Workout Of The Day

Much to my chagrin, I will likely only have time for a run today. No less than 5 miles, and hopefully at least 7. But we shall see...

Certainty

I'm a bit short on time for blogging today, so I thought I would pull out a blog post that I wrote a long time ago, but never bothered to publish. The reason I didn't publish it before is because I wanted to respond to something Simon Grey and I were going back-and-forth about, but I didn't want to go back-and-forth so much that it created any animosity. So I thought I would let this post lie for a couple of months and make my point later, after some time had passed. Well, some time has passed, and I think it should be okay to publish this one now.

I don't at all have it out for Simon Grey, unless by "have it out," you mean "closet bromance." Part of what makes the "blogosphere" so interesting is that it enables ideas to not only exist, but also to interact. And since comments are not available on Grey's blog, I resort to continuing the dialog here.

In the end, though, I think this is a good thing. The "blog comment" is a very different medium of communication than the "blog post." The latter is more thorough, more organized, and requires more intellectual energy and patience. The blog comment is a knee-jerk. So while I sometimes feel disappointed that I cannot provide a one-line, knee-jerk reaction to Simon Grey in his own space, in the final analysis, I think it's better if I don't. I tend to think my blog posts are better than my comments, anyway.

Regarding the continuing dialog, Simon Grey responds to my post from a few days ago, with characteristic thoughtfulness. He makes a number of interesting points that I am finding difficulty excerpting. In your own best interest, read the whole thing. However, for standout passages, Grey starts strong:

The most interesting thing about philosophy in general, and epistemology in specific, is how it has a wonderful to tendency to simply go up its own ass.  Eventually, at some point, any logical application of an asserted truth, particularly about the nature of knowledge, leads to some hilarious, and often depressingly self-defeating conclusions.  Most conclusions are nihilistic, at least in the sense that, once you begin to think about knowledge you eventually conclude nothing is really certain, and even things that appear certain may not necessarily be certain, and we can’t ever really be sure of everything, so maybe let’s go home, put a gun to our respective heads, and pull the trigger.

Grey writes about a literal, albeit unintended, nihilism. The more one questions the universe, the fewer certainties exist, the more apparent it becomes that, perhaps, nothing exists. Understanding the world in which we live, with all its frustrating ambiguity and nuance, necessitates that we "let go of the reins," or in typical Stationary Waves lingo, "free ourselves of our illusions." Grey's key point in his post is to remark that there is a trade-off between knowledge and certainty.

He makes his case brilliantly. But is it true?

I Laughed At Love, It Was A Big Mistake / In The Absence Of, I Filled It With Hate

For a long time now, I have had a concept in mind that I like to call "practical nihilism" (see the Lexicon for a definition). Practical nihilism is what fills the void left by uncertainty. Grey describes the process perfectly in the passage excerpted above. You can find my take here.

One way to look at it, as Grey points out, is that certainty is some sort of opposite of knowledge, at least in so far as more knowledge gives rise to less certainty. It's not unlike viewing the world through a microscope, zooming in further and further, only to discover progressively more elementary particles that each behave in a manner quite differently from that of the larger particles they form; a quark behaving differently than a proton, which behaves differently than an atom, which behaves differently than a molecule, which behaves differently than a cell, which behaves differently than an organism, which behaves differently than a species, and so on. 

This is true, but does that mean that the rule generalizes? In other words, can we really say that the result of all additional knowledge is the discovery of more uncertainty?

In my previous post, I pointed out that mathematicians, for example, are certain of specific mathematical truths regardless of their ability to prove those truths. The more they know about mathematics, the more certain they become of basic principles like the value of a number's square root. These basic principles are logically irrefutable; logic is, in fact, one thing of which we are decidedly certain.

At the same time, the more we expand our mathematical knowledge, the more we struggle with the Peano Axioms, for example. For some mathematicians, the ability to call the very definition of numbers into question creates a mathematical world of profound nuance and great uncertainty. But for the likes of Steven Landsburg, it's not a big deal. Why not? Here is Landsburg in his own words:

The point [of the Peano Axioms] isn’t to “allow mathematicians to talk” about numbers; mathematicians from Pythagoras through Dedekind had absolutely no problem talking about numbers in the absence of the Peano axioms. Instead, the point of the Peano axioms was to model what mathematicians do when they’re talking about numbers. Like all good models, the Peano axioms are a simplification that captures important aspects of reality without attempting to reproduce reality in detail.

Or, in my words: when we set out to decipher the truth - particularly when the truth we are interested in is abstract, intangible, or predominantly derived from logic - the nature of the enterprise requires that we simplify some things, or hold them constant (ceteris paribus), or otherwise ignore them, in order to get at the central object of the analysis. Once having learned about the central object, we relax the constraints (hopefully progressively) so that we can learn new things that pertain to the new constraints. But the result of each analysis, if it's successful, is more knowledge and less ambiguity.

It would be wrong to call the relaxing of constraints a new form of confusion, nuance, or uncertainty. At every step in the process, we are more certain of what we set out to know. But each new fact brings with it a hunger for more facts, a curiosity for that which is yet to be explained, a thirst for a greater depth of knowledge.

I contend that it is really this new curiosity that Simon Grey calls "uncertainty." The real challenge is neither knowledge nor certainty, both of which come in due course. The real challenge is building a meaningful understanding of the universe using what you've learned. The real challenge is Authenticity.

Meaning
Simon Grey himself may have been the one who first made me aware of the inadequacies of language with respect to human knowledge. Just as a human being may express individualist and collectivist tendencies, depending on the context, without becoming any less of an individual or member of the collective, so too knowledge can increase our certainty while providing a higher tolerance for nuance. We need not choose.

Left to our own devices, I'm fairly sure that both Grey and I could blather on and on about the particulars of knowledge, belief, and certainty. The fact that we have the ability to explore the nuances of the matter by no means implies that the nuances we discover make the truth of any situation less certain. It feels less certain, but remember: Newtonian physics is no less true than quantum physics. The physicist's task is to explore the details; for the rest of us, we limit the scope of the analysis to that which provides the best results.

Grey suggests that this means that the value of knowledge is in its ability to predict the future; that we come to believe in the best estimator of reality thanks to its proven value as an estimator. He might even be right about that - but even if so, what does that have to do with truth or knowledge? Something isn't true because it serves as the best estimator, but the exact reverse: because something is true, it therefore serves as the best estimator.

Grey writes about knowledge as it relates to belief. I don't disagree with his analysis, but I would open the matter up to a third variable: meaning.

To work this into Grey's view, recall that Grey wrote:

Before I disappear down a rabbit hole of my own digging, let me simply say that we know what we know, and we know what we believe, but what we believe may not necessarily be true. Therefore it wise to hold fast to our experiences while also considering our beliefs as things to be challenged from time to time.

This is true, but also hinges on the vital assumption that the questions we ask have meaning. Now we're coming full circle, because if you recall, this issue arose out of what I wrote regarding Lubos Motl's assertion that there is such a thing as a stupid question. I'll illustrate this by example:

You find yourself lost in the woods with nothing but a map. There are many meaningful questions you might ask about your predicament. Considering that you possess a map, I submit that one of the most important questions you can ask at this point is: Which way is North? A less useful question would be How did I get here? A somewhat unhelpful question would be: How do I know that this map is even a map of my present location? A very unhelpful question is: What is the meaning of words like 'North' or 'South' considering the fact that I exist in an M-dimensional universe? Or even worse: Does modern physics tell me more about my existence than The Qu'ran?

I'm not suggesting that none of these questions are ever worth asking. Instead, I'm suggesting that some of them are more meaningful than others. I'm also suggesting that the meaning is context-dependent.

So, one can meaningfully question Peano axioms if one knows that the context of the question is the improvement of a conceptual model for Real Arithmetic. One can meaningfully question the scope and relevance of physics if the context of the question is the struggle to find one's place in the universe. One can question even the meaning of the words "North" and "South" if the context is astronomical cartography.

What matters to these questions is the context in which they are being asked, because the context gives these questions meaning in exactly the same way that the context of a physical analysis will determine whether one chooses Newtonian or quantum physics to conduct the analysis. A more casual view of the situation would suggest that "we don't even know which kind of physics is certain," but within the context of our situation and considering the full scope of human knowledge on the subject, the truth is clear. And certain.

Some days I am a bigger fan of Ayn Rand than others. One of her more important contributions to philosophy was her relentless focus on the context in which discussions occur. Without the all-important context of the analysis, we risk slipping into meaninglessness. This meaninglessness eradicates our ability to relate to those facts in the universe that really are certain.

Conclusion
All that having been said, let me end by focusing on the context of this post: I hope that readers will see this post as being a contribution to line of thought originating from Simon Grey, rather than any kind of rebuttal to it. Another way of saying this is that his thoughts on my thoughts spawned additional thoughts, and we seem to have entered an oscillatory cycle of some kind.

Take it all for what it's worth. It's in the universe now, and exists apart from either he or myself, part of an ongoing dialogue that has existed for millennia as is not likely to end any time soon. Such is the nature of the big questions, I suppose.

And to think that you made it all the way down to the bottom of the page. 

Workout Of The Day

Today, I'm headed out for a 4-5 mile run. The distance run depends on the heat and humidity outside. Southern summers can be brutal for runners. I can only do what I can do.

Math Is Important

Jonathan Finegold-Catalan discusses a quote supplied by Robert Murphy. Unless I'm mistaken, Murphy's original intent with that post was merely to highlight the occasionally hilarious use of absolutist language in Mises' writing style. So we should not take Catalan's point as any kind of quibble with Murphy, so much as a tangential exposition.

Anyway, Catalan's post is worth reading and thinking over. I'm not going to excerpt it because it's reasonably short, and I don't think I can describe his point in a more concise way than he did. So go read it. The general question is to what extent Mises objected to the use of "empiricism" (understood here to mean the statistical analysis of historical economic data) in economics. Catalan reasons that if Mises objected to its use - and it is commonly believed that he did - then Mises was wrong to do it wholesale. In short, there are important applications for quantitative analysis in the field of economics.

I seem to recall (and, indeed, here it is) a Mises Daily article covering with academic precision the difference between how Mises saw "history" and how he saw "economics," i.e. theory. And, if memory serves me right, there were elaborations on this throughout the Austrian blogosphere from (I think) Peter Boettke and Steve Horwitz. But don't hold me to that; this is just what I seem to remember.

Anyway, under Salerno's paradigm outlined in that Mises Daily article, Mises felt that "empiricism" was a legitimate question for economic history, while all questions of economics were a matter of pure theory, and thus mathematical models would be of very little use in that arena. This strikes me as being a well-balanced position, and I have no reason to object to that.

I'm not one of these guys who "knew Mises" or "knew the guy who studied under Mises," so I will defer to what those folks say about how Mises felt about empiricism.

What I will say is this: My reading of Mises is always quite a bit more moderate than the typical Austrian economist's reading. I interpret the Murphy/Catalan quote to mean simply that any conflict between the empirical facts and the economic theory needs to be resolved, either by revising theory to make it more exact, or by refining the quality of one's empirical model. In the worst-case scenario, maybe we could say that the empirical model is too much of an approximation to yield a perfect 100 R-square.

I mean, call me stupid, but I have never gotten the impression from any of the Mises I have read that he opposed empiricism so much as felt that descriptive theory is what mattered most. As you say, I think most people already accept that idea, but from what I learned in my old History of Thought course 10 years ago, I had the impression that socialist economists and Soviet planners were moving toward a "mathematical economics" viewpoint where the economy could be planned and assessed via matrix algebra, and this was the kind of thing Mises objected to. Again, in this day and age, who doesn't?

I will add that society has become far more mathematical since the days of Ludwig von Mises. Even my parents grew up in an age when few adults had any reason to know calculus. In contrast, I myself use it almost every day. More to the point, though, society's ubiquitous conversations about growth rates and rates of change of growth rates and derivative finance exchanges and so on and so forth reflects society's growing comfort with calculus and post-calculus mathematical concepts as modes of thought. 

To put it another way, every child learns what a mathematical vector is in grade school. Nobody ever sits down and does the kind of math that they teach kids about vectors, though. Instead, we get into physics courses in high school - or advanced mathematics courses in college - and come to understand that a vector is a way of mathematically expressing position, direction, and force in a concise and usable way.

Now, physical sciences can directly apply calculations to vectors. Social sciences - and ordinary people in general - can still use vectors as a sort of "theoretical tool." You can start to see things in your life as "vectors" of sorts. Your career path could be thought of as a vector. Your level of anger in an argument. Or whatever.

The point is that one of the benefits of understanding complex mathematical concepts is that they provide logical insights that we wouldn't otherwise see. What's important, of course, is being able to apply those concepts to our lives theoretically in a meaningful way. In that sense, theory always trumps pure math when we're seeking to understand the world. But it's not a one-way thing. Math influences how we think, and thinking influences how we use math. That's because math is in many ways the formalized version of how humans think, anyway. Wherever a good idea comes from is a good source of knowledge. Those who rule out math as a source of insight demonstrate a lack of appreciation for what mathematics actually is.

Coming To Terms With Reality

On Tuesday, James Taranto from The Best of the Web Today published a thoughtful article in which he described why he came to believe the Iraq War was a mistake, and why he thinks Syria is similarly foolhardy. The whole article is a worthy read, of course, but there are some excellent standouts that set this article apart from similar articles written by others. As Taranto writes,

This is not going to be one of those columns in which we repudiate wholesale our position back then, as no small number of former Iraq war supporters have done. That posture has always struck us as pusillanimous (abandoning one popular position for another), pointless (for one cannot annul an already-fought war), and intellectually lazy.

He then states that "no philosophical breakthroughs have occurred" to change his mind, but that the Iraq War is simply an empirical failure that leads him to believe that similar enterprises are likewise doomed. I'd like to briefly risk pusillanimity, pointlessness, and intellectual laziness by outlining my own philosophical change of heart regarding the Iraq War.

In 2003, when the US government began to make the case for invading Iraq, I was twenty-two years old and suffered from what I now believe to be a terrible naivete. I believed the reports that Saddam Hussein had previously gased the Kurds (which were true), and I acknowledged the plain fact that Hussein stood in defiance of the relevant UN treaties and was acting as an aggressor toward Israel by providing military supplies to the Palestinian regime and otherwise verbally stoking the embers of that conflict. Based on these facts - not on the prospect of WMD - I reasoned that ousting Hussein was within the legitimate purview of a combined UN force. When the UN declined to do so, I considered this to be the UN's failure to meet its mandate. The resulting invasion by "the coalition of the willing" was a military engagement I viewed to be a tragedy of international resolve, that France and Russia had plunged the rest of the world into an unnecessarily protracted occupation when a swift, limited, and targeted attack on Iraq would have done the job.

While many conservative readers may find this point of view reasonably well-balanced and will fail to see its naivete, the truth is that history has proven this perspective horrendously wrong. Over the last decade, I have come around to the idea that two acts of governmental illegitimacy do not add up to legitimate war. What I mean is that I continue to believe that Hussein's actions were aggressive, tyrannical, and wrong, but that I now believe that any right claimed by the United States or the United Nations to deploy forces to oust such a leader are no less aggressive, tyrannical, and wrong than the actions of Hussein.

The world has begun to look to me a lot like it looks in the history books that describe the years leading up to World War I. Coalitions of Western governments are playing war games, picking and choosing which lesser country's leaders are to be considered "legitimate" and which are not. Those leaders that are not accepted by the international community are not just ostracized or hit with trade sanctions. They are struck down with military force. On a grand scale, this is no different than the growing number of instances in which the police gun down suspects rather than bringing them to trial.

It is the vain presumption of political legitimacy and superiority on the part of the Western governments that worries me. Just as Obama knew what was best for us plebes with respect to his health care endeavor, so he knows what's best for us regarding Syria. Even worse, he seems to also know what's best for the Syrians. For all the horrible reports of violence coming out of Syria, I cannot point to a single report that outlines why the US, specifically, should be involved, or why it is the Obama Administration that is most capable of deciding which side is to be supported and which side to be punished in that civil war.

Nor do I feel comfortable supporting Russia's position as lone dissenter. Putin's record of political legitimacy is of course far worse than Obama's, and some would even put him on par with Assad. I doubt his motives in opposing a US invasion are noble in any way, shape, or form. On a philosophical level, his presumption of legitimacy is no less audacious and preposterous as Obama's.

Recently, The Crimson Reach asked (rhetorically), "Wouldn't it be terrible if Americans could stop America from going to war?" His point is a good one, and its rhetorical implication is one that I find truly haunting: What if it's impossible for the American public to prevent its government from invading a foreign country? We all agree that war on Syria, regardless of how "limited" the Administration would like it to be, is an awful idea, wrong for our country, and probably wrong for the world.

But what if our central government is so powerful that it simply doesn't matter what the people want? What then? What if the people's tenuous grasp on its "democracy" has already slipped, and we're only now discovering the tyranny under which we're all living?

Workout Of The Day

Today is back and biceps day. Again, the focus here is on building muscles to improve posture, not necessarily to become a triangle-torsoed behemoth.

First do this:

• 5 sets of 10 pull-ups
• 4 sets of 10 seated cable rows
• 3 sets of 10 deadlifts
• 4 sets of 10 back extensions

Then do this:

• 4 mile run

My Five-Word Response To The Crimson Reach

So what if you ‘agreed to host’ this person? So what if you ‘gave a job offer to’ this person? What does that have to do with whether this person may or should be allowed to cross the border? You’re totally free to make all the ‘agreements’ and sign all the ‘contracts’ you like with whomever you like. Nobody is saying otherwise. But that doesn’t mean that whoever you decide to ‘invite’, ‘contract with’, or ‘host’ suddenly no longer needs to obey laws (such as border- and immigration-laws) to which they may – totally and completely independently of you and the ‘agreement’ you made with them – be legitimately subject. The one thing has nothing to do with the other; your merely ‘contracting’ with a person does not have the magical power to melt away all legal restrictions upon that person that might impede their fulfillment of that ‘contract’ – nor should it.

So let's change the law. 

Another Post On Personal Capital

The other day, I wrote a post about how all wealth generation requires savings. As I pointed out there, this may be something like the fishing net made by a subsistence fisherman, or it might be a new professional degree or certification pursued after-hours. No matter what the case may be, if you wish to consume (or save) outside your current production possibilities frontier, you have to first save and then invest that savings in a bid to expand your wealth.

What I left unstated in that blog post, however, was just how personal I feel this concept is. In a manner of speaking, virtually everything you do can be viewed through this savings/capital lens. This is such a profound perspective, in my opinion, that it seems to infiltrate every aspect of my life, and probably yours, too.

Some Examples
Take this blog, for example. I started this blog many years ago for no purpose other than to write down my thoughts in a way that didn't pollute the email inboxes of my friends and family. (Not everyone wants to muse about current events or the philosophical underpinnings of distance running, as you can imagine.) What I discovered after a short while of regular blogging was that concepts laid out in Post A carried implications about Post B, leading to a new Post C, which would then start the cycle over and over again. In short, by dedicating time to organizing my thoughts, I found that I had more ideas to work with when I had new thoughts.

Naturally, this is from whence The Stationary Waves Lexicon sprang. It was a tool to keep these recurring concepts handy so that I could start to refer to them by mere phrases, without having to take the time to describe every old concept whenever I felt it applied to a new blog post or situation. And even though I recognize the methodological problems associated with having a private, internal language built into my thoughts, it has still been a net boon to the development of my thoughts.

This process of building thoughts on top of each other is a lot like saving concepts so that they can be invested in future blog posts. In order to understand this less abstractly, consider how many bloggers have managed to collect and re-edit their past blog posts and publish them in book format. This is the perfect example of saving thoughts as though they were capital and investing them in a new entrepreneurial enterprise.

Another good example is the collection of workouts available on this blog under the label workout ideas. As I mentioned yesterday, I've managed to build up quite a stockpile of workouts, enough to not have to think too much about finding a good workout to exercise my arms, or my abs, or build running speed, or etc. A great deal of that kind of work has already been done - by me - over the past few years of writing this blog. So now if I need to find a good or interesting workout, one very good option available to me is to simply search my own blog for a few ideas from which to choose.

Still another example is a musician's portfolio of songs or existing repertoire, as the case may be. One of the larger hurdles a new band must clear is the development of about three full sets of material. Without that material, there is no hope of getting a good, paying gig as a performing ensemble. A new band comprised of musicians who already know a large number of songs can get in performance shape much more quickly. Moreover, "supergroups" comprised of multiple famous musicians can build their sets from the existing song portfolio of each of its members and can thus tour in support of a single album's worth of songs while still delivering a long and comprehensive live show to their fans by drawing on their previous work.

Conclusion
The point I'm trying to make is that when we collect our thoughts and keep track of what we know, we allow ourselves to essentially "save" our knowledge and "reinvest it" later by applying it to other areas of our lives. This is why I spend so much time writing about the concept of capital and savings. It's not that I think it's a profound economic concept - even though it is. Rather, I feel it's a concept that applies to everyone's ordinary lives. This is the means by which we better our lot in life, and also an important means of keeping oneself stimulated and engaged in daily life. It's remarkable that something as simple as writing down what you do and what you know can have such a profound downstream impact on a person's life.

Try it, you'll see what I mean.

Workout Of The Day

I'll be heading out for a five-mile run today to allow my muscles to recover from yesterday's brutal tricep/chest workout.

I think I will run this workout as a fartlek because I have been neglecting speed and pace work over the last two months, in favor of the 8W thing. I would like to try to become a bit stronger of a runner over the fall/winter season.

Simon Grey: Open Borders Is Illogical

Simon Grey has a recent post in which he argues that the idea of open borders is illogical. While the whole post is worth reading, I think Grey neatly sums up his position in his second paragraph, as follows:

To me, supporting the Open Borders movement is akin to designing a house without doors in the various entry points.  The entire point of putting doors on a house is to regulate who can enter and leave the house, and on what terms, and at what time, so forth and so on.  Likewise with borders, the entire point of their existence is to regulate who can enter and leave, the terms and times of entrance and exit, and so forth.  The Open Borders movement, though, is basically arguing that borders should still exist, but that they shouldn’t be used to regulate anyone’s movement.

It's a fair point, right? If the purpose of the border is regulation of entry, and my position is that entry shouldn't be regulated, then why not advocate for border elimination rather than border freedom?

In cases such as this, I often wonder why immigration restrictionists view national borders as being fundamentally different on every level to any other kind of border that exists in the world. To see what I mean, consider the following Google Maps screen-shot of part of the New York City area:

While most of us would call this metropolitan mess by the general term "New York," there are nonetheless real differences between these communities, and real borders between them. Borders identify legal boundaries between points of administration. Certain police precincts exist between these communities, differences in tax rates and real estate values, differences in the price and delivery of public utilities, and private utilities. And even beyond all of that, the communities are slightly different for more natural reasons such as landscape and local culture.

Yet, at the same time, no immigration restrictionist in his or her right mind would argue that a citizen of Levittown ought to be barred from moving, working, hanging out, or even couch-surfing in Massapequa. Even the prospect of such border enforcement seems absurd to the average immigration restrictionist.

By way of comparison, take a look at this screenshot of a region between California and Baja California.

If it weren't for the thick white line Google Maps uses to delineate between the two states, you'd stand about as good a chance identifying the border between San Diego and Tiujuana as you would the border between Glen Cove and Syosset. The open borders position is simply that a resident of Tiujana ought to be able to interact with San Diego in exactly the same way that a resident of Glen Cove can interact with Syosset. That's all.

An argument in favor of moving from Glen Cove to Syosset - or even moving from Manhattan to Dallas - is an argument for neither anarchy nor border irrelevance. Or, if it is an argument for border irrelevance, it is as equally as anarchic as the idea that there is nothing inherently problematic in moving from Denver to Boulder, or from Bismarck to Minneapolis, or from Minneapolis to St. Paul.

In one sense, the borders matter. In another sense, they don't. If that fact is "illogical" it is a level of illogic that is universally shared by anyone who believes people ought to be allowed to move to an adjacent city in the same metropolitan area. And, in the case of San Diego and Tiujana, it is actually the very same argument.

The Disconnect Between Macroeconomics And Me

I do not want to be too hard on this post at Idiosyncratic Whisk, because it outlines an idea that I agree with almost completely; namely, that the so-called "housing bubble" was not really a housing bubble, but rather a liquidity crisis caused by Fed policy. Read the whole thing. It is a very good, and very well-documented article, as is typically the case with Idiosyncratic Whisk.

But the following quote stands out to me as being a good example of why I think sometimes macroeconomists arrive at the correct conclusions with some very strange (to me) reasoning (emphasis mine):

The overwhelming factor justifying a higher Home Price to Rent (PTR) is the real interest rate. That is because much of the value of owning, versus renting, is as a hedge against future nominal increases in rent. And, the present value of those relative gains is very sensitive to real rates.

I agree that "the overwhelming factor justifying a higher PTR" is the interest rate. What surprised me about Kevin Erdmann's post was the reason he gave for this: that home owners choose to be home owners as a hedge against future nominal increases in rent. That is not the case, at least not in my experience. I do not know very many home owners who chose to purchase a home in order to hedge against future rent increases. There are many reasons to own a home, and hedging against higher future rents is not a very common one.

To me, this sounds a lot like the suggestion that people only purchase cars to hedge against higher expected future leasing prices. In general, leasing is cheaper per month than financing a car, just like renting an apartment is generally a bit cheaper per month than paying a mortgage + insurance + escrow + all the other expenses associated with home ownership. Not surprisingly, lower income individuals tend to be tenants, while higher income individuals tend to own their homes outright.

Now, it could be that I'm just being thick. It's possible - heck, it's even highly likely - that Erdmann was really just writing about the PTR number in isolation. That is, maybe Erdmann's only point in saying the above was that the only relevant economic information with respect to the ratio of home prices to rent is the relative benefit of owning versus renting, or vice versa. This is obviously a fair and accurate point to make.

Even so, it highlights the remarkable disparity between how economists and financiers view these issues, versus how decision-making actually occurs to laymen like myself. The decision to own a home comes down first to affordability; that has some relevance to PTR, but my point is simpler than that. Some people simply do not have enough money to even think about buying a dwelling. The ratio is irrelevant to such people.

Once owning a home becomes affordable, the decision is not so much about hedging against rent as it is about building equity. That is, rent is not a leverageable asset, but property is. Now, it's possible that savvy finance-types who live in urban areas would prefer to rent and then invest the money saved in the stock market, thereby earning a greater return. But this is only the kind of decision that appeals to people who are comfortable with self-directed investing. For the ordinary person, their reasoning is more like, "I'm paying rent money every month anyway... I might as well get a home out of it."

Now, obviously Erdmann's reasoning is more economically savvy, but it's possible that he's giving the economy too much credit by assuming that everyone else is as savvy as he is. As for myself, I'm not fully convinced that the average person thinks of it that way.

But maybe this is why I'm not a real economist. At least I agree with Erdmann's bottom line, which implies perhaps a close enough for rock-and-roll approach to economic analysis.

Fitness For Now

So, now that I've wrapped up my 8W thing, I figure I should move on to the next big thing. For now, I don't really have a workout "plan," per se. But publishing daily workouts on my blog was good for my hit counts, and it was also very convenient for me in that I did not have to write my workout down before heading to the gym; I could just check my workout on my mobile phone on my way in. Thus, I think it will prove productive to keep posting daily workouts.

But before I get to that, it's only fair to make clear what my over-arching objective is with my workouts for the next little while.

As I think I mentioned before, I undertook the 8W thing to get in shape for an upcoming vacation. Well, I'm still a few weeks away from said vacation. There is enough time between now and then that I can't just rest on my laurels, get a daily run in, and chill out. I've also completed what was essentially a "cutting phase." Considering that, I think it's best to work on building some more muscle.

And, regarding muscle mass, I would like to focus on workouts that will improve my posture and rebuild some of the muscle mass I lost during my cut. That means: lots of abdominal work, lots of work on back muscles, chest and shoulder work, and some balancing exercises. To achieve this, I think I'll swap out some of the plyometric work I've been doing lately and replace it with balancing exercises, Bosu work, etc. There are also some exercises that I enjoy a lot, but that I have not had the opportunity to do a lot of lately (push-ups, for example), so I'd also like to focus on doing exercises that are fun for me.

Finally, I've built up quite an encyclopedia of workouts lately. I will be drawing heavily from those exercises in order to avoid having to reinvent the wheel every day. I'm also going to take a standard approach to strength training in that I'll be focusing on particular muscle groups on particular days. (But I will be incorporating combination movements where possible.)

Okay, that's the approach. Now, without further ado, here's today's workout.

First, do each super-set three times:

• 15 x Push-ups with feet on a medicine ball / 15 x cable chest press
• 15 x push-ups with one hand on a medicine ball, roll to the other hand between each / 15 x cable crossovers
• 15 x one-legged push-ups on an inverted Bosu, jump to switch legs between each / 15 x incline press

Then, do this:

• 4-5 mile run

8W Retrospective

Having finished up the eight-week-long fitness-building set of workouts I've been calling "8W," I thought I would write a post about my general impressions of how it went.

First, I remind readers that the general principle behind the workouts was that the first four weeks would consist of an approach to muscle-building, while the last four weeks would be more of a cardio or "cut" phase. Ostensibly, this was designed to take someone from being somewhat out-of-shape to being in, say "beach-ready" condition.

How did it work? Well, I was extremely pleased by the first four weeks. I think I managed to build a decent amount of muscle and strength. Many of the workouts were extremely challenging, but none were so challenging that I failed to finish the cardio workout afterward (on days that included both strength and cardio). After four weeks, I had succeeded in building the kind of muscle I was looking for. I was looking good, feeling good, and my blood sugar was under control.

At the outset of the last four weeks, I came down with a bad cold that disrupted the momentum I had built up. I like to say that fitness is a matter of getting the ball rolling. The hard part is simply getting your body used to the prospect of fitness, building muscle, burning fat, etc. Once you "get into the zone" (for lack of a better term), it becomes somewhat easy to improve even further. This is how so many people make so much good progress in a short period of time.

Well, my cold served to pull me out of the zone, and I never really got back in for the remainder of the workout regimen. However, I don't feel that this fully explains the shortcomings of the final four weeks. Truthfully, I found them a lot easier than I had intended them to be. A few of the workouts were difficult, and all that cardio was initially a stretch, but my intention was to make the final four weeks excruciating. That didn't happen.

Then again, I can safely say that the final four weeks accomplished their task. At this point I have so little fat on my body that it's a struggle to take my insulin without bleeding. There isn't any adipose tissue into which to stick the needle. I have an incredible amount of energy - so much so that I scarcely need seven hours of sleep per night. It's more like six, actually.

All said, I think it's safe to say that 8W accomplished its intention. In that sense, it was a real success. As I mentioned at the outset, this set of workouts was developed for a friend, and I can happily report that we both achieved similar results. If I restrict myself to a purely physical view of the situation, it worked out great. But what I learned this time around is how much harder I can afford to push myself. That fact will surely be captured in future workouts.

I hope you enjoyed it, too!

8W: Week 8 / Day 7

Rest day.

Great work! You finished all 8 weeks!