Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Paul Krugman: Asimov's Foundation Novels Grounded My Economics
OK, economics is a pretty poor substitute; I don't expect to be making recorded appearances in the Time Vault a century or two from now. But I tried.
So how do the Foundation novels look to me now that I have, as my immigrant grandmother used to say, grown to mature adultery? Better than ever. The trilogy really is a unique masterpiece; there has never been anything quite like it. By the way, spoilers follow, so stop reading if you want to encounter the whole thing fresh.
Maybe the first thing to say about Foundation is that it's not exactly science fiction – not really. Yes, it's set in the future, there's interstellar travel, people shoot each other with blasters instead of pistols and so on. But these are superficial details, playing a fairly minor part in the story. The Foundation novels are about society, not gadgets – and unlike, say, William Gibson's cyberpunk novels, which are excellent in a very different way, they're about societies that don't seem much affected by technological progress. Asimov's Galactic Empire sounds an awful lot like the Roman Empire. Trantor, the empire's capital, comes across as a sort of hyper-version of Manhattan in the 1940s. The Foundation itself seems to recapitulate a fair bit of American history, passing through Boss Tweed politics and Robber Baron-style plutocracy; by the end of the trilogy it has evolved into something resembling mid 20th-century America – although Asimov makes it clear that this is by no means its final state.
Let me be clear, however: in pointing out the familiarity of the various societies we see in Foundation, I'm not being critical. On the contrary, this familiarity, the way Asimov's invented societies recapitulate historical models, goes right along with his underlying conceit: the possibility of a rigorous, mathematical social science that understands society, can predict how it changes, and can be used to shape those changes.
by Paul Krugman, The Guardian | Read more:
Illustration: Alex Wells
For Athletes, Risks From Ibuprofen Use
But a valuable new study joins growing evidence that ibuprofen and similar anti-inflammatory painkillers taken before a workout don’t offer any benefit and may be causing disagreeable physical damage instead, particularly to the intestines.
Studies have already shown that strenuous exercise alone commonly results in a small amount of intestinal trauma. A representative experiment published last year found that cyclists who rode hard for an hour immediately developed elevated blood levels of a marker that indicates slight gastrointestinal leakage.
Physiologically, it makes sense that exercise would affect the intestines as it does, since, during prolonged exertion, digestion becomes a luxury, said Dr. Kim van Wijck, currently a surgical resident at Orbis Medical Center in the Netherlands, who led the small study. So the blood that normally would flow to the small intestine is instead diverted to laboring muscles. Starved of blood, some of the cells lining the intestines are traumatized and start to leak.
Thankfully, the damage seems to be short-lived, Dr. van Wijck said. Her research has shown that within an hour after a cyclist finished riding, the stressed intestines returned to normal.
But the most common side-effect of ibuprofen is gastrointestinal damage. And since many athletes take the drug for pain before and after a workout, Dr. van Wijck set out to determine the combined effect of exercise and ibuprofen. (...)
The health implications of this finding are not yet clear, although they are worrying, Dr. van Wijck said. It may be that if someone uses ibuprofen before every exercise session for a year or more, she said, “intestinal integrity might be compromised.” In that case, small amounts of bacteria and digestive enzymes could leak regularly into the bloodstream.
by Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Getty Images
On Growing Up
But for my co-worker, this was amazing. "You're a real grown-up!" she said.
I wasn't quite sure what to say. I'm still relatively new to the working world. After freelancing for the last eight years, I've only just taken a full-time job—and it's one where I'm at least a decade older than almost everyone on my team. At the age of 38, married, with kids, a mortgage, a beard, and a receding hairline, I suppose I must really seem like an adult to them.
If only I seemed like that to myself! Though I never wanted to be one of those much-derided man-children loafing around Brooklyn coffee shops—"grups," New York magazine dubbed them—I was never all that eager to embrace the traditional outward markers of adulthood: suit and tie, office job, lightless dead eyes. And in truth, I'd always felt like a child. The sense of smallness and powerlessness that are a child's everyday experience had never fully left me. When I'd look at my own father, a tenured history professor, I could never imagine becoming like him. And when I looked at kids, I felt nothing but sympathy—I know what you're going through—and imagined they were looking at me and thinking, Dude, you look older, but I see through you; you're just like me.
Still, degree by degree, things shifted. Six years ago, I grew a beard, mostly because, clean-shaven, I looked like I was still 17 years old. I invested in some good shirts and stylish blazers—not office-drone garb, but clothes I felt comfortable in. And, of course, I got married and had kids and bought an apartment. Inside, I felt no different from before—small, nervous, new to everything—but apparently I was. Or, quite possibly, the world was different, not in its essence but in how it viewed me. My own children, for example, will never see me as anything but a grown-up, and as they age, the kids of her generation will see me that way, too. One day, my daughters may look at me as I looked at my own father, and think: How am I ever going to become that?
The secret (which is only a secret to those still too young to have experienced it) is that adulthood is not something we consciously embrace, a set of rules we one day agree to follow. It's a set of perceptions and assumptions that everyone has about us, though we may still feel like children inside. How the hell did I become an adult? It's because the young people at my office decided I was. And one day, 10 or 15 years from now, it'll happen to them, too. We all grow up, whether we want to or not.
by Matt Gross, Theodore Ross, and Nathan Thornburgh, The Atlantic | Read more:
Photo: Weinstein Company
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Secret of Googlenomics
In the midst of financial apocalypse, the gadflies and gurus of the global marketplace are gathered at the San Francisco Hilton for the annual meeting of the American Economics Association. The mood is similar to a seismologist convention in the wake of the Big One. Yet surprisingly, one of the most popular sessions has nothing to do with toxic assets, derivatives, or unemployment curves.
"I'm going to talk about online auctions," says Hal Varian, the session's first speaker. Varian is a lanky 62-year-old professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and School of Information, but these days he's best known as Google's chief economist. This morning's crowd hasn't come for predictions about the credit market; they want to hear about Google's secret sauce.
Varian is an expert on what may be the most successful business idea in history: AdWords, Google's unique method for selling online advertising. AdWords analyzes every Google search to determine which advertisers get each of up to 11 "sponsored links" on every results page. It's the world's biggest, fastest auction, a never-ending, automated, self-service version of Tokyo's boisterousTsukiji fish market, and it takes place, Varian says, "every time you search." He never mentions how much revenue advertising brings in. But Google is a public company, so anyone can find the number: It was $21 billion last year.
His talk quickly becomes technical. There's the difference between the Generalized Second Price auction model and the Vickrey-Clark-Groves alternative. Game theory takes a turn; so does the Nash Equilibrium. Terms involving the c-word—as in clicks—get tossed around like beach balls at a summer rock festival. Clickthrough rate. Cost per click. Supply curve of clicks. The audience is enthralled.
During the question-and-answer period, a man wearing a camel-colored corduroy blazer raises his hand. "Let me understand this," he begins, half skeptical, half unsure. "You say that an auction happens every time a search takes place? That would mean millions of times a day!"
Varian smiles. "Millions," he says, "is actually quite an understatement."
by Steven Levy, Wired | Read more:
Someone spotted the monkey poking through a Dumpster around lunchtime. When a freelance animal trapper named Vernon Yates arrived, all he could make out was an oblong ball of light brown fur, asleep in the crown of an oak. It was a male rhesus macaque — a pink-faced, two-foot-tall species native to Asia. It weighed about 25 pounds.
No pet macaques were reported missing around Tampa Bay — there wasn’t even anyone licensed to own one in the immediate area. Yates, who is called by the state wildlife agency to trap two or three monkeys a year, was struck by how “streetwise” this particular one seemed. Escaped pet monkeys tend to cower and stumble once they’re out in the unfamiliar urban environment, racing into traffic or frying themselves in power lines. But as Yates loaded a tranquilizer dart into his rifle, this animal jolted awake, swung out of the canopy and hit the ground running. It made for the neighboring office park, where it catapulted across a roof and reappeared, sitting smugly in another tree, only to vanish again. Yates was left dumbstruck, balancing at the top of a ladder. (By then, a firetruck had been called in to assist him.) “There’s no way to describe how intelligent this thing is,” he told me recently.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (known as the F.W.C.) came to believe that the macaque wasn’t a pet but had wandered out of a small population of free-roaming, wild macaques that live in a forest along the Silver River, 100 miles away. Soon, the F.W.C. was warning that wild macaques can carry the herpes B virus, which, though not easily transmitted to humans, can be fatal. A spokesman also told the press, “They’re infamous for throwing feces at things they don’t like.”
As sightings stacked up in the following days, it became clear that the macaque was crossing the highway again and again, threading traffic like a running back. One afternoon, Yates and an F.W.C. investigator named James Manson managed to dart the animal in a church parking lot but lost track of it before the drug took effect. At one point, the two men were staring into tangled brush, stumped, when Manson tilted his head and saw the monkey perched with ninja-like stillness above him, close enough to touch. The two primates locked eyes. Then the monkey turned and was gone. “And that’s really when the story began,” Manson told me.
And on it went, with the monkey zigging and zagging around Tampa Bay, dodging the government agencies bent on capturing it. The state considers the animal a potential danger to humans and, like all invasive species, an illegitimate and maybe destructive part of Florida’s ecology. But the public came to see the monkey as an outlaw, a rebel — a nimble mascot for “good, old-fashioned American freedom,” as one local reporter put it. (...)
Vernon Yates is 59, with a broad, serious face and white-threaded hair. He lives on the west side of Tampa Bay, in the suburb of Seminole. He came to open his front gate wearing camouflage crocs and khaki shorts, throwing on a Jack Hanna-style khaki shirt as he walked, but never going so far as to button it.
He’d been hosing down his bear cage when I rang. Yates has about 200 exotic animals at his house. Most are pets that the F.W.C. confiscated from owners who failed to comply with state regulations and then entrusted to Yates’s one-man nonprofit, Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation. There were 17 tigers, some leopards, cougars, a pile of alligators in a concrete pool and a dusty battalion of large African spurred tortoises. Yates likes tortoises — he also keeps a single Galápagos tortoise as a pet. “I’ve been married five times,” he told me. “In one of my divorces, I lost $100,000 worth of tortoises.”
At his desk, Yates unfolded a map of Tampa Bay. But he found he had to flip the map over, then consult other maps, at different scales, to trace the macaque’s entire odyssey. “It’s an amazing feat, when you think about his travels,” he said. Since 2009, Yates estimates that he has gone after the animal on roughly 100 different occasions. The monkey was his white whale. He claimed to have darted it at least a dozen times, steadily upping the tranquilizer dosage, to no avail. The animal is too wily — it retreats into the woods and sleeps off the drug. A few times, the monkey stared Yates right in the eye and pulled the dart out.
For the last two years, the macaque seems to have lingered in the same area of South St. Petersburg, ranging between a bulbous peninsula and the small island of Coquina Key, about two miles away. Yates still received calls about the animal — one came in the previous week. But the trail went cold a long time ago. Sightings were seldom reported now. As a woman on Coquina Key named Rosalie Broten told me: “Nobody wants the monkey to be captured. Everybody wants it to be free.”
The citizenry of Tampa Bay was adamantly pro-monkey. People had long been abetting the animal, leaving fruit plates on their patios. A few people, one F.W.C. officer told me, called the agency’s monkey hot line to report that they’d seen the macaque several hours or even a couple of days earlier — offering totally useless intelligence, in other words, presumably just to stick their thumbs in the government’s eye. The Mystery Monkey of Tampa Bay, as people called it, had very quickly become a celebrity. There were at least two styles of Mystery Monkey T-shirts on offer, and a catchphrase: Go, Monkey, Go. As the macaque passed through the town of Oldsmar, a self-storage facility threw the monkey’s picture on a digital billboard with the message: “Stay Free Mystery Monkey.” And a Facebook page for the animal got 82,000 likes. “The taxpaying citizens of Tampa have been driven bananas by the out-of-touch political establishment,” the monkey wrote on its blog at the end of 2010, announcing its run for mayor.
by John Mooallem, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration by Tim Enthoven
An Unexpected Fix
Living in a woodland in deepest, darkest Somerset, our guests certainly get their fill of nature. We don’t deliberately give them demeaning jobs, but being knee-deep in pig shit, or building a compost loo, puts you in direct contact with the earthy realities of life. And reality, as the actress Lily Tomlin once quipped, ‘is a crutch for people who can’t cope with drugs’.
A corollary of that earthy reality is that, instead of being, in the old-fashioned phrase, ‘opium-eaters’, some of our guests eat a healthy dose of humble pie. And humility, as in 12-step AA orthodoxy, is the first step of the cure. Addicts often have a paradoxical combination of low self-esteem and massive ego, so recognising that they are ‘powerless’ over a substance is a vital reminder that they’re not super beings, just precious, weak humans, along with the rest of us.
AA is, of course, a much-debated institution. Founded in Ohio in 1935, it now has more than 2 million adherents and has been the model for dozens of other ‘Anonymous’ movements. Based on mutuality, it has no organisational structure to speak of, and yet it’s often accused of being cultish and controlling. Inspired by the ‘Oxford Group’ of Christians, it has always maintained that addiction is a ‘spiritual malady’ for which the only cure is conversion. Step three explicitly describes handing over responsibility for your recovery ‘to the care of God’. The AA’s ‘big book’ deliberately looks like a Bible, with its blue ribbon to mark a favourite passage. Those in recovery can invariably quote chapter and verse, and at the core of the book is that image of two evangelists — Dr Bob and Bill W — who went out into a darkness to spread the good news.
Research into the effectiveness of AA is notoriously unreliable (partly because of the anonymity that it promises). Recent studies suggest that it is no more or less successful than other behaviour treatments. But because AA was the first, and most famous, treatment programme, its influence on the wider recovery movement has been immense.
Most notably, AA’s notion that alcoholism is a disease — ‘a cunning, baffling and powerful disease’, as the big book puts it — has meant that for decades addiction has been seen in medical terms. This is something addicts yearn to hear, because seeing addiction as a disease allows a degree of self-forgiveness. It suits the medical profession too, because, in the scathing words of the psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple in Junk Medicine (2007), it creates ‘employment opportunities’ for the ‘therapeutic juggernaut’. It’s easier, he writes with sadness, ‘to give people a dose of medicine than to give them a reason for living’. So heroin-users are prescribed methadone, a heroin substitute famously invented by Nazis, and potentially as addictive and often fatal as the thing it’s supposed to replace. But the medicalisation of addiction also suits politicians. The Nixon administration in the US was the first to flood the market with methadone in 1970 and, ever since then, it’s been seen as a politically expedient substance: not because it reduces addiction, but because it reduces crime.
There are now, however, stirrings of a backlash against the consensus. (...)
To my mind the great drawback of medicalising addiction is that it actually obscures AA’s subtler diagnosis of a ‘spiritual malady’. It’s not, perhaps, surprising that in our secular age the spiritual tag is touted less often than the ‘disease’ one. And yet the degree to which recovery is considered a spiritual experience is evident when reading some of the best books on the subject: Bruce Alexander’s The Globalisation of Addiction (2008), subtitle: ‘A Study in Poverty of the Spirit’; Richard Rohr’s Breathing Underwater (1989), subtitle: ‘Spirituality and the 12 Steps’; or Gerald G May’s Addiction and Grace(2007), subtitle: ‘Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions’.
Even a cynic such as Russell Brand, in his maverick and moving BBC3 documentary From Addiction to Recovery said that rehab ushered in a ‘profound spiritual change’ and that he rediscovered ‘love and compassion’. Abraham Twerski, the American psychiatrist and rabbi, has worked with addicts all his life and he, too, insists on the immaterial, or metaphysical, nature of recovery. ‘I know without doubt that the source of addiction is spiritual deficiency,’ he has written. ‘Irrespective of whether we are religious or atheist, all human beings are spiritual by nature, and spirituality is the cornerstone of our recovery.’
The theory, broadly, is that addiction isn’t merely a physical craving for a substance, but a means by which damaged souls, severed from family, tribal, cultural and spiritual ties, address their sense of being dislocated, isolated and atomised in an atmosphere of superspeed capitalism and acute consumer competitiveness. We’re obsessed with ourselves and what we’ve got. We don’t talk about vocations and callings, but about careers and pay-packets. Being responsible implies a response to something, but we struggle because, in a cultural and spiritual vacuum, we’ve got nothing to which we can respond.
Fixing addiction, then, is much more complicated than weaning someone off a needle or bottle. Treatment needs to be holistic, dealing with an individual in the round. It’s not just about repairing a brain, or a vein, but about repairing relationships and the spirit. It sounds very highfalutin’ and, since we’re not professionals, we don’t really know how to do it. But then, nobody does. There’s no textbook about how to repair the spirit.
by Tobias Jones, Aeon | Read more:
Photo: Kate Keara Pelen
Monday, December 3, 2012
How important is the Fiscal Cliff for Investors? Hint: Not Very
The “fiscal cliff” paranoia continues unabated. Apparently, it is the only thing that matters to the markets. Every twist and turn in the negotiations is crucial to the future of the republic!
Whenever the media obsess over a potential crisis, history teaches us that it is most likely to be overwrought hype. Recall the Y2k frenzy as Exhibit 1 in The People v. Really Bad Mediaprosecution.
Want to learn just how absurdly obsessive the media have become over this? Just type “fiscal cliff” into Google Trends and you will see how, post-election, the term’s appearance in the media simply went ballistic.
Where did this sudden spike in mentions begin? The Columbia Journalism Review points to coverage such as that of the financial network CNBC. Ryan Chittum, who reports on the business media for CJR, notes that CNBC began a campaign called Rise Above that blanketed its airwaves since the day after the election with pleas for a solution to the fiscal cliff. As Google’s trend chart shows, it was part of a media dogpile — at least until the David Petraeus affair sent the drones scurrying after a more salacious story.
What does the fiscal cliff mean to investors?
Let’s start with a definition: The term refers to the deal that Congress made in late 2011 to temporarily resolve the debt ceiling debate. The “sequestration,” as it is known, calls for three elements: tax increases, spending cuts and an increase to the payroll tax (FICA). The Washington Post’s Wonkblog has run the numbers and finds “$180 billion from income tax hikes, $120 billion in revenue from the payroll tax, $110 billion from the sequester’s automatic spending cuts and $160 billion from expiring tax breaks and other programs.”
That is a not-insignificant amount of money, but it is hardly the end of the world. To put this into context, it is a little less than the TARP bailout for Wall Street in 2009 and somewhat less than the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, President Obama’s stimulus package. An educated guess puts this at about $600 billion to $700 billion out of a $15 trillion U.S. economy. I’d ballpark that at about 4 percent of the GDP, or 0.50 percent of the forecasted GDP growth of 2 percent for calendar year 2013.
The term “fiscal cliff,” popularized by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, is really a misnomer. As several analysts have correctly observed, the effects of sequestration are not a Jan. 1, 2013, event. The impact of the spending cuts and tax hikes would be phased in over time. A fiscal slope is more accurate. Additionally, as students of history have learned, single-variable analysis for complex financial issues is invariably wrong. Because of the inherent complexity of economies and markets, we cannot adequately explain or predict their behavior by merely looking at just one variable.
Given all this, what else might be driving equity markets? Consider the following factors as the causes of recent volatility:
Weak corporate profits: If you want to understand market jitters, look no further than falling earnings growth. Profits and revenue have disappointed in the third quarter, coming in below estimates. As the Wall Street Journal noted, this has been the “worst quarter for corporate profits in three years.” Even worse, future estimates for earnings growth keep sliding. In July, estimates for fourth-quarter profit were annualized gains of 14 percent. By October, that fell to 9.6 percent. It has now slipped to 5.5 percent, according to S&P Capital IQ.
by Barry Ritholtz, Washington Post | Read more:
Photo via Mother Jones
Reply to a Dead Man
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No one ever knocked at my door, and Rose was the only person I was acquainted with in the neighborhood. It had to be her, I thought; that was just cold hard logic.
So I opened the door looking down, expecting to see my diminutive neighbor’s wide face under a thatch of black hair turned gray.
Instead I was looking at the red-and-blue vest of a white man even taller than me. He had a bald head and not much facial hair. His skin was the color of yellowing ivory and his eyes were a luminous gray—like a mist-filled valley at dawn.
“Mr. Vaness?” the stranger asked, in a magnificent tenor voice.
“Yes?”
“My name is Harding, Lance Harding. I am here representing the last wish of Seth Vaness.”
“What?”
“I work for a small firm called Final Request Co. We execute the last wishes of clients who have passed on.”
“You’re a lawyer?”
I looked the slender tenor up and down. He had on a nice suit, but it was reddish-brown, not a lawyer’s color, in my estimation.
“No, Mr. Vaness. We at FRC don’t execute wills. Our job is to deliver messages from the dead.” He smiled after the last word, giving me a slight chill.
“Uh-huh. You use a Ouija board or somethin’?”
“We are engaged by the deceased before their demise.”
“My brother hired you to give me a message after he was dead?”
Harding smiled and nodded.
“He died six and a half months ago,” I said. “What took you so long?”
“His wish was for us to execute his instructions not less than half a year after his demise.”
“Is this some kinda legal thing?”
“It is a simple agreement between FRC and your brother,” Lance Harding said, maintaining an aura of imperturbable patience. “Often individuals wish to pass on knowledge outside of the rubric of wills and other legal formats. Some leave a spoken message, others might wish to pass along a note or a small package.”
“Seth didn’t have much,” I said. “He couldn’t have anything to hide.”
“We all have something to hide, Mr. Vaness. Either that or something is hidden from us.”
by Walter Mosely, The Atlantic | Read more:
Photo: Bryce Duffy
10 Techniques for Making Cities More Walkable
(I can’t say that Jeff and I know each other well, but we’re friends, and I like him a lot. I’m listed in the acknowledgments, and one of my articles is cited in the narrative. I previously reviewed The Smart Growth Manual, which Jeff co-authored with Andres Duany and Mike Lydon.)
Here are the author’s ten steps of walkability, with a memorable line from his description of each:
1. Put cars in their place. ("Traffic studies are bullshit.") Startling quote, no? Jeff believes, and I tend to agree, that a car-first approach has hurt American cities. This is in part because traffic engineers too often have failed to acknowledge that increased roadway traffic capacity can lead to more, not fewer, cars on the road. The resulting phenomenon of "induced demand" results in unanticipated consequences not only for traffic on freeways but especially in neighborhoods and downtowns, where streets are sometimes treated not as critical public spaces for animating city life but as conveyances for motor vehicles. Jeff generally supports congestion pricing, but cautions that we must be very careful about assuming the merits of pedestrian-only zones. (I think there are also circumstances where we must be very careful about congestion pricing, which I’ll discuss below.)
2. Mix the uses. ("Cities were created to bring things together.") The research shows that neighborhoods with a diversity of uses – places to walk to – have significantly more walking than those that don’t. Jeff makes the point that, for most American downtowns, it is housing – places to walk from, if you will – that is in particularly short supply. He also points out, quite correctly, that for most (still-disinvested) downtowns, affordability is not much of an issue, because relatively affordable housing is all there is. For those booming downtowns susceptible to gentrification, he recommends inclusionary zoning and "granny flats," or accessory dwelling units.
3. Get the parking right. ("Ample parking encourages driving that would not otherwise occur without it.") As do many progressive city thinkers, Jeff points out that we have a huge oversupply of underpriced parking, in large part due to minimum parking requirements for buildings and businesses. A side effect is that adaptive reuse of historic properties can be discouraged, because there isn’t sufficient space to create parking required for the buildings’ new uses. Jeff recommends consolidated parking for multiple buildings and businesses and higher prices, especially for curb parking, and shares a number of successful examples.
by Kaid Benfield, Atlantic Cities | Read more:
Photos: Kaid Benfield
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Saul Leiter Shopper, 1953
via:
[ed. Hedonic adaptation: the supposed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes (Wikipedia).]
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