Recommended: Skin in the Game

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's previous books, Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, and more recently Antifragile, all dealt one way or another with how humans, including economists and bankers and stock brokers, don't understand randomness and risk very well. His most recent book, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, deals with a new subject - the morality of giving advice or creating policy if one has no "skin in the game", if one sufferers no consequences if the policy is a disaster for others. As he points out, the very politicians and policy makers who disrupted the Middle East in the name of "spreading democracy", resulting in the death or displacement of millions of people, still retain their high-paying jobs, and may even be unaware of the chaos their policies have produced.

Taleb is arrogant and very sarcastic about some of the academic and political fields and people whom he thinks mislead the public while suffering no consequences themselves. If you are a government policy wonk or an economist or a politician you probably won't like this book. I find his sarcasm acceptable, because I think he is right on most of the issues he raises.

Recommended: Shopcraft as Soulcraft

Matthew Crawford’s 2009 book Shop Class as Soulcraft is reminiscent of Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair. Crawford also repairs motorcycles (and with a Ph.D.), but really this book is about is the value of craft work – of working with one’s hands to produce something tangible in the world, as opposed to shuffling bureaucratic paper in a cubicle, or worse yet, shuffling electrons in a computer. This is a philosophical essay about the nature of work and workers, about how the modern corporate world dehumanizes workers and their management and leaves them unsatisfied with life, and how one might recover that satisfaction with a vocation, or at least an avocation, of craft work.  It is well worth reading.

Recommended: Energy: A Human History

Richard Rhodes, who wrote the wonderful 1987 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, has written a new book on Energy, entitled Energy: A Human History. It is well worth reading just for general interest and to appreciate the degree to which energy use throughout the ages has shaped civilizations and cultures. But of more immediate application is his last chapter, in which he deals with the mythology and facts of renewable energy. Basically, the glowing promises of some that we will transition to carbon-free renewable energy within the next 20 years or so are a fantasy being sold to the public with little or no factual or scientific or economic basis. Moreover, if we really want to get to mostly carbon-free energy, we will have to overcome the American public's irrational fear of nuclear energy, because nuclear energy is the only way we can provide enough carbon-free energy to manage our growing electrical base load throughout the world.  This book will give the reader a factual basis with which to judge the (often unrealistic) claims of the renewable-energy proponents.

Differences

A friend of ours who is an author came to visit us last week. She is working on a book about how to bridge the current political divide in our country; how to get people from the two sides to talk to each other, and even more important, to listen to each other – a worthwhile endeavor. Our discussion got me to thinking about this issue.  

Our positions on issues – social, political, religious, etc – are shaped entirely by our world view, what our parents and peers have told us (either explicitly or unconsciously thorough body language and tone of voice and expressions), what our schools and churches or temples or mosques have taught us, and what our personal experiences have been. Within that bubble of our own individual world view, whatever views we hold on issues are obviously correct, perhaps even self-evident. How could they be otherwise?

For example, if someone is raised in a strict conservative Christian family, lectured to for years on conservative Christian dogma by authority figures like parents or pastors or priests, surrounded by a community of peers who devoutly believe the same Christian doctrine drummed into them since they were infants, OF COURSE they will believe abortion and homosexuality are terrible sins. How could they believe otherwise? If we had had the same life experiences we too would believe that.

For example, if someone is raised male in a Islamic Middle Eastern culture, is uneducated with no hope whatever of ever getting a job or a wife, living in grinding poverty, and a charismatic leader comes along and offers us a meaningful, honored, religiously-approved task that will take us directly to paradise and out of our current meaningless miserable life, IT’S NO WONDER he (it’s almost always a he) would volunteer to be a suicide bomber. Under similar life experience we too might well volunteer.

To take an example closer to home, if we were a 50-some year old working class machinist in, say, Detroit, whose job disappeared when it was outsourced overseas and who has watched the equity in his mortgaged house go negative in the same market crash that left Wall Street bankers with multi-million dollar bonuses, paid for by the taxpayer bailout, and who heard himself derided as a “deplorable” or suffering from “white privilege” by a rich Democratic candidate, I can well understand how he might vote for Trump (or at least against Clinton). In the same situation we too might have voted the same way.

The core of this is to realize that people who hold views different than our own, even ridiculous or outrageous views (from our own point of view) see those views from inside their world view and life experiences as perfectly reasonable, and may see our own views as naïve, if not equally outrageous.

It’s back to assumptions, of course. But the important thing to remember is that people’s assumptions are based on what they were taught and what their life experiences have taught them, and that is to be respected. It doesn’t mean one has to agree with them, but one has to acknowledge that their views don’t come from stupidity, or from some evil force or malignant state of mind – they come from the authentic life experiences of that other person, and if we ourselves had had the same life experiences we would almost certainly believe as they do.

Let me re-recommend Arlie Russell Hochschild’s 2016 book Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Here is a liberal academic who has recognized this fact, and worked hard to try to understand the world view of people on the other side of the divide.  Joan Williams in her 2016 book White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America does much the same thing.

We need an equivalent book from a conservative trying to understand – understand, not judge -  the liberal world view, but I haven’t seen it yet.

The point is we need to get out of this endless hammering of people with other views and come to recognize that people will have differing views based on differing life experiences, and just because someone has a different view doesn’t mean they are stupid or sexist or racist or inherently evil – they are just different, and vive la difference – it is what makes our nation interesting and vital and healthy.

Putin and Trump

I see the media is running its usual confirmation bias about the Trump-Putin meeting. They are displaying the same fake outrage that they have for months that Trump didn’t dispute Putin’s assurances that the Russian government didn’t try to influence the 2016 election.

If he had, Putin naturally enough would have just denied it again – did they really think Trump could get him to admit it? I suppose they expected Trump and Putin to get into a childish “Yes you did, no I didn’t” tiff.” Since Trump is obviously trying to set up a working relationship with Russia that will get them to help us on some issues of mutual interest, like restraining Iran, of course he butters up Putin. It is an obvious thing to do if you are trying to pry a favor from someone – people do it all the time.

Of course Russia tried to influence our elections, just as we try to influence Russian ones, though they apparently weren’t particularly good at it. All large nations, and many small ones, try to influence other nations by both open and undercover methods, and have done so since the dawn of history. American media and political outrage at this issue is entirely manufactured outrage for political spin. No one who has even an elementary knowledge of history is really surprised. The American government itself has a long history of messing in other nation’s political affairs, and even in managing more than a few outright coups as well as swaying elections (in Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Iran, Japan, and the Philippines, to name a few we know about, and who knows how many more we don’t know about).

And of course it is no coincidence that special prosecutor Muller indicted 12 Russians just days before Putin and Trump met. The indictments are meaningless, because Russia is no more likely to extradite those 12 to the US for trial than we would be to extradite any of our CIA or NAS hackers to Russia if the Russians accused them.  Moreover there is nothing in the indictments that hasn’t been public knowledge for more than a year, including the exact names of the people who did the hacking. We apparently hacked the security cameras in that building and were able to watch some of the activity. So why issue the meaningless indictments just before Trump and Putin met if not to try to embarrass Trump and interfere with whatever plan he might have had to improve relations with Russia, who after all we need to help us on some other issues, like the Middle East wars.

But then the Trump haters will drink the media Cool Aid just as they have for months now, as the media has fed them spin that feeds their confirmation bias.

I don’t much like Trump, but I don’t make the mistake that so many others do of underestimating him and thinking he is an idiot. (Pray for opponents that underestimate you!). The man is certainly a con man (as are many, perhaps even most, politicians), but he is very, very good at what he does, as the last election demonstrated. There is clearly much more going on under the covers, both pro-Trump and anti-Trump, then we see in the media spin, and this is clearly brutal Washington hardball politics.

It leads me again to remember Nassim Taleb’s argument that listening to the daily news not only doesn’t increase one’s knowledge, it actually reduces it.

Reality (in the shape of Trump) bites Europe

Predictably the European press is outraged that Donald Trump scolded European leaders at the recent NATO summit. He used blunter words than I might have chosen, but in fact he was perfectly right about his central point – Europe, with a GDP about as large as the US ($19.14 trillion in 2017 vs $19.39 trillion for the US) and a population almost a third larger (511.8 million in the EU vs 326 million in the US in 2017), is incapable of defending itself without US support.  In fact they can hardly move what few troops and equipment they have to a battle front without US logistical support. This despite the fact that a resurgent Russia threatens them far more than it threatens the US.

NATO members (most of the EU) each pledged decades ago to spend at least 2% of GDP on their own military preparedness. By comparison, the US spends about 3.6% of GDP on our military. But although all NATO countries pledged to spend at least 2% of their GDP on their militaries, only 6 of the 28 members actually do so (Canada, Britain, France, Turkey, Greece, and Poland).  And the wealthiest country in the EU, Germany, spends a paltry 1.2% of its GDP on its military, which as a result has, as of 2017, not a single operable submarine or transport plane. According to a recent report from their parliament’s own military commissioner, the German military doesn’t even have enough protective vests, winter clothing or tents to participate in a NATO mission if called up, and they currently have 21,000 vacant officer posts. In a NATO exercise last year in Norway German troops were so short of equipment that they had to use broomstick handles as simulated guns.

Europe has for decades relied on the US to protect it from Russian incursions. When Europe was weak, after the devastation of World War II,  that made sense. It makes no sense now. Europe is wealthy enough to fund its own defense, and Trump is perfectly right to rub their noses in that fact.

In fact presidents in both parties at least from Gerald Ford up to and through the Obama administration have raised this point, timidly, with NATO repeatedly. But of course they were so timid that NATO ignored them. All Trump has done is make the point forcefully for once. And guess what, NATO members promptly had an emergency meeting to plan increasing their military capabilities.  Of course it will go nowhere unless the US keeps the pressure on.

And of course even if they finally, with much prodding, meet their 2% goal, it may not be spent effectively. The same problem that bedevils the EU’s financial system bedevils its military systems – 28 countries each doing their own thing with poor coordination. So the Turks, for example, are buying Russian S-400 air defense missile systems that don’t interoperate with anything NATO has. (Turkey is not a member of the EU, yet, but is a member of NATO).

So yes, Europeans were upset to have been called out so bluntly. But asking them nicely over the past few decades hasn’t worked, so perhaps it will take Trump’s bluntness to actually make them meet their commitments.

How Trump “plays” his opponents

A reader of my June 28 blog asked just exactly how President Trump’s Twitter comments are  “playing” the media and his opponents, as I suggested in that post. Those of you who have read Scott Adam’s 2017 book Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter, or Robert Caldini’s 2007 book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, or his 2017 book Pre-suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuasion, already know the answer.

In essence Trump is making use of the very same automatic human mental and emotional responses that canny advertisers and negotiators and political spin doctors use; he is just unusually good at it. We all like to think we are mostly rational, but it just isn’t so – we are all controlled more by emotional cues and mental shortcuts. And these work even when we understand them. As Scott Adams points out, we all know perfectly well that $9.99 is really $10.00, and yet…… We all know perfectly well that the TV comedy we are watching has a canned laugh track, and yet…..

The primary thing that his outrageous comments do is to take the oxygen away from his opponents by dominating the media cycles, just as he did in the primaries. When one of his outrageous twitter comments comes out the media plays it up and it drowns out anything his opponents might have been saying or proposing.  A few in the media (but probably not many) may understand what he is doing, but it doesn’t matter because it all drives audience share and the media owners and the talking heads love it – it helps their sales and their careers. And of course he gets billions of dollars worth of free media coverage.

The second thing it does is establish the agenda. What people focus on becomes at that moment the most important thing in their mind, a principle advertisers understand well. So when he makes an outrageous twitter comment that everyone talks about, that established where their focus is and makes that topic, and him, of central importance in their minds.  It also keeps the focus on him and away from his opponents. There is an old actor’s saying ”I don’t care what they print about me so long as they spell my name right”, or in another version “any publicity is good publicity”. Both recognize that name recognition and focus are the key in the long term – not content.

And then these statements on twitter or in interviews are often clever examples of “framing” or “anchoring” – establishing associations, even unconscious associations, that prepare the ground for later messages. It sets us up for things like confirmation bias. If these are unfamiliar terms, read the books listed above.

Finally it keeps the opposition on the back foot, always sputtering ineffectually with outrage and moral indignation, and focused on virtue signaling to their peers and herd reinforcement rather than on pragmatic planning for regaining power.

And this all works. That’s why I say Trump is “playing” the media and the opposition. And by the way, the media also use these techniques to advance their own agendas; they just aren’t quite  as good at it as he is.

None of this is particularly comforting. It’s not comfortable to think we can be so easily manipulated, but we are, and it happens to all of us every day. Why else do we buy so much stuff we really don’t need, or believe politicians who make promises we know perfectly well they couldn’t keep even if they intended to?

Abortion Law and the Supreme Court

There is much worry and angst these days about the Supreme Court overturning Roe vs Wade, the landmark abortion ruling. It got me to thinking about the religious argument against abortion, because at root it is purely and simply a religious argument, not a logical or biological or legal one.  Some branches of Christianity assert that life begins at conception, but that is a purely arbitrary point asserted as religious dogma, because of course life never ceases between production of the sperm and egg in the parents and the successful live birth of a new baby. Everything in between is just a process, and to pick any single point in that process as the point where “life begins” is just arbitrary – life never ended or there wouldn’t be a developing baby.

So I have wondered why pro-choice supporters haven’t made the obvious legal argument that forbidding abortion is the federal government imposition of a particular religious view on the entire country, contrary to the First Amendment's Establishment Clause.

All this hinges around the question of when the state should recognize a baby as a new person, with the civil rights of a person. Clearly a live birth is a new person. One might possibly argue that as soon as the fetus can survive outside of the womb - somewhere around 22-24 weeks - it is a new person. I find it hard to argue that a blastosphere, the small ball of cells developed in the first few weeks after conception, is really a person yet. It has the potential to become a person eventually, but in fact research has shown that something like half of these never become live births and are spontaneously aborted or resorbed.

And then there is the valid argument that women ought to have the power to control their own bodies and their own reproductive behavior. I find that persuasive. Those that oppose abortion are free to never have one, but I don’t see why they should impose their own religious views on others who believe differently. Finally, I like Scott Adam’s position – he thinks men ought to butt out of the whole debate, since it is not men who bear the full weight of pregnancy and child upbringing. It is an example of Nassim Taleb’s “skin in the game” moral principle – it is the woman who has the most skin in the game, so it is the woman who morally ought to make the decision. Others, including other women, who don’t have to carry the child for nine months and suffer all the health risks and raise it and support it for decades afterward have no moral claim to be involved in the decision.

Recommended - Democrats are powerless to block Trump's Supreme Court nominee - and have no one to blame but themselves

I mentioned in a June 28 post that Democrats had made a number of tactical mistakes that were coming home to bite them now. In that regard I recommend Mark Thiessen's article today in the Washington Post (reprinted from the Chicago Tribune) entitled Democrats are powerless to block Trump's Supreme Court nominee - and have no one to blame but themselves. Thiessen traces the Democrat's series of errors back to the unprecedented 2001 filibuster of Miguel Estrada  for the U.S, Court of Appeals, under the Bush administration, apparently because they didn't want the Republicans to get the credit for eventually appointing the first Hispanic to the Supreme Court.  Thiessen then traces the series of subsequent errors they made which have left them largely powerless now to prevent Trump from naming whomever he wishes to replace the retiring Justice Kennedy, and to fill any further openings that might occur before the midterm elections, and even after if the Republicans maintain control of the Senate, as seems likely.

It does seem to me that Congressional Democrats have been remarkably incompetent since Trump was elected. There have been a number of opportunities for them to offer Democratic votes in return for concessions on issues they care about, but they have adopted such a obstructionist position, even on issues they supported under Obama,  that they have wasted the opportunities.

Recommended: The Silk Roads

Europeans and Americans are taught a world history (to the extent that they are taught history at all) that largely ignores the East, beyond a footnote about China and perhaps a lurid tale or two about the Mongolian hordes. Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History at Oxford University, Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford and Director of the Oxford Center for Byzantine Research, sets out to correct that oversight with his 2015 book The Silk Roads: A New History of the World.  In truth until the Spanish began importing vast wealth from the Americas, Europe was a backwater and the real action and progress in the world was all in the Middle East and Far East.

The reader will learn two things from this eminently readable history. First, that a very great deal of significance was going on in the Middle East and Far East during what Europeans think of as primitive times or the dark ages. Second, that the history of European and then later American involvement in the East, right up to the present day, is a sordid tale of greed, arrogance, incompetence and betrayal on both sides. It is not a pretty picture.

The next Supreme Court justice

In all the media panic about the selection by Trump of the person to replace the retiring Justice Kennedy, one of the interesting claims (by liberal commentators) is that the Supreme Court has issued terrible decisions this term. I have been thinking about that, and I’m not sure I agree. Consider some of the recent landmark decisions:

I have already written in a recent post about the Court’s upholding of Trump’s immigration ban. As I said in that post the ban may well have been unwise, but there is no question from the wording of the relevant section of the law that the president had the power to issue it. The lower court judges who found against the law were clearly trying to impose their own political and social views rather than adhering to the plain and unambiguous wording of the law.

On the ruling that overturned the practice of public sector unions of demanding partial dues from people who didn’t belong to the union, it seems to me that is absolutely correct. Why should anyone be forced to support a voluntary organization they didn’t join? In any case, I personally think public sector unions ought to be outlawed. There is reasonable justification for unions in private enterprise, even if union bosses often abused their position.  But public sector unions bargain with elected officials, who often owe their jobs to votes and campaign contributions from the unions, so this is hardly an “arms-length” transaction. It is really often a collusion between unions and the officials they elect at the expense of the taxpayers who ultimately pay the bills.  That is how so many states and cities got into the untenable position of paying such  massive public sector pensions that they are going broke.

In the case of the gerrymandering issue the court essentially punted because it couldn’t (yet) find an acceptable formula against which to test election maps. Gerrymandering is a very complex issue, because in fact some minority groups want what is essentially gerrymandering in order to get voting districts that are black enough or Hispanic enough to get a black or Hispanic person elected. Beyond that, people are increasingly self-segregating in neighborhoods, even if none of them are in fact segregationists. So how does one determine if there was deliberate gerrymandering or simply self-segregation? There is no doubt that there is deliberate gerrymandering for political purposes by both parties and it ought to be ended, but the court was correct, I think, to punt on the issue until it can determine an adequate test.

The baker who didn’t want to make a wedding cake for a gay couple because of his religious beliefs is one of those interesting cases in which two rights are in conflict. The court issued a very narrow ruling, simply saying that the Colorado commission that originally ruled against the baker was unduly hostile to religion in general, but at the same time they reaffirmed the principle that gays have the same civil rights as anyone else. It seems to me this was a careful and judicious ruling in a difficult case, in which the court didn’t (yet) see a way to enunciate a valid general principle that would become a precedent.

I understand that some groups would like judges that make rulings on issues in which those groups are unable to get laws passed, but I think that is wrong. Elected officials in legislatures are the proper way to get laws passed or amended; unelected judges are NOT the way to bypass legislatures. If politicians or interest groups can’t get a law passed it is because the laws they propose don’t (yet) have enough public support to get the legislative votes needed, and so they probably ought not to be passed. That is the whole point of a democracy. Bypassing that constraint through the unelected judicial system is, I think, improper, unwise and ultimately a danger to democracy. So I hope the next Supreme Court justice is in fact a strict constructionist (some call them conservatives, but that is incorrect) – someone who rules on the plain text and original intended meaning of the law and Constitution, not on some “expanded” or “enlightened” interpretation that happens to  support their own personal social or political persuasion.

In sum, I think laws and regulations ought to be passed and/or amended ONLY by elected legislators, not by unelected judges, or for that matter, by unelected bureaucrats in federal agencies. A judge’s only job is to apply the law as written, or if there is ambiguity, as intended by the legislature that passed the law, to the extent that can be determined by the record. I understand there are times when we ought to pass laws and we don’t, and even a few cases where the Supreme Court has forced the issue (as with segregation, for example) to the benefit of society, but I think that is a bad precedent despite its salutary outcome. A court that can make good “expanded” interpretations can just as well make dangerous and damaging “expanded” interpretations at other times. Better they should stick strictly to the existing law and let elected legislatures make or amend laws as required.