it amounts to nothing more than a back-of-the-envelope "likely story." Even so, he does make a point that has been staying with me for a long time now. I haven't written about it (at least I don't think I have) because, like most of my economic ideas, it is something of a specter that haunts me, more than it is an actual theory. So I will hide behind Cowen's description of it and say, "That's what I'm talking about." Here it is:

IT and China, taken together, seem to imply a big whack to median income.  This whack should be higher for the less flexible polities, and furthermore the wealthy and the well-educated in the U.S. get back a big chunk of that money through tech innovation and IP rights.  Plus we’ve had some good luck with fossil fuels and even the composition of our agriculture.  If you had a country without those high earners in the tech sector, and an inflexible labor market, those economies will have to contract and I don’t just mean in a short-term cycle.  Equilibrium implies negative growth for those economies, at least for a while.

The more people talk about "stagnating median incomes" in the context of the so-called "Great Stagnation," the more I am moved to believe that the developed world has had this coming for a long time. And when I say that, I don't mean to suggest that our buffoon politicians have sabotaged our ability to profit by heaping an ever-increasing regulatory and tax burden upon us, although that is also true.

No, what I rather mean is this: Globalization has been going on now for about 40 years. I am in my thirties, and it's still difficult for me to understand that the 1970s are "way back then" in the same way that the 1950s were ancient history for me when I was growing up. 40 years is an awfully long time. It is an especially long time when it is the span of time over which a major economic event has occurred. 40 years of globalization and supply-chain restructuring, out of expensive-labor countries like the US and Europe, and into cheap-labor countries like China and Brazil is bound to have some repercussions eventually.

Up until the mid-00s, we only really perceived those repercussions to be dramatically falling prices (in real terms, of course) for consumer goods. So our prices have been falling for a full 40 years, during which our incomes rose for the first 30, and then declined for the last 10.

Isn't the story obvious? Rising incomes in developing countries, paired with falling prices in developed countries, paired with increasing globalization of the management of business operations implies greater equality of wages across borders. It is textbook, entry-level international economics.

So, obviously we can expect US median incomes to decline and developing-nation median incomes to increase until a new equilibrium is reached. I have no reason to believe we have yet arrived at that new equilibrium, so my belief is that US incomes still have a lot of room to decline.

But, unlike many other bloggers out there, I don't consider this bad news in the slightest. Prices really have decreased for virtually everything over time. We will make less money, but we will also need less money to enjoy the same standard of living. Global wealth is absolutely skyrocketing, and has been for the last 200 years. No amount of doom-saying about "the Great Stagnation" (what a cheap scare tactic that term is!) can change the fact that the cat is out of the bad. Our friends who lived in mud huts 60 years ago are climbing into the suburbs of what we used to derisively call "the Third World." Successful Asian entrepreneurs have managed to accumulate fortunes that put them in competition with the most storied US billionaires. Living abroad - even living in those "spooky" places where the food is spicy and music is in odd meter - is no longer the terrifying lunar expedition our parents assume it is. Perhaps it never was, but the point is that wealth equality is spreading like wildfire.

And the fountainhead of all these plummeting prices and wealth accumulation is economic production. So none of this is actually bad news. Your income may decline in real terms, but your standard of living will not, nor will your wealth. It is a good time to be alive, and for the first time in history, it is a good time to be alive in the Old World, the New World, Asia, and Africa alike. 

Hindsight And The Arrow Of Time

Introduction
The following is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article on "The Arrow of Time." The specific excerpt refers to the "causal arrow of time."

A cause precedes its effect: the causal event occurs before the event it affects. Birth, for example, follows a successful conception and not vice versa. Thus causality is intimately bound up with time's arrow. 

An epistemological problem with using causality as an arrow of time is that, as David Hume maintained, the causal relation per se cannot be perceived; one only perceives sequences of events. Furthermore it is surprisingly difficult to provide a clear explanation of what the terms "cause" and "effect" really mean, or to define the events to which they refer. However, it does seem evident that dropping a cup of water is a cause while the cup subsequently shattering and spilling the water is the effect. 

Physically speaking, the perception of cause and effect in the dropped cup example is a phenomenon of the thermodynamic arrow of time, a consequence of the Second law of thermodynamics.^[6] Controlling the future, or causing something to happen, creates correlations between the doer and the effect,^[7] and these can only be created as we move forwards in time, not backwards.

I had accessed this article some months ago, and I find that it has now undergone some revision. At the time, I had copy-pasted the above section of the article and highlighted a particular passage that interested me greatly. I now find that the most interesting part of the article has been removed, so I quote it now as it appears in my own personal notes (emphasis mine). The following used to appear immediately following the above passage, without a paragraph break.

However, it is also partly a phenomenon of the relation of physical form and functionality to the attributes and functional capacities of physical agents. For example, the causes of the resultant pattern of cup fragments and water spill are easily attributable in terms of the loss of manual grip, gravity, trajectory of the cup and contents, irregularities in its structure, angle of its impact on the floor, etc. However, applying the same event in reverse, it is difficult to explain how the various pieces of the cup come to possess exactly the nature and number of a cup before assembling, how they could assemble (as neither floors nor hands can create china cups unaided), why they should assemble precisely into the shape of a cup and fly up into the human hand (as immobile floors cannot throw and, without contact, the human hand lacks the capacity to move objects unaided) and why the water should position itself entirely within the cup.

Discussion

As I think about this concept today, what strikes me most is the concept that the remains of a theoretical shattered cup can be hypothetically reassembled by playing the events in reverse, according to the known laws of thermodynamics. The important lesson here is that myriad possible events can potentially result in the same pattern of shattered debris. 

This is might be because small variations in initial circumstances do not significantly impact the end results if the process of a shattering cup is sufficiently complex. It might also be due to the fact that knowing the precise set of initial circumstances ex post facto is impossible. Theoretically, I suppose it could also be a combination of those two ideas.

I wonder how this might impact analyses in hindsight.

For example, is it possible to conduct any sort of worthwhile historical analysis? There are as many possible reconstructions of history as there are attempts to reconstruct it. But, importantly, there is no way to determine whether any of those reconstructions reflect events as they actually occurred. The nature of the causal arrow of time is such that many valid explanations exist for the same set of circumstances. What differentiates them is mere probability. Only a firsthand observer would know for sure, and then, too the observer's memory would be subject to human error.

For that matter, the observer's memory is itself a reconstruction of history. Might it also lack the same kind of credibility?

This is not idle philosophical posturing on my part. Consider the real-world problem of psychological therapy. I once heard a story about someone whose therapist had allegedly botched a hypnosis session and implanted a false memory of childhood abuse that could never be reversed. While I cannot actually vouch for the truth of that story, I think it serves to illustrate my point here. One need not be implanted with a false memory to misjudge the true initial set of circumstances that lead to one's current position.

Someone undergoing psycho-therapy, then, may come to believe something false about their past, even when the utmost care is taken to prevent error. This is not because psycho-therapy is bad, but because there is an inherent epistemological problem involved in linking current conditions to past circumstances. That inherent problem is this: one can easily construct a perfectly valid, but nonetheless entirely false, explanation for one's current set of conditions. 

Conclusion

What do we conclude from this? Is every investigation of the past inconclusive by its very nature? Valid logic, after all, is not necessarily true logic. The devil isn't even in the details. The devil is in the analysis itself.

It is a strange and fascinating concept. I'm not sure I'm capable of giving an answer, but I welcome your comments.

The Future Is Increasing Heterogeneity

In my previous post, I had some things to say regarding hanging one's whole philosophy on a single axiom. I also touched briefly on Simon Grey's prediction that the age of American dominance is coming to a close. (For that matter, I have seen this claim made on other blogs, such as Anti-Gnostic and Chateau Heartiste.)

It seems to me that there is a relation between these two concepts, and also to something I recently read about property rights on Jonathan Finegold Catalan's blog:

Differentiating rivalry and conflict may overcome a major hurdle in the IP debate. If we look at property as an outcome of spontaneous order, then we acknowledge that there’s no such thing as property “rights” that exist outside of social convention. A better way of stating something similar is that property rights are defined institutionally. Since institutions can change, so can property rights. This is a good thing, because it allows people to resolve conflicts between each other by parceling property and trading it with each other. This applies equally to intellectual property. The best thing that can happen to the production of ideas isn’t to completely dissolve intellectual property rights by fiat, but to allow the market to spontaneously arrive at solutions over time.

Everything I see in the world today points in a single direction: Heterogeneity. What I mean is that as technology improves and entrenched institutions (political and otherwise) are over-thrown, they seem to be increasingly replaced by personal, local, individualized alternatives.

First Example: Movies
It used to be that a single town had a very small number of relatively large, single-screen movie theaters. These theaters would show one major motion picture at a time, to large audiences. There wasn't a lot of choice or flexibility involved. As the movie industry progressed, the "cineplex" was born, followed by the "megaplex" and all other movie-related "plexes." The trend was to increase the number of theaters and films shown. This trend continued until new 3-D technology brought new meaning to the meaning of the phrase "big screen experience." But as the market became saturated with 3-D movies, the theaters again started to shrink to accommodate both more showings of a single film and a greater number of films shown. Technology again paved the way for on-demand movies. Now people can easily afford large-screen TVs for their own home theaters, complete with fancy sound systems that provide a very pleasant movie experience - even in 3-D - at home. The film industry has accommodated this need by providing movies on demand either through telecommunications or bulk mail. Either way you shake it, what was once a large and rare "community event" is now a very small, individualized affair.

Second Example: Music
If you think of today's music industry as basically being a continuation of the orchestral music of the Baroque composers, then the trend is simply this: Music used to be something only accessible by the aristocracy in large theaters, and now anyone can hear anything they want to, at any possible moment, no matter where they happen to be in the world, on a personal electronic device that fits in their smallest pocket. Further commentary here is virtually irrelevant, but I will add one more aspect to the story.

It used to be that the popularity of music was determined by taste makers. The kings chose which composers they would hire, originally. Twenty years ago, the biggest hits were determined by a complex payola conspiracy between the radio station operators and the record labels. Today, there is no such thing as "popular music" in the sense that we used to understand it. Music that happens to be popular is music that has been purchased by movies, television programs, and advertisers to be included in the backdrop of a visual experience. It is there that we become aware of a new song, but we are not really the paying customers of that music. For the most part, the corporations advertising their products are the primary consumers. We're more like secondary consumers of the most popular music. The other side of this is that the most popular music is actually the music we all listen to with the least frequency. Instead, we amass a list of small, unpopular musical artists whose unique sound appeals to us individually.

But again, the punchline here is a trend away from large institutions and toward a more individualized experience.

Now Back To Those Other Bloggers
So let's return to what I started out trying to say. If we fully grasp the implication of what Catalan is getting at, then what we're looking at is the fact that social institutions - even the sacrosanct ones like private property - have no concrete meaning other than the spontaneous, de facto enforcement of them in the environment that currently exists right this minute. What is true today - even what is true of institutions today - is not necessarily true tomorrow, and in fact a free society will be highly flexible in that regard. It could be that intellectual property in the form of patent laws served a viable purpose for a short period of time, and must now be divorced from the institution of the state and enforced on a more individual basis.

Thus, we see the possibility that even property rights may be following a trend of decreasing instiutionalization and increasing individualization.

Similarly, the Non-Aggression Principle (while perfectly adequate as an ethical guidelines) may have out-lived its purpose as some sort of institutional axiom upon which to base an entire world view. As philosophy migrates out of the ivory towers of academia, down into the dirty blogosphere and into the individual minds of ordinary people, the viability of a logical system that encapsulates "what libertarianism is" will certainly falter. Instead, people will arrive at a functional idea of liberty based on the diversity of opinion that exists in a social system comprised of billions of individuals.

Lastly, the idea of American dominance is certainly obsolete, but this is not the travesty that some might perceive it to be. The reason is that American dominance will not be replaced by Someone Else's Dominance. Rather, it will be replaced by the dominance of the individual, in nebulous abstract. If the trend I am identifying continues, then what lies ahead is a period in which no country is particularly dominant, and power and fortunes will be made by ambitious individuals and multi-national groups.

All of this is an argument in favor of the Rothbardians, by the way, and I am not exactly sympathetic to their point of view. The last bastion against this kind of progress is Rothbard's own critique of the Whig view of history. That is, Rothbard thought the Whigs were fools to believe that the trend they were observing would extend to perpetuity. Trends can and do reverse.

Epilogue
I would like to think a bit more about this in light of my ideas about The Individual. If the trend is away from social institutions and toward individual experiences, then this would signify (at least, according to my previous posts on the topic) a shift toward existential sentiments and away from moral ones. I would expect such a shift to involve a broadly waning sense of social morality and the dissolution of time-honored social institutions. I would expect these things to be replaced by greater concerns with a person's sense of identity and place in the world.

Is this indeed what we in today's society? I am tempted to say yes, aren't you? But I shall have to explore this in a future blog post.

Links And Commentary

First Link
Sonic Charmer (or is it The Crimson Reach?) has it right on austerity:

Here is how, from what I can tell, the whole ‘austerity’ debate has gone:1. Countries in, like, Europe pass a bunch of tax increases.2. This is referred to as austerity, since ‘austerity’ means ‘spending cuts or tax increases’.3. The tax increases don’t help the economy.4. Smart People point and say: “See? Austerity doesn’t help.”5. Which proves we should….pass a bunch of tax increases instead.

I look at this as the classic bait-and-switch tactic that dominates leftist rhetoric. The idea is to make Point A, and upon its rebuttal, make Point B. Then, when Point B is rebutted, switch back to Point A. Repeat over and over until the opponent gets tired. We see this everywhere, and Sonic Charmer has done a good job of exposing the ruse on this issue.

But keep it in mind on other issues. Take gun control for example. A leftist will start by saying that "assault weapons" are responsible for the massacre of school children; a rightist will respond that guns don't kill people, people kill people. Then the leftist changes the subject by replying as follows: "Why do you need to carry an assault weapon?" The rightist will point to his Constitutional rights in an attempt to rebut the leftist's new argument about "necessity," at which point the leftist will reply: "Your right to gun ownership does not trump my right to life." See that? Now we're talking about guns killing people again. So the rightist has to readdress the topic of responsible gun ownership, at which point the leftist can reply with another argument about necessity.

Once you identify the rhetorical trick of it, though, it's powerless. Just remember to identify it when you're arguing with a leftist. If you out it as the ruse that it is, the leftist can't keep on going with it without looking stupid.

Second Link
I am not as pessimistic as Simon Grey:

First off, if Buffett is leaving the US market, then it’s time for everyone else to follow suit.  Sell of all of your investment items, cash out your retirement accounts, and go buy gold and silver and keep what you buy in your possession.  Or at least hold cash in your possession.  The market is finally catching up with reality, and now it’s time to leave. 

Second, and more broadly, it looks like this pretty much spells the beginning of the end.  American dominance, particularly of the economic variety, is drawing to a close.  Get used to living in poverty.

For one thing, I do not consider Warren Buffett's reputation to be very justified. He made a great deal of money for himself early on, but his subsequent plays have not panned out quite as well. He is a bit of a relic from the so-called "Great Moderation," during which a few people accidentally made hundreds of millions of dollars under conditions that the market will never again tolerate. For another thing, David Henderson makes a compelling case against pessimism.

Third Link
Speaking of pessimism, though, John Cochrane describes himself as "doom and gloomy" on interest rates. The short version of the story is that interest rates are supposed to go up soon, but it's anyone's guess when that will actually happen. What strikes me about this kind of commentary is that it assumes that low interest rates are desirable for everyone. If that were true, why would anyone charge interest at all? High milk prices are a good thing for milk farmers; therefore, those people who earn interest will not hurt from rising interest rates. The Stationary Waves punchline is this: Now is a good time to lock your debts into fixed rates while simultaneously locking your investments into variable rates. Easier said than done, though...

Fourth Link
Meanwhile, Matt Zwolinski decides to take the one principle about which every libertarian agrees and argue against it.

On its face, the [Non-Aggression Principle]’s prohibition of aggression falls nicely in line with common sense. After all, who doesn’t think it’s wrong to steal someone else’s property, to club some innocent person over the head, or to force others to labor for one’s own private benefit? [...] 

But the NAP’s plausibility is superficial. It is, of course, common sense to think that aggression is a bad thing. But it is far from common sense to think that its badness is absolute, such that the wrongness of aggression always trumps any other possible consideration of justice or political morality. There is a vast difference between a strong but defeasible presumption against the justice of aggression, and an absolute, universal prohibition. As Bryan Caplan has said, if you can’t think of counterexamples to the latter, you’re not trying hard enough. 

I am sympathetic to Zwolinski's rather sensible intention of breaking through the cultishness of hanging absolutely everything you believe on a single, unwavering logical axiom. This just kicks the can down the road: You've stated your axiom but failed to prove why this one axiom should form the basis of anyone's philosophy. Even if I accept that the Non-Aggression Principle leads to my preferred outcome in all cases, that does not necessarily mean that it is the correct logical basis for those outcomes. Had Zwolinski made that case, then we'd actually be getting somewhere.

But Zwolinski didn't make that case. (He comes close in his fifth point, but bungles it badly.) Instead, he provided six ways that someone already uncommitted to the NAP would be emotionally moved to reject it. Perhaps the key to this issue is that no one has ever been able to reduce any philosophy or approach to life to one, single axiom. Perhaps there is nothing at all wrong with the NAP as one of a set of logical axioms governing ethical behavior. Perhaps that's exactly how most libertarians see the NAP, in which case Zwolinski is constructing another Red Herring in an effort to appeal to the cool kids who think libertarians are nerds.

BubbleCoin

The question is whether the (USD) price of Bitcoins indicates a high true market value for digital currency, or whether it is merely the product of market speculation?

Bubbles exist whenever the asking price of a good greatly exceeds the same good's economic usefulness. If the world were moving over to Bitcoins permanently, I would expect a steady increase in both Bitcoin value and the number of economic transactions made using Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. We need not argue about it, we need only consult the existing data (courtesy Blockchain.info).

This graph shows that the number of Bitcoin transactions has increased by a full order of magnitude in the past year, and that increase has been great, but steady.

Meanwhile, during that same year, the price of Bitcoins in USD is 40 times higher now than it was last year, most of those gains occurring only over the past month.

So, ten times the number of transactions at forty times the price.

Tact

Shrinking Vocabularies And Disappearing Concepts
Ever since George Orwell introduced the concept of a steadily shrinking vocabulary in his masterpiece, 1984, people have been pointing it out. It is probably difficult to find hard evidence that society's vocabulary is actually shrinking, though, since new words are added to the major English dictionaries all the time. Of course, this doesn't even cover the hundreds of informal and slang words that have crept into the contemporary lexicon as mainstays. To those of us who like to read classic literature, there is no positive comparison to be made between words like "levity" versus words like "lol," but from the standpoint of linguistic evolution, we can't really say much. Language evolves according to majority use, not according to the subjective preferences of bookworms. Sad but true.

Be that as it may, there can be no denying the fact that, as certain words and phrases fall out of favor, sometimes the concepts behind them also disappear. One such concept about which I have previously written is the concept of a person's creed. Prior to the last half of the 20th Century, virtually everyone knew what it meant to live by a creed; if one uses the term nowadays, though, the result isn't much more than some funny looks. Still, one can still live by a creed, even if one doesn't really understand that particular word anymore. The concept has not completely disappeared, although it is certainly waning.

The Disappearance of Tact
Apparently, the opposite is true for the word tact. That is, everyone knows what the definition of the word is, but nobody understands the concept anymore.

When we practice tact, we refrain from blurting out any old thought that pops into our heads. We abstain from displaying our emotions in an uncouth way and instead present a calm, yet honest, temperament. We choose our words carefully so that we may be perfectly understood without being overly offensive.

Another way we might put this would be thus: Tact is temperance applied to interpersonal communication. Temperance, of course, is yet another one of those ideas in the midst of a disappearing act. So we are striking a theme here.

Why do I say tact is disappearing? Well, consider the latest two examples, culled from the headlines.

First we have Steven Landsburg's well-meaning but ill-fated "psychic harm" thought experiment. Landsburg's core point is a rather good one. Knowing exactly what constitutes "harm," as well as which particular kinds of "harm" ought to influence public policy, is important knowledge in the realm of political science. As a society, we ought to take the time to analyze important problems like those, and Landsburg was right to do so.

The problem is that Landsburg's example of an unconscious rape victim was emotionally charged to the point of being, well, tactless. My own comments on the topic (which you can find on Landsburg's blog) reiterated what I think the most important take-away is here: Don't use rape as a means to explore "the big questions." Rape is a horrible example, not because it isn't illustrative of something, but because discussing it is entirely tactless. Frustratingly, Landsburg provided a wealth of additional examples to make his point on his blog, all of which were for the most part ignored precisely because he chose to include a discussion of rape.

A little tact invoked during the writing of that blog post could have gone a long way.

The next example is the recent kerfuffle over the odd-couple musical duet between Brad Paisley and LL Cool J that has managed to ignite a media firestorm over the question of racism and political correctness. (Full disclosure: I have not listened to the song, and I have no intention of doing so - not because I find the ideas expressed by the song objectionable, but simply because I long since lost interest in the artistic output of either of those artists.) Sure, the song comes from an admirable place, exploring the different perspectives of modern-day white US southerners and northeastern urban blacks. On that level, we can probably count this song among the many existing conversations about race relations we have been having again and again for the entirety of US history.

But, on the other hand, invoking the Confederate Flag as a symbol of southern pride is a rather stupid thing to do; not because it is a poor symbol for the south, but because it has baggage. To fly the confederate flag is to choose one's symbolism in complete absence of tact. Tact, for heaven's sake!

It's not as if that is the only flag available to denote southern pride. Every state in the south has its own state flag, for example, and those flags encapsulate a local pride that can be felt by anyone who feels an attachment to the region. Those flags don't come with the same kind of race-relations baggage that the confederate flag does. So why not use them?

Conclusion
No, I am not dense. I do understand that by invoking hypothetical rape or the confederate flag, people are choosing deliberately provocative imagery to explore the boundaries of our sensibilities. I understand that being offended is part of the goal; it's a shock to the system so that we may probe the issue more thoughtfully.

But, I cannot say this enough, doing so lacks tact. Tact is also an important part of any provocative dialogue. Those who undertake to provoke others with their antics should hardly be surprised at the resulting firestorm. In some cases - Sinead O'Conner's infamous papal protest on Saturday Night Live comes to mind here - such provocation may be called for. O'Conner understood full well, by the way, that what she was doing was an incredibly controversial act that would probably never be fully understood in her lifetime. That is to say, she shrugged off tact for the completeness of her statement. It was an informed choice, and such a choice is certainly a valid one to make.

The unfortunate thing about Landsburg's blog post and Paisley's duet, though, is that neither party seems to understand what all the hubbub is about. What it's about is tact. If their intention is to simply court controversy, they did a great job.

If they wanted to persuade others, however, they needed to employ a little more tact. Tact, though, is one of those concepts that is disappearing from modern society. Hopefully, this is a trend that can be reversed.

Now Playing

Adventures In Body-Building

Not long ago, I blogged about what I call Incremental Fitness, or the process of adding small but progressive changes to your fitness plan over an extended period of time in order to achieve better fitness goals. As I put it then, my goal was to take on a training regimen that emphasized muscle strength over endurance training, the exact opposite of my general fitness tendency. Last week I wrapped up the first phase of my year-long fitness goal, and today I am about to begin the second phase. At this point, I would like to pause for a moment and discuss the plan I have been following for the past 10 weeks or so.

Jim Stoppani's "Shortcut to Size"
The plan I decided to undertake was Jim Stoppani's "Shortcut to Size" program, available (for free, no less) at Bodybuilding.com. I selected this program because it struck me as being well-balanced, comprehensive, and intelligent. Truth be told, when you scour the internet for weight lifting plans, you come across a lot of crap. There are a lot of poorly designed one-sample-week plans out there that may make sense for absolute beginners, but which fall a little flat for those who are more experienced with exercise and fitness. The "Shortcut to Size" offers a full twelve weeks of workouts, separated into three, month-long "phases" that are further divided into weeks. A program that offers this much planned variety seems to have a lot going for it.

So how did it go?

Well, first let's consider the positive. Over the course of the past ten weeks, I have experienced major gains both in muscle tone and strength. Nearly everyone I know has noticed the changes in my body build, and that's saying something, considering that I am not someone who receives those kinds of comments ordinarily. If we compare the weight I was using to perform the exercises at the beginning to the weight I finished with, my muscle strength increased a full fifty percent (!). This fact alone is somewhat staggering, and I suspect that my strength gains are somewhat of an outlier. That said, a friend of mine who took on Stoppani's other program at Bodybuilding.com reported similar strength gains, so I believe that this program and others like it offer a great deal to all those who want to build more muscle strength. Finally, my blood glucose control improved dramatically and stayed consistent, for the most part, over the full course of the program.

But it wasn't all good. Perhaps the most significant "problem" (I use that word loosely, however) is that I didn't actually gain any weight. I was surprised by the gains in strength I made, but stunned that this didn't translate into gains of pure muscle mass. I would have liked to have gained more, although I must concede that I did not follow the dietary recommendations (owing to my own unique dietary needs as a diabetic), nor the supplement regimen (owing to my belief that supplementation beyond a daily multivitamin is probably a bad idea for most people). Furthermore, while the "Shortcut to Size" seems to offer a good variety at first glance, in reality the regimen is highly repetitive. I was bored of it after just six weeks. The third and fourth week of every month were low rep/high weight weeks, which I found difficult to perform but not at all challenging from a fitness standpoint. After giving my all to three or four sets of low-rep motions, my body quickly recovered as though I had done no exercise at all. During these weeks, my interest in the program waned considerably, and my blood sugar levels rose predictably. I also found the program extremely weak on abs.

All things considered, I would rate the program as "just okay." For someone who needs an introduction to self-directed weight lifting, this is probably a good fit. For someone seeking to make major gains in size and strength, I would recommend getting a personal trainer, despite the expense. For someone like myself, who merely wanted to increase muscle mass and tone as the first phase of a comprehensive, year-long fitness plan, this was a decent - though not amazing - fit for my objectives.

Ten weeks into the twelve-week program, staring into those final two unpleasant weeks of low repetitions, it's time for me to seek another program, one more appropriate to my body type and fitness interests. That means: more plyometrics, more endurance.

Phase Two, And Choosing The Right Fitness Regimen
Let's be clear: the "Shortcut to Size" was not a failure for me. The pros definitely outweighed the cons. The only reason I'm moving on early is because I feel that I have extracted as much benefit from that particular program as I can. I do not stand to gain much from the final two weeks, and I am anxious to get started on a new plan. So, my experience with the workouts available at Bodybuilding.com is certainly positive, and it was my first choice when thinking about what I wanted to accomplish next.

Over the past three months, I have definitely missed how it feels to be a strong endurance athlete. While increased muscle strength comes with a long list of benefits, I simply feel as though I am at my best when my endurance level is high. So, my first objective in phase two is to increase my cardiovascular activity level.

Having written extensively about the benefits of plyometric exercise (see for example here, here, or here), I already know that I want my next phase to rely heavily on plyometrics. I cannot stress this enough: if you want to take your overall fitness to the next level, plyometric exercises are the only way to go. A couple of weeks of such training will suffice to make you start feeling like a new person, and dedicated, consistent plyometric exercise will turn you into a superman or superwoman. Guaranteed.

As a third goal, I do not want to lose the muscle strength, tone, and whatever additional muscle size I've gained thus far. Whereas in previous years, I may have simply reverted to a classic endurance athlete training regimen with thrice-per-week plyometric training mixed in, this year I would like to stay consistent in my resistance training so as not to lose out on the benefits conferred to my blood-glucose control and physical appearance.

All of the above considered, I have selected something at Bodybuilding.com called "The 365 Circuit Trainer." This week-long sample regimen, designed by martial artist Julien Greaux, seems to offer everything I'm looking for: plyometric training, upper body training, heavy abdominal/core training, and plenty of "off" days, during which I can pursue a greater endurance base.

Like every training program I ever take on, I intend to make subtle modifications to the prescribed exercises, tailored to my own specific needs. Because this plan only shows a week's worth of training, I will have to rely on my own good sense to increase the weights I lift and choose alternatives for some of the exercises as time goes on. (Examples might be using cable machines as opposed to free weights or swapping out an incline bench for a dumbbell incline press.)

All said, I'm confident in the new direction I'm headed, and I'm excited to get going.

A Final Word On Changing Fitness Programs
There is one last thing I should discuss here. Faithful Stationary Waves readers know about the Myth of the Perpetual Beginner, and know how important it is to rise above the world of "always beginning something new."

One of the real health risks associated with taking on a new fitness program is this: If you've very recently completed a new fitness regimen (as I have), then immediately moving to a new regimen may put you at risk of over-training. At best, over-training will make your whole body feel fatigued, which will prevent you from extracting the benefits of your daily workouts. At worst, over-training can injure your muscles and ligaments. Obviously, any period of time you have to "sit out" due to injury is a period of time when you are not benefiting from regular exercise. Recovering from injuries can take anywhere from two weeks to two years, and perhaps even longer than that.

Hence, it's important to rest and recover between fitness regimens. One week of rest and light training can save you many weeks of injury recovery time. I spent all last week training lightly in anticipation of this week's new plan. If you've recently completed one workout regimen and want to begin another, I recommend you also take a week or two off to let your body recover and gear-up for the next set of demands you make of it.