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The Narco Tunnels of Nogales

If everyone had kept quiet, it could have been the most valuable parking spot on earth. Convenient only to the careworn clothing stores clustered in the southern end of downtown Nogales, Ariz., it offered little to shoppers, and mile-long Union Pacific (UNP) trains sometimes cut it off from much of the city for 20 minutes at a time. But the location was perfect: In the middle of the short stretch of East International Street, overshadowed by the blank walls of quiet commercial property, the space was less than 50 feet from the international border with Mexico.

On Aug. 16, 2011, just before 3:30 p.m., three men sat in a white Chevrolet box truck parked near the Food City supermarket on Grand Court Plaza. In the driver’s seat was Anthony Maytorena; at 19, Maytorena already had an impressive criminal record, and a metal brace on one arm as a result of being shot while fleeing from local police three years earlier. Locked in the cargo compartment behind him were two boys from Nogales, Sonora, the Arizona town’s twin city on the other side of the border—Jorge Vargas-Ruiz, 18, and another so young that his name has never been released. Together they drove over to International Street, where two cars were holding the parking spot for them.

Maytorena parked the truck, climbed out, and—watched by a spotter gazing down from high up in the hills on the Sonoran side of the border—sauntered around the corner. Inside, the two teenagers lifted a hatch in the floor of the cargo compartment; beneath, in the steel box that had once contained the truck’s refrigeration unit, was a trapdoor that opened less than a foot above the street.

On a word from the spotter, men underground lowered a camouflaged circular plug of concrete held in place by a hydraulic jack, revealing a hole just 10 inches in diameter. The hole opened into a tunnel 3 feet square and 90 feet long, leading to a room in an abandoned hotel on the Mexican side of the border. It took less than 40 minutes to transfer 207 tightly wrapped bundles of marijuana from the San Enrique hotel to the back of the truck: more than 2,600 pounds in all, conservatively valued at just over a million dollars.

U.S. Border Patrol agents and officers of the Nogales Police Department rode slowly past the truck while the transfer took place. None of them noticed anything unusual. Customs officers manning the pedestrian border crossing at the end of the street continued their work as normal. With the cylindrical plug jacked back into place, the boys in the back of the truck used a caulking gun to close the seam around it with concrete sealant. Once again, the tunnel entrance in the parking space was invisible. As the truck pulled away at a little before 4:30 p.m., it had begun to rain. Behind the wheel, Maytorena almost certainly believed the tunnel operation had been yet another audacious success.

Crime has been coming up out of the ground in Nogales for a while now. Since 1995 more than 90 illicit underground passageways have been discovered in various states of completion in the two-mile stretch of urban frontier that separates Arizona’s Nogales from its far larger twin in Sonora. Twenty-two complete tunnels have been found in the past three years alone. Streets have opened up beneath unwary pedestrians and subsided under heavy vehicles; the city has become infamous as the Tunnel Capital of the Southwest.

Although quantification is impossible, the underground shipment routes represent a significant economic investment, one that far exceeds the time and money spent on the homemade submarines, ultralight aircraft, and catapults used to move narcotics elsewhere. Some tunnels cost at least a million dollars to build and require architects, engineers, and teams of miners to work for months at a stretch. A few include spectacular feats of engineering, running as much as 100 feet deep, with electric rail systems, elevators, and hydraulic doors. But the economies of scale are extraordinary. Tunnels like these can be used to move several tons of narcotics in a single night.

by Adam Higgenbotham, Bloomberg Businessweek |  Read more:

AP Photo

The Wiggle of Least Resistance

I got a bike — a fixed-gear with bright blue wheels, custom-made to my specifications. I am a San Francisco techno-hipster, so this selection was a bit of a self-caricature. But sometimes the predictable thing turns out to be the best thing, too, and you can’t let that stop you. When I went to receive my bike from its maker in a cramped workshop down on Cesar Chavez Street, I didn’t know what I know now: a single San Franciscan in possession of a good bike must be in want of a Wiggle.

I got the bike and I started to ride it. Gently at first. Tentatively. When you’ve biked only on quiet cul-de-sacs and college campuses, the idea of riding in the city, right up there alongside the cars, seems frankly pretty absurd. So in those early days, I picked my path carefully through quiet avenues. I pedaled exclusively on side streets with no stop lights.

But slowly I gathered my courage. It began with a Saturday foray down Market Street, San Francisco’s ugly, angry main artery. I didn’t get flattened or flung over the handlebars and I liked the look of the tall buildings blurring by on both sides. Next, I wanted to ride my bike to work — but I couldn’t quite figure out how.

San Francisco is spotted with steep hills, and in the middle they mass shoulder-to-shoulder like a defensive line, splitting the city in two. To the west, there’s Golden Gate Park and the long avenues of the Outerlands, the grid that stretches all the way to the Pacific; to the east, there’s the Mission and Market Street and the glistening bay. To the west, my apartment; to the east, my office. The train that takes you from one side to the other tunnels through the heart of a hill. If you drive it, your car labors up one side, teeters at the top, then pitches down the other.

But there is no tunnel for bikers, and bikers can’t climb those streets. (Well, maybe some bikers can. This one couldn’t.) The shallow grade outside my door left me breathless, and the hills that separated me from downtown were much, much steeper. I cursed the blue-wheeled bike for its lack of mechanical advantage.

And then I heard about the Wiggle.

The Wiggle is not a secret, not exactly; there is a detailed Wikipedia entry. But you would never know to Google “the wiggle” unless someone told you about it, right? You would never know the Wiggle was even a thing unless one of your techno-hipster co-workers, also in possession of a fancy flat-colored fixed-gear, upon hearing of your plight, said: “Dude … you know about the Wiggle, right?”

by Robin Sloan, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Wendy MacNaughton

The Economics of the Google Gigabit

In the excitement around Google's unveiling of the $70 gigabit broadband connection in Kansas City, some may be wondering how it is that Google can offer a gigabit for moderately more than what most of us pay for far slower cable broadband connections.

On one side of the equation is the fact that big cable companies (Time Warner Cable, Comcast, etc.) have long been ripping off consumers by pricing their services far above cost -- something they can easily do because they face so little competition. But the more interesting side of the equation is how Google can make its gigabit price so low.

Recall that Chattanooga made major waves with its gigabit service, priced then at the rock-bottom rate of $350/month. A gigabit is not available in many communities and where it is available, the price is often over $10,000 per month. We published an in-depth case study of their approach a few months ago.

But, as Milo Medin -- the head of the Google Fiber project -- is fond of saying, "No one moves bits cheaper than Google." Google has built an incredible worldwide fiber optic network. Let's call this lessons 1 and 2.

Lesson 1: Google built its own network. It isn't leasing connections or services from big telecommunications companies. Building your own network gives you more control -- both of technology and pricing. 

Lesson 2: Google uses fiber-optics. These connections are reliable and have the highest capacity of any communications medium. The homes in Kansas City are connected via fiber whereas Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink, and others continue to rely on last-generation technologies because they are delaying investment in modern technology to boost their profits.

Others have already followed these lessons but are not able to offer their gig for such a low prices. To understand why, let's start with some basics. I'm hypothetically starting Anytown Fiber Net in my neighborhood and I want to offer a gig. Whenever any of my Anytown subscribers want to transfer files amongst themselves, the operating cost to me approaches zero because (aside from the capital costs of building the network), the cost of transfering those files is basically the electricity it takes to pulse lasers over the fiber and keep the fans on the routers humming.

Lesson 3: Local traffic on the network is essentially free. A local gigabit is no big deal on a fiber network. (Hat tip to Lafayette Utilities System for being the first to offer local 100Mbps traffic for free.)

We start talking about real operating costs when Anytown users want to connect to networks that are not on the Anytown network. When a user wants to watch a video on YouTube ordownload a patch from Microsoft, I need to interconnect with other networks that can get me there. For a small player like me, that means paying for transit. I pay Level 3 or some other major national network operator so my user can send a request to YouTube over the Level 3 network.

The arrangement between me and Level 3 is interesting. I don't pay per bit that my customers use. Instead, I "commit" to a specific capacity. The higher the capacity, the lower my per bit charge. So if I commit to 500Mbps, I may be paying $7 for each Mbps but if I commit to 2000Mbps, I may pay $5 for each Mbps (these numbers are totally invented, not unlike how actual contracts seem to be made). But the interesting part is how it is measured and its implications.

My committed rate determines my cost but not necessarily what I have access to. Let's say I commit to a 500Mbps connection to Level 3 for $7/Mbps. I have to pay for the amount of Mbps that corresponds to 95% of my peak demand. The cost comes down to how high the peaks are, not how many bits are transferred over the course of the month. So if my peak was 550 Mbps, then I have to pay for (550 * .95) * $7, or $3,657.50

On the other hand, if I allowed the combined usage of my users to hit a far higher peak, say 1,000 Mbps, my cost would be $6,650 and I would be kicking myself for not upping my committed rate. Fortunately, I can control the peak with my routers, allowing me some control (at the cost of alienating my users who will see worse performance individually).

Another thing I can do is "peer" with others. For instance, if Anytown Net can get Google to connect directly to us, traffic to Google sites (ahem, YouTube) becomes free (as Google likely wouldn't charge because it wants to encourage everyone to use its services). This is why the Open Connect Netflix announcement is so important.

Allowing users to hit popular sites without increasing the peak bandwidth saves real money. In fact, a sizable community fiber network reported to me that peering with a major source of video traffic dropped their monthly costs by tens of thousands of dollars. This brings us to Lesson 4.

Lesson 4: Scale matters. Big time. Everyone wants to interconnect with large networks and large sources of content. The larger Anytown Net is, the more others will be interested in connecting with me.

by Christopher, Community Broadband Networks |  Read more:

99 Ways to Be Naughty in Kazakhstan

A few months ago, at the Tablao Villa Rosa, a tourist-friendly restaurant in Madrid, dozens of beautifully dressed women from all over the world were gathered around a stage taking cellphone pictures of a male flamenco dancer in tight pants. The women, whooping and clapping against the sides of their wine glasses, were editors, publishers and executives from the far-flung corners of the Cosmopolitan magazine universe — missionaries from the more established international Cosmos (Australia, France, Britain) and the newer, upstart Cosmos (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, Vietnam and dozens of other countries). They gathered there at the biennial Cosmic Conference to soak up the Cosmo ethos (“Fun, fearless, female!”) and then went home to radiate it outward. One Cosmo staff member would tell me — in complete seriousness, having chosen her words carefully — that Cosmic was going to change my life.

“Did you see those pants?” asked Kate White as she sat down with a glass of red wine at the wine-barrel table where I was writing down my impressions of, among other things, the flamenco pants. White, 61, is the laser-blue-eyed editor of Cosmo U.S., the mother ship, or Big Cosmo, as it’s called by other editors. During White’s 14-year tenure, the magazine has increased its U.S. circulation to 3 million readers, from 2.3 million, and introduced 22 international editions for a total of 64, including spinoffs. (By comparison, Marie Claire has 35 international editions, and Glamour has 16). She’s dazzling but relaxed, with a full, frequent laugh. She is the Bill Clinton of Cosmic, the charming and influential American, the unofficial boss of bosses, toward whom her international counterparts gravitate. Her book, “I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know,” is due out in September.

White also wastes no time. Within minutes she was asking me whether and when I want to marry, whether and when I want to have kids, whether I’d want to marry but not have kids and whether I’d consider freezing my eggs. I was surprised by my answers, not knowing I had them until I heard myself telling her, with no hesitation, that I did want to marry and have kids but that I thought I’d be O.K. if neither happened and that work was more important to me at the moment (perhaps to the detriment of those things) and a number of other personal details. Another Cosmo editor swooped in before I could ask her for specific advice, but I would have.

White’s likable directness is one of her magazine’s defining characteristics. Cosmo has a cheerful, girlfriendy tone (“When Your Period Makes You Cra-a-zy”) and a much racier reputation than its newsstand competitors (“Eeek! You’ll Die When You Read What These ‘Normal’ Guys Wanted Once Their Pants Hit the Floor”). Its covers rarely fail to feature at least one bold, all-caps rendering of the word “sex.” The August issue, for instance, offered “52 Sex Tips” and “When Your Vagina Acts Weird After Sex.” A sampling of 2012 headlines includes “50 Sex Tips,” “50 Kinky Sex Moves,” “99 Sex Questions” and “His Best Sex Ever.”

The repetition can be a little numbing, but it may help explain how Cosmo, which is the best-selling monthly magazine in the United States, has morphed into such a global juggernaut. (“If all the Cosmo readers from around the world came together,” read a recent piece in Cosmo South Africa, “this group would form the 16th-largest country in the world.”) Through those 64 editions, the magazine now spreads wild sex stories to 100 million teens and young women (making it closer to the 12th-largest country, actually) in more than 100 nations — including quite a few where any discussion of sex is taboo. And plenty of others where reading a glossy magazine still carries cachet. (“Many girls consider a hard copy of Cosmo to be an important accessory,” says Maya Akisheva, the editor of Cosmo Kazakhstan.) As the brand proudly points out, in 2011 alone, these readers spent $1.4 billion on shoes, $400 million on cars, $2.5 billion on beauty products and $1.5 billion on fragrance and bought 24 million pairs of jeans.

by Edith Zimmerman, NY Times |  Read more:

Marie van Regteren Altena
Still Life with Geranium and Japanese Print
20th century
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The Best Time I Quit Drinking

I was sitting in a cafe the other day drinking tea and watching a woman sip a glass of wine. I wasn’t fully boring-holes-into-her-head watching her, of course, but working on my computer and dividing my attention among a project, two e-mail inboxes, iTunes, cute dogs trotting past, and this woman holding a glass of white wine and talking to her friend. I must have glanced over a dozen times to see the glass still held aloft and half-full, as if she had forgotten it was in her hand. My god, had she forgotten? What was wrong with this woman? Could the conversation be that interesting?

It’s at moments like these that it becomes impossible to forget what I would sometimes like to, that as perfectly okay as it might sometimes seem to have just one beer or join in a champagne toast, I can’t. If I start I won’t be able to stop; I’m not and never will be a normal drinker.

I never in my life forgot about a drink in my hand or a bottle in my cabinet. In those last desperate months when I still hoped that if only I exerted enough self-control I too could drink normally it was as if an open bottle of wine languishing in the pantry glowed phosphorescently. But it didn’t glow for everyone, and for a very long time I imagined that I could make myself not see it. I would leave notes taped to my bedroom door pleading with myself to not venture into the kitchen, I’d exult in having a single glass of wine with dinner, think “see! Ican have just one!” then spend the next three nights bombed. I remember one particular bottle of vodka belonging to a roommate that I must have drunk and replaced a dozen times. I would drink just a little bit at a time until I knew it would be noticed and felt I might as well finish it off before I bought a new bottle. I would worry all the next day that I would be caught before I could smuggle in the replacement but once I did I would tell myself it was no big deal: everyone drinks their roommates’ booze sometimes, right? But this wasn’t sometimes anymore.

Was I always this way? Yes and no. I loved alcohol from the second I first felt the fire of purloined whiskey in my throat at some high school party, but I was cautious, too. Three of my grandparents were addicted to booze or pills, two of them burning out before I was born (one doing so quite literally in a house fire caused by passing out in bed with a lit cigarette). Even before I was treated for an eating disorder at 15 I suspected that my mother’s food and exercise obsessions were manifestations of that same addictive hunger. And so part of my behavior toward alcohol involved careful self-monitoring — afraid that I would have to give up booze if it became an obvious problem I learned to be cautious and secretive about my relationship with it.

I hid the extent of my drinking, trying to camouflage myself as a moderate drinker. I drank before I went out and after, added shots to my drinks at parties when no one was paying attention, carried flasks. I can’t think of a single time when any one person knew how much alcohol I consumed over the course of an evening. This furtiveness is common to many alcoholics but seems more common among women, for one way we show our power and status in this society is by visible self-control, never letting anyone see how hungry we are (why else is Victoria Beckham so fascinating?).

I’ve heard the condition of alcoholism defined as fear of life, a condition alcoholics treat with booze and drugs as well as a variety of addictive behaviors. Although I rarely made the mental equation I feel bad = I need a drink, my cravings for alcohol manifested when I felt most keenly the gap between how other people saw me: a smart, cool, cosmopolitan person with a fascinating career — and how I felt inside: hollowed out, desperate, and worthless. I drank to blunt my fear and discomfort, to blur the edges, to forget I felt like a fraud. As Caroline Knapp put it in her beautiful memoir Drinking: A Love Story, “I loved [alcohol]’s special power of deflection, its ability to shift my focus away from my own awareness and onto something else, something less painful than my own feelings.”

by An Alcoholic, The Hairpin |  Read more:

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Saving "Craft" from Cuteness

In the first minute of the TLC summer show “Craft Wars,” the host Tori Spelling says the word “craft” and its variants over a dozen times. It’s the “ultimate crafting competition.” Competitors have “every crafting tool they could dream of.” “As an avid crafter myself, with my own crafting line….” The repetition seems unnecessary, given the show’s title and the beauty wall behind Spelling featuring the full spectrum of fabric, thread, tools, and notions. But after listening to Spelling say “craft” a few dozen more times, without substitution, I realized her writers weren’t brand-crazy. They were just stumped. There are no synonyms for a word that has lost its meaning.

What “craft” mostly means on “Craft Wars” is the act of making things cuter. Take this shopping cart full of sports equipment and make a cute bag. Take this shopping cart full of school supplies and make a cute playhouse. That these bags will never be used, that some of them are not even completed, that, really, a duffel bag has already achieved ideal sports-bag form, are not considerations, not when a sawed-off tennis racket can be inserted “for ventilation” and tennis balls strung to make a “more comfortable” carrying strap. And what could be more delightful than a playhouse roofed in composition-book covers, never mind its ability to withstand rain?

Craft used to mean something, and it would never have been made with Mod Podge. You can buy a tea towel with the William Morris quotation, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” (It is a hundred per cent linen, so it is both.) What Morris, a designer, entrepreneur, futurist, and leader of the late nineteenth century Arts and Crafts Movement, proposed was a return to the medieval craft tradition, in which objects were made by hand by skilled workmen, and priced accordingly. Rather than three sets of elaborately decorated transferware china, you would have one set of handmade and glazed plates. Rather than rooms full of elaborate Victorian furniture, you would own a few chairs, hand hewn and joined with wood, not industrial glue.

Reformers like Morris proposed that we live with less, but better, much as the unconsumption movement does today. Recent books like “Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Clothing” show the physical and environmental toll of a closet stuffed with ten-dollar why-not dresses, while blogs like “Make It Do,” “Unconsumption,” and “Stuff Does Matter” suggest new criteria for getting, spending, and discarding the contents of those closets and cupboards. And many of those criteria derive from the old-school definition of craft: make it yourself, buy better quality items, think about each purchase, keep it for a long time.

“Craft Wars,” in contrast, seesaws uneasily between the desire to make it beautiful and the desire to make it useful and usually ends up at neither. Two competitors, asked to craft a birdhouse out of the contents of a kitchen junk drawer, build chunky boxes out of wood, and start sticking the junk to them. (The Victorians would have used seashells, to better effect.) Asked to make patio furniture out of beach toys, the competitors give us wetsuit throw pillows and a plastic pail turned ice bucket versus a lounge chair made of boogie boards threaded together on a steel-pipe frame. The boogie-board lounge maker, the only male contestant in the first two episodes, is also the only crafter whose skill Morris would have recognized. Kevin Chartier, who was laid off an an art director, makes metal sculpture while working as a stay-at-home father and handyman. When confronted with a large scale, three-dimensional project, he didn’t separate the beautiful from the useful, but got out the blowtorch. It’s regrettable, given the overall demographics of the show’s audience, that it had to be a man with power tools that broke the show’s decorated box. The longstanding gender division between the craftsman working for money, and the craftswoman working to feed, clothe, and comfort her family seemed re-inscribed.

by Alexandra Lange, New Yorker | Read more:

Illustration by Kim Demarco.

How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance

I've had guns pulled on me by four people under Central Mississippi skies — once by a white undercover cop, once by a young brother trying to rob me for the leftovers of a weak work-study check, once by my mother and twice by myself. Not sure how or if I've helped many folks say yes to life but I've definitely aided in few folks dying slowly in America, all without the aid of a gun.

***

I'm 17, five years younger than Rekia Boydwill be when she is shot in the head by an off duty police officer in Chicago. It's the summer after I graduated high school and my teammate, Troy, is back in Jackson, Mississippi. Troy, who plays college ball in Florida, asks me if I want to go to McDonald's on I-55.

As Troy, Cleta, Leighton and I walk out of McDonald's, that Filet-o-Fish grease straight cradling my lips, I hold the door for open for a tiny, scruffy-faced white man with a green John Deere hat on.

"Thanks, partner," he says.

A few minutes later, we're driving down I-55 when John Deere drives up and rolls his window down. I figure that he wants to say something funny since we'd had a cordial moment at McDonald's. As soon as I roll my window down, the man screams, "Nigger lovers!" and speeds off.

On I-55, we pull up beside John Deere and I'm throwing finger-signs, calling John Deere all kinds of clever "motherfuckers." The dude slows down and gets behind us. I turn around, hoping he pulls over.

Nope.

John Deere pulls out a police siren and places it on top of his car. Troy is cussing my ass out and frantically trying to drive his Mama's Lincoln away from John Deere. My heart is pounding out of my chest, not out of fear, but because I want a chance to choke the shit out of John Deere. I can't think of any other way of making him feel what we felt.

Troy drives into his apartment complex and parks his Mama's long Lincoln under some kind of shed. Everyone in the car is slumped down at this point. Around 20 seconds after we park, here comes the red, white and blue of the siren.

We hear a car door slam, then a loud knock on the back window. John Deere has a gun in one hand and a badge in the other. He's telling me to get out of the car. My lips still smell like Filet-o-Fish.

"Only you," he says to me. "You going to jail tonight." He's got the gun to my chest.

"Fuck you," I tell him and suck my teeth. "I ain't going nowhere." I don't know what's wrong with me.

Cleta is up front trying to reason with the man through her window when all of a sudden, in a scene straight out of Boyz n the Hood, a black cop approaches the car and accuses us of doing something wrong. Minutes later, a white cop tells us that John Deere has been drinking too much and he lets us go.

by Kiese Laymon, Gawker |  Read more:

Illustration by Jim Cooke

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emerald city
by wildpianist (chris tarnawski)
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The Purest of Them All

When most Americans talk about good-tasting water, they’re talking about water that tastes like their own spit.

“When you taste something, you’re comparing the taste of that water to the saliva in your mouth,” says Gary Burlingame, who supervises water quality for the Philadelphia Water Department. “The saliva in your mouth is salty.”

Salty saliva bathes your tongue, drenching every one of your thousands of taste buds. It protects you from nasty bacteria, moistens your food, helps you pronounce the word “stalactite” and even lets you know when you might be drinking something bad for you. Like water.

Pure water, that is.

Stripping water down to an ultrapure state makes it unfit for human consumption.

In the world of electronics, manufacturers remove all of the minerals, dissolved gas and dirt particles from water. The result is called ultrapure water, and they use it to clean tiny, sensitive equipment like semiconductors, which are found in computer microchips.

Water molecules have a slight negative charge, which means they’re good at dissolving or pulling other molecules apart. When water is in an ultrapure state, it’s a “super cleaner,” sucking out the tiniest specks of dirt and leaving your computer’s brain squeaky clean.

But if you were to drink ultra-pure water, it would literally drink you back. The moment it came through your lips, it would start leaching valuable minerals from your saliva.

by Kelly Izlar, Scientific American |  Read more:
Photo: Powering A Nation (100gallons.org)

Robert Shiller on Behavioral Economics

In the past twenty years there has been a revolution in economics with the study not of how people would behave if they were perfectly rational, but of how they actually behave. At the vanguard of this movement is Robert Shiller of Yale University. He sits down with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE.

David Edmonds: Okay you’ve got a choice, buy this plastic alarm clock right next to where you are standing for $28 or walk ten blocks and buy it in another shop for half price; $14. Now try this one, buy a laptop for $1995 in the shop next to you or walk ten blocks and get it for $1981. Well chances are you are more likely to walk to save money on the cheap clock then the expensive laptop, which is odd because in either case you could save exactly the same amount of money. In the past twenty years there has been a revolution in economics with the study not of how people would behave if they were perfectly rational, but of how they actually behave. At the vanguard of this movement is Robert Shiller of Yale University.

Nigel Warburton: Robert Shiller welcome to Social Science Bites.

Robert Shiller: My pleasure.

Nigel Warburton: The topic we are going to focus on is behavioural economics. Now we know roughly what economics is, but what’s behavioural economics?

Robert Shiller: Well the word ‘behavioural’ refers to the introduction of other social sciences into economics: psychology, sociology, and political science. It’s a revolution in economics that has taken place over the past twenty years or so. I think it’s bringing economics into a broader appreciation of reality. Economics was actually more behavioural fifty or a hundred years ago. At Yale University where I work, 1927 was the year where the department of economics, sociology and government was split into three separate departments and they moved us all apart.

Nigel Warburton: Why would it matter if they just split the departments up, I mean there’s an argument that specialisation actually allows people to progress further in their field – rather then knowing a little bit about everything.

Robert Shiller: Absolutely. There are both advantages and disadvantages of this structure. The advantage is that we develop mathematical economics and mathematical finance to a very advanced level – and it’s useful: we have option pricing theory that is very subtle and allows complex calculations that have some relevance to understanding these markets. But it loses perspective on why we have these options anyway. It offers a justification typically that involves rational behaviour. You can get into the swim of that, thinking ‘I want to know why smart people use options’ And it’s instructive to go through the exercise of thinking ‘is it really ever right to buy these investment products?’ But that doesn’t mean that you’re answering the question why people really do buy options and why this market exists and why other markets that sound equally plausible don’t exist.

Nigel Warburton: So what you’re saying is that traditional economics has focused on a kind of ideally rational individual: what would they do if they behaved in their own best interests based on the information available? But behavioural economics brings in the fact that we don’t always behave in our own best interests.  (...)

Robert Shiller: There’s a lot going on. It turns out that the human mind is very complicated. Economic theory likes to reduce human behaviour to a canonical form, the structure has been, ever since Samuelson wrote this a half century ago, that people want to maximise their consumption. All they want to do is consume goods; they don’t care about anyone else. There’s neither benevolence nor malevolence. All they care about is eating or getting goods and they want to smooth it, they described it in terms of so-called utility functions through their lifetime and that’s it. That is such an elegant simple model, but it’s too simple and if you look at what psychology shows, the mind is the product of human evolution and it has lots of different patterns of behaviour. The discoveries that psychologists make to economics are manifold.

Nigel Warburton: One that I know you’ve discussed is this notion of fairness that might trump the economic rationality.

Robert Shiller: A sense of fairness is a fundamental human universal. It’s been found in some recent studies that it even goes beyond humans, that higher primates do have some vestigial or limited understanding of fairness and equity. In terms of how the market responds to crises, economists assume that everything is done purely out of self-interest. And yet non-economists when we ask them about how things work, they have a totally different view. In one of my questionnaire surveys we asked something like this: if the economy were to improve what would your employer do?

a) nothing – why should he help me just because the economy goes up?

b) well the economy improves means the market for my services improves so my employer would realise out of self-interest that he would have to raise my wage in order to keep me.

c) my employer is a nice person and he would recognise that he should share the benefits with his employees.

I gave this question to both economists and non-economists. The economists all picked B, or most of them picked B! They think that market forces dominate. Whereas very few of the non-economists did: they thought either their employer was a bad guy which is A, or their employer is a nice guy, that’s C. So there’s a different worldview and I think that if people think that fairness is such an important thing in labour contracts then modelling the world as if it’s of total insignificance is wrong.

Nigel Warburton: So doesn’t this just make everything much, much more complicated because you can’t reduce individuals then to some kind of cipher where they are simply maximising their self-interest in terms of economic benefits?

Robert Shiller: That’s why a lot of economists don’t like this. Maybe with some justification they’ll say that there’s too many details in this theory, you can explain anything with it. But I’m un-persuaded by that criticism because, first of all, we can work on this and study people more and understand what psychological principle is relevant. And secondly, it doesn’t help to have a theory based on wrong assumptions.

by Social Science Bites |  Read more:

The Egg

You were on your way home when you died.

It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.

And that’s when you met me.

“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”

“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.

“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”

“Yup,” I said.

“I… I died?”

“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.

You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?”

“More or less,” I said.

“Are you god?” You asked.

“Yup,” I replied. “I’m God.”

“My kids… my wife,” you said.

“What about them?”

“Will they be all right?”

“That’s what I like to see,” I said. “You just died and your main concern is for your family. That’s good stuff right there.”

You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn’t look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher than the almighty.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.”

“Oh,” you said. “So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?”

“Neither,” I said. “You’ll be reincarnated.”

“Ah,” you said. “So the Hindus were right,”

“All religions are right in their own way,” I said. “Walk with me.”

You followed along as we strode through the void. “Where are we going?”

“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “It’s just nice to walk while we talk.”

by Andy Wier |  Read more:

h/t GS

On Her Majesty's secret service
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A Brief History of Money

In the 13th century, the Chinese emperor Kublai Khan embarked on a bold experiment. China at the time was divided into different regions, many of which issued their own coins, discouraging trade within the empire. So Kublai Khan decreed that henceforth money would take the form of paper.


It was not an entirely original idea. Earlier rulers had sanctioned paper money, but always alongside coins, which had been around for centuries. Kublai’s daring notion was to make paper money (the chao) the dominant form of currency. And when the Italian merchant Marco Polo visited China not long after, he marveled at the spectacle of people exchanging their labor and goods for mere pieces of paper. It was as if value were being created out of thin air. 


Kublai Khan was ahead of his time: He recognized that what matters about money is not what it looks like, or even what it’s backed by, but whether people believe in it enough to use it. Today, that concept is the foundation of all modern monetary systems, which are built on nothing more than governments’ support of and people’s faith in them. Money is, in other words, a complete abstraction—one that we are all intimately familiar with but whose growing complexity defies our comprehension.


Today, many people long for simpler times. It’s a natural reaction to a world in which money is becoming not just more abstract but more digital and virtual as well, in which sophisticated computer algorithms execute microsecond market transactions with no human intervention at all, in which below-the-radar economies are springing up around their own alternative currencies, and in which global financial crises are brought on for reasons difficult to parse without a Ph.D. Back in the day, the thinking goes, money stood for something: Gold doubloons and cowrie shells had real value, and so they didn’t need a government to stand behind them. 


In fact, though, money has never been that simple. And while its uses and meanings have shifted and evolved throughout history, the fact that it is no longer anchored to any one substance is actually a good thing. Here’s why.


Let's start with what money is used for. Modern economists typically define it by the three roles it plays in an economy: 


It’s a store of value, meaning that money allows you to defer consumption until a later date. 
 

It’s a unit of account, meaning that it allows you to assign a value to different goods without having to compare them. So instead of saying that a Rolex watch is worth six cows, you can just say it (or the cows) cost $10 000.
 

And it’s a medium of exchange—an easy and efficient way for you and me and others to trade goods and services with one another.


All of these roles have to do with buying and selling, and that’s how the modern world thinks of money—so much so that it seems peculiar to conceive of money in any other way. 


Yet in tribal and other “primitive” economies, money served a very different purpose—less a store of value or medium of exchange, much more a social lubricant. As the anthropologist David Graeber puts it in his recent book Debt: The First 5000 Years (Melville House, 2011), money in those societies was a way “to arrange marriages, establish the paternity of children, head off feuds, console mourners at funerals, seek forgiveness in the case of crimes, negotiate treaties, acquire followers.” Money, then, was not for buying and selling stuff but for helping to define the structure of social relations. 


How, then, did money become the basis of trade? By the time money makes its first appearance in written records, in Mesopotamia during the third millennium B.C.E., that society already had a sophisticated financial structure in place, and merchants were using silver as a standard of value to balance their accounts. But cash was still not widely used.


It’s really in the seventh century B.C.E., when the small kingdom of Lydia introduced the world’s first standardized metal coins, that you start to see money being used in a recognizable way. Located in what is now Turkey, Lydia sat on the cusp between the Mediterranean and the Near East, and commerce with foreign travelers was common. And that, it turns out, is just the kind of situation in which money is quite useful. 


To understand why, imagine doing a trade in the absence of money—that is, through barter. (Let’s leave aside the fact that no society has ever relied solely or even largely on barter; it’s still an instructive concept.) The chief problem with barter is what economist William Stanley Jevons called the “double coincidence of wants.” Say you have a bunch of bananas and would like a pair of shoes; it’s not enough to find someone who has some shoes or someone who wants some bananas. To make the trade, you need to find someone who has shoes he’s willing to trade and wants bananas. That’s a tough task. 


by James Suroweck, IEEE Spectrum |  Read more:

Photo: Levi Brown; Prop Stylist: Ariana Salvato

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A Day Job Waiting for a Kill Shot a World Away

From his computer console here in the Syracuse suburbs, Col. D. Scott Brenton remotely flies a Reaper drone that beams back hundreds of hours of live video of insurgents, his intended targets, going about their daily lives 7,000 miles away in Afghanistan. Sometimes he and his team watch the same family compound for weeks.

“I see mothers with children, I see fathers with children, I see fathers with mothers, I see kids playing soccer,” Colonel Brenton said.

When the call comes for him to fire a missile and kill a militant — and only, Colonel Brenton said, when the women and children are not around — the hair on the back of his neck stands up, just as it did when he used to line up targets in his F-16 fighter jet.

Afterward, just like the old days, he compartmentalizes. “I feel no emotional attachment to the enemy,” he said. “I have a duty, and I execute the duty.”

Drones are not only revolutionizing American warfare but are also changing in profound ways the lives of the people who fly them.

Colonel Brenton acknowledges the peculiar new disconnect of fighting a telewar with a joystick and a throttle from his padded seat in American suburbia.

When he was deployed in Iraq, “you land and there’s no more weapons on your F-16, people have an idea of what you were just involved with.” Now he steps out of a dark room of video screens, his adrenaline still surging after squeezing the trigger, and commutes home past fast-food restaurants and convenience stores to help with homework — but always alone with what he has done. (...)

Among the toughest psychological tasks is the close surveillance for aerial sniper missions, reminiscent of the East German Stasi officer absorbed by the people he spies on in the movie “The Lives of Others.” A drone pilot and his partner, a sensor operator who manipulates the aircraft’s camera, observe the habits of a militant as he plays with his children, talks to his wife and visits his neighbors. They then try to time their strike when, for example, his family is out at the market.

“They watch this guy do bad things and then his regular old life things,” said Col. Hernando Ortega, the chief of aerospace medicine for the Air Education Training Command, who helped conduct a study last year on the stresses on drone pilots. “At some point, some of the stuff might remind you of stuff you did yourself. You might gain a level of familiarity that makes it a little difficult to pull the trigger.”

Of a dozen pilots, sensor operators and supporting intelligence analysts recently interviewed from three American military bases, none acknowledged the kind of personal feelings for Afghans that would keep them awake at night after seeing the bloodshed left by missiles and bombs. But all spoke of a certain intimacy with Afghan family life that traditional pilots never see from 20,000 feet, and that even ground troops seldom experience.

“You see them wake up in the morning, do their work, go to sleep at night,” said Dave, an Air Force major who flew drones from 2007 to 2009 at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada and now trains drone pilots at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. 

by Elisabeth Bumiller, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Heather Ainsworth

Jonah Lehrer and the Tyranny of the Big Idea

Jonah Lehrer, wunderkind science writer (just google "jonah lehrer wunderkind"), resigned as Staff Writer at The New Yorker yesterday after finally admitting to making stuff up. He had only just started his new, high-profile gig.

The sad saga began about a month ago, on June 19, when Jim Romenesko discovered that one of Jonah Lehrer's first pieces for The New Yorker began with three paragraphs that were nearly identical to a section of an October 2011 article Lehrer wrote for The Wall Street Journal. Apparently, Lehrer had plagiarized himself. The internet's amateur research machine kicked into gear, and many, many other instances of "self-plagiarism" surfaced.

The powers that be at The New Yorker decided that self-plagiarism wasn't a grave enough crime to merit firing Lehrer, but it didn't feel like the story was over. His blog, Frontal Cortex, went eerily silent, as did his Twitter feed.

The other shoe has dropped. After weeks of investigation into suspicious Bob Dylan quotations in Lehrer's new book, Imagine, journalist Michael Moynihan finally got Lehrer to admit to lying. Here's his mea culpa:

Three weeks ago, I received an email from journalist Michael Moynihan asking about Bob Dylan quotes in my book ‘Imagine,’ The quotes in question either did not exist, were unintentional misquotations, or represented improper combinations of previously existing quotes. But I told Mr. Moynihan that they were from archival interview footage provided to me by Dylan’s representatives. This was a lie spoken in a moment of panic. When Mr. Moynihan followed up, I continued to lie, and say things I should not have said. The lies are over now. I understand the gravity of my position. I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and readers. I also owe a sincere apology to Mr. Moynihan. I will do my best to correct the record and ensure that my misquotations and mistakes are fixed. I have resigned my position as staff writer at The New Yorker.

Whatever you think about Jonah Lehrer's transgressions, his treatment in the media, and his plummet from what is arguably the highest perch in American journalism, it's helpful to bear in mind that there's a demand side of this equation.

What made Lehrer so successful—with his books, at Wired, and then, for a time, at The New Yorker—was his ability to mold the results of hard science into tidy, consumer-friendly, and often unexpected insights. That's exactly what smart, curious, and busy readers like you and I want: surprising, Fun-Size ideas with just enough academic heft.

Jonah Lehrer isn't the only one capitalizing on this demand for Wow! stories. There's a whole industry. Malcolm Gladwell, the Freakonomicsguys, certain TED Talks, Slate—they all trade, to some extent, on the snappy, mind-blowing idea you didn't see coming but totally seems kind of true.

The problem is that it's unreasonable to expect that every new piece of media should upend conventional wisdom or deliver a profound new insight. To think that Jonah Lehrer could expose an amazing new facet of human psychology every week, in 1,000-odd words no less, is ludicrous. There are only so many compelling, counterintuitive, true ideas out there.

But the demand for them doesn't abate. That's why you see so many science writers talking about the same handful of studies (the Stanford prison experiment, the rubber hand illusion, Dunbar's number, the marshmallow test) over and over. That's why you see pop economists who should know better creating flimsy and irresponsible contrarian arguments about climate change for shock value. That's why you get influential bloggers confessing they're only 30 percent convinced of their own arguments but "you gotta write something." That's why the#slatepitches meme hits home.

I liked Jonah Lehrer. I still like him. I won't defend his fabrications, but I've learned a lot—most of it true, I'm pretty sure—from his writing. And don't get me wrong: I certainly wouldn't wish TED away. The conference has done an admirable job getting important ideas, sources of inspiration, and truly world-changing work in front of large audiences.

My appeal is just this: Media creators, don't let the mandate for a novel Big Idea supersede your responsibility to treat your subjects honestly and with the nuance they deserve. If reality doesn't match your tidy argument, don't force it. And readers, if we expect that a writer like Jonah Lehrer dazzle us with a brand new paradigm-shifting profundity every week, maybe we're setting ourselves up for disappointment.

by Andrew Price, Good