The liberal problem

Liberals and conservative political positions these days both have serious problems. The conservative problem is simple: conservatives these days are simply inconsistent. They want the federal government out of our lives, and at the same time they want the federal government to enforce their own religious and cultural views on issues like abortion and gay marriage. They want the federal budget cut, but not at the expense of military spending, Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security, the things that account for most of the federal budget. They want a simplified tax system, yet they want to preserve lots of special interest deductions and loopholes for businesses. But then, the conservative movement is in some crisis right now. With luck and time they may manage to get their act together and create a consistent set of policies.

The liberal problem is more subtle. Fundamentally liberals want more social and economic equality in the nation, which is a reasonable aspiration. But they are faced with the uncomfortable fact that people simply aren’t equal. Some are smarter than others. Some are willing to work harder than others. Some are more willing to educate themselves than others. Some are more willing than others to take risks and start new businesses. Some are more willing than others to retrain themselves if their jobs disappear. Some of these differences are inherent (genetic), some are environmental or cultural. But these differences are there, and they are real.

Faced with this, liberals often confuse equality of opportunity with equality of outcome, and end up supporting policies that try to make the outcomes more equal for everyone, rather than the opportunities. As Winston Churchill once said “Capitalism is the unequal distribution of blessings, Socialism is the equal distribution of misery.”

The lesson of the socialist/communist systems that prospered over the past half century and then mostly crumbled is that incentives matter. Systems that remove the incentives by assuring everyone of a job and a wage whether they work hard or not lead inevitably to an inefficient, even moribund, economy. Or as the old Soviet joke goes “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”.

In fact one of the main reasons America has prospered over the past couple of centuries is because, by a process of self-selection, the nation was populated early with a lot of people with more than average initiative. It takes more than average initiative to uproot oneself from one’s culture and family, undertake a dangerous sea journey followed perhaps by a dangerous land journey, and then try to carve out a new life in a hostile wilderness. Or even in later times to immigrate to a city in a new country with a different language, different culture and different customs. Couch potatoes generally don’t do this.

Unfortunately this sort of initiative isn’t reliably passed down to one’s children and grandchildren, so that now, generations later when life is more comfortable, not so many of our people have this sort of initiative and drive. That is perhaps why these days new immigrants are twice as likely to start a new business as native Americans.

Liberal attempts to rectify this by focusing on making outcomes more equal simply misses the point. What will keep us healthy as a nation is making opportunities more equal, for example by working to offer better education for all. The outcomes will still be unequal, because people aren’t equal, but at least the outcomes will be better aligned with how hard people are willing to work and how much initiative they are willing to put forth.

About intelligence

I noted in a recent post that, by definition, the mean IQ is 100, and that about half the population falls below that level. That is because intelligence, as measured by standard IQ tests, is a normal or “bell shaped” distribution, with a standard deviation of about 15.

I got to thinking about this some more as my third grandchild took her SAT tests. Now college entrance exams like the SAT and the ACT are highly verbal, and highly culturally biased. Nevertheless, they are pretty good predictors of college success because American undergraduate college classes tend to be heavily loaded toward verbal tasks (reading texts and writing papers), and are also highly culturally biased. The politically-correct move in the 1970’s to “correct” these biases in the college entrance exams missed the point completely. It was the colleges that were biased, and the tests were pretty good predictors of college success precisely because they were biased the same way.

But the intelligence question is really a good bit more complex than that. The Grant Study, which followed 268 Harvard men throughout their careers starting in 1938, found among other things that above a certain minimum level of IQ (about one standard deviation above the mean, or IQ of about 115), intelligence didn’t seem to matter much in success. Other studies have shown that people of very high intelligence (IQ of 150 or higher) seem almost always to suffer other problems. And in fact Mensa, a society one can join only if one is in the top 2% of the population in intelligence, includes a lot of people whose only significant accomplishment in the world seems to that they were able to join Mensa.

Human intelligence actually appears to be a highly multi-faceted attribute, and people who are poor at some facets can be brilliant at others. I have a gift for seeing through complex problems to the core issue, but I am hopeless at remembering names and faces. I can recall for decades complex details of a design, but can’t for the life of me memorize foreign language vocabulary and verb forms. My wife is incapable of understanding mechanical designs, but can watch a stranger in a restaurant for a couple of minutes and accurately (ie – it matches what someone who knows the stranger well knows about them) read their personality and even much of their life story.

Of course our society values and rewards some of these facets, and ignores and disparages others. When we were a mechanical society, mechanics who had a “sixth sense” (high intelligence) about machines and how they operated were much in demand and highly paid. Now that we have become more of an electronic and computer society, those of us with the peculiar mental facilities to visualize electronic circuits and computer programs have better job opportunities. Soon enough this advantage will probably pass to those whose peculiar strengths are in understanding biochemistry and shaping biological components.

So although intelligence as measured by standardized IQ tests is an important measure of ability, it is just one measure of a limited number of facets of real intelligence. Success in the “real world” is shaped just as much, if not more, by cultural factors, emotional abilities, social skills, perseverance, work habits, and even luck. So the fact that about half the population falls at or below 100 in IQ doesn’t tell the whole story. There are a lot of people who wouldn’t score especially high in a standard IQ test who are nevertheless highly successful in the real world, and very good, even brilliant, at some non-verbal skills not measured by standard IQ tests. And there are some very high IQ people who are, frankly, thoroughly dysfunctional and complete failures in the real world.

The 4% Universe (of knowledge)

One of the more startling findings in astrophysics in recent years is the discovery that there isn’t nearly enough matter in the visible universe to account for the gravitational pull that holds the spinning galaxies together.  Given the amount of matter we can detect, galaxies spinning at the rate we see should fly apart under centrifugal force.  In fact, current theory estimates that all the matter we see comprises only about 4% of the universe, the other 96% being made up of what is tentatively named “dark matter” and “dark energy”.

I propose that the same is roughly true of our current state of knowledge. That despite all the wonderful discoveries in physics and chemistry and biology over the past few hundred years, we are still just barely scratching the surface.  That we know something like 4% of what is to be known, and even that may be wildly optimistic.

Case in point: we can accurately describe gravity.  Given masses and distances we can predict the resulting gravitational forces with enough accuracy to send spacecraft safely throughout the cosmos.  Yet in fact we still have not the faintest idea why two masses ought to attract each other. Oh, physicists have fancy equations, and theoretical constructs like “gravitons” and “space-time distortions”,  but at root we are still clueless about how gravity really works.

Case in point: like gravity, we can accurately describe magnetism, create magnets with metals or electric fields , use magnetism for things like motors, but also like gravity we still have no idea at all why electric fields or certain metals create these fields, or why these fields produce attractive/repellent forces, but only on some elements and not on others.

These two examples mimic human use of fire.  We humans and our pre-human ancestors have apparently made use of fire for up to a million years, but only since the development of chemistry in the past couple of hundred years have we had the faintest idea what was really going on in a fire.

In the field of biology things are even worse. We understand more or less the physical structure of the brain and of neurons,  but are a long way from having the faintest idea how these operate to create “thoughts’ or “self-awareness”.  We can see how blood vessels operate, but have hardly a clue how a developing fetus makes a blood vessel grow from one place to another and then connect to existing plumbing.  We have vague ideas about how “concentration gradients” of special molecular markers lead to the growth of arms and legs and the like, but really no idea at all how the body arranges for the bones of the arm to grow into the humerus (upper arm) and then the radius and ulna (lower arm), all of these looking remarkably similar in detail from one person to another.

So I would caution against the “irrational exuberance” ( a  Greenspan term) , or hubris, of thinking we have understood the world and just have a few minor details remaining to work out.  Far from it, if all knowledge is like a finished oil painting, at best we have only the beginnings of a preliminary rough charcoal sketch of the finished work. In a 1000 years or so, if we are lucky enough to survive as a species that long, our current views of the world will no doubt seem absurdly childish and primitive.

Recommended: America the Clueless

Frank Bruni has a provocative piece in today's New Your Times Op Ed section: America the Clueless.  He points to numerous recent polls that show that large parts of the American public are truly clueless about the politics going on around them. That is consistent with other findings from respected pollsters like the Pew Foundation, that find, for example that most people know relatively little about the religion they are so sure is true (their own), or that a fair fraction of high school seniors can't find the USA on a world map.

I have pointed out before that, by definition, about half the population has an IQ below 100 (that is how IQ is scaled), and that success in an undergraduate program -- at least if the college hasn't dumbed it down too much -- generally takes an IQ of at least somewhere around 115, or for the statisticians out there, about one standard deviation above the mean.  So some of these findings really aren't that surprising.

But what does take some pondering is this: in an increasingly complex world, where issues like climate change, energy policy, health care delivery, bank regulation or foreign relations are complex, many-faceted, and require study in arcane fields to even understand all the issues, what is the proper policy role of an electorate that can't even name the current vice president or their own members of Congress, or perhaps even find the USA on a world map?

An ancient toast

From a London newspaper, 23 Sept 1787, "The following toast has been drunk at several meetings on the occasion of the approaching general elections:

May we have
  Addition of honest men
  Subtraction of grievances
  Multiplication of elections
  Division among knaves
  Reduction of our debts"

Sounds like a good toast for the present time as well !

Correction on "Top 10" list source

A loyal fan has pointed out that although Johnny Carson used the "Top 10" list idea, it originated with David Letterman.   Thanks for the correction!!

My "top 10" list of dumb things the federal government has done recently

I mentioned in my last post that I thought our federal government these days seemed to excel at doing dumb, self-defeating things. With a tip of the hat to Johnny Carson, here is my own “top 10” list of dumb, counter-productive, self-defeating things our federal government has done in recent times, covering both the Bush and Obama administrations so that the blame is fairly spread over both political parties:

No. 10 – Since campaign money is already severely distorting the electoral process, remove the last effective restraint on unlimited funding from corporations (Supreme Court Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission) so that the problem will be worse.

No. 9 – Increase the number of drone attacks on suspected terrorists, thereby killing more innocent civilians who happen to be nearby, increasing the already sky-high resentment against America in the Middle East and helping immensely the recruiting of new terrorists.

No. 8 – Since the various intelligence and domestic investigatory agencies were seen, after 9/11, to be too big, slow-moving and bureaucratic to be effective, combine them all into a single new agency called “homeland security” which is an order of magnitude bigger, slower-moving and more bureaucratic.

No. 7 - When immigration is the only thing keeping America from the demographic woes of other first world nations (losing workers at the same time they are gaining old people), when immigrants started 28% of all new U.S. businesses in 2011, despite accounting for just 13% of the U.S. population, and are twice as likely as the native-born to start a new business, require the world’s best and brightest who come to this country to get a good education to leave the country just when they are ready to become productive and create US jobs.

No. 6 - With entitlement expenses (Medicare, Medicaid & Social Security) already growing so fast that, unless the law is changed, they will consume almost one-fifth of the nation’s gross domestic product, and almost the entire federal budget, by 2050,  make the problem worse by adding a $1.2 trillion drug plan to Medicare.

No. 5 - Since some US banks are deemed “too big to allow to fail”, encourage them to take over other failing banks so that now they are even bigger, and their potential failure even more of a threat to the economy.

No. 4 - With the federal government already borrowing about 40 cents of every dollar spent, increase federal spending by 29% between 2007 and 2009, and keep it there.

No. 3 - In the midst of a major recession, when all federal efforts ought to have been focused on improving the economy and reducing unemployment, spend 18 months and most of the available political capital pushing through a 2000+ page health bill so complex that to this day it is poorly understood and quite possibly impossible to implement.

No. 2 - Get us into two simultaneous unwinnable ground wars in the Middle East, the “graveyard of empires”, when any half-educated student of history knows that invaders from Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan to the British Empire and the Soviet Union came to grief in these areas.

No. 1 - Having got us into these unfortunate and unwinnable wars, keep us in them, bleeding money, lives, and American good will around the world for 12 years, twice as long as World War II.

Recommended: Beyond the Fence

David Brooks has written another provocative piece, this time about immigration. Beyond the Fence, a New York Times Op Ed piece yesterday, lays out the reasons that Brooks thinks are driving the opposition to immigration reform.  There certainly has been an unusual amount of opposition to what is clearly a thoroughly dysfunctional system that allows the world's best brains to come to the US to get educated, but then forces them to leave again just when they are at their most productive.

Much of the developed world faces crippling demographic problems - a sharp drop in workers and a sharp increase in old people who have to be supported. The population of Japan, for example, is decreasing by about a million people a year. America has avoided the worst of this only because of immigration.  To stifle that immigration is about the dumbest and most self-defeating thing we could do for the nation, long term.

 But then, our government these days seems to excel at dumb, self-defeating action, or inaction.

Recommended: What Austerity?

There has been much grumbling lately among Keynesian (liberal) economists that the current lackluster performance of the America economy is all due to the fiscal "austerity" being forced on the government by the Republicans.  Of course they need to find some excuse why the much vaunted $1 trillion plus "stimulus" that they prescribed seems not to have worked.  But as J.T. Young points out in today's RealClear Politics article What Austerity?, in fact government spending has not decreased, it increased by a massive 29% between 2007 and 2009 as the Obama administration came into power, and has stayed there ever since, despite the sequester.

So much for that excuse.