Gorehorn, the Adventure Pony

If you’re looking for an activity to soften a long drive, I recommend an extravagant Mix CD Challenge!  Our trip was from Arlington, Virginia to Durham, North Carolina.  The challenge was simple: invent two album names and assign them to other people on the trip.  Each person takes the album names they are given, contemplates for a while, stirs up a vision, and creates the perfect mix for such an album name.  The results can be stunning and add a whole new dimension to the music you once thought you knew.  While I can’t share our concoctions so easily, the album names should reflect how we made four hours speed by in a flash:

• Euclid’s Last Stand
• Genghis Kahn and the Band Wagon
• Goodnight Spoon
• Gorehorn, the Adventure Pony
• How To Dismantle a ‘71 Ford Pinto’
• Jeanne Kirkpatrick Overdrive
• Kind of Periwinkle
• The Longings of Seedless Watermelons

Update: April 2008

A re-posting of a recent letter that I sent to family and friends.

Well into the new year, so much has changed and I just wanted to pause a moment, greet you with a note, and share a few stories (likely with too many references to economics!).

Two years ago I moved out to the mysterious land of Virginia (where people introduce themselves with their full name).  It’s no California, but it was good enough for Thomas Jefferson and has turned out to be quite good to me.  I have benefit from good company, plenty of opportunities, and, pleasantly, an enjoyable dance scene (where I have lead only one, fortunate, relationship-commencing, knee injury).

Up until this past October I worked at the Institute for Humane Studies.  My main responsibility was to manage our globalization education project which included maintaining a website and directing several summer seminars on the topic.  The job gave me the opportunity to work with several top notch faculty members and hundreds of bright, enthusiastic students.  In the process, I have increased my fondness of teaching basic economic principles and developed a strong interest in alternatives to our traditional methods of education.

In the spirit of education, this past Fall greeted me with some new opportunities.  I made it over to Switzerland for a one week conference on sustainability.  I won’t hazard a guess as to whether I will remember the bike rides through the Alps or my hosts’ Malthusian diatribes with more clarity, though if I were to recommend a memorable experience, the way the layers of clouds pattern the valley below Braunwald is indeed striking.

On my return, and with my blessing, it was decided that we cancel the globalization project I was working on.  It’s a challenging decision to terminate something you have worked hard to make succeed, yet my economics training never fails to remind me that if you can’t increase the value of the resources you are using, you are best to let those resources find a higher valued use elsewhere.  The shocking part came as I realized half of my job was contingent on this decision.

While it is only human nature to be somewhat frustrated at the occurrence of unexpected change, I responded in another way only something as savvy as human nature could suggest: I didn’t sleep for three days.  After a handful of conversations with close friends (and with myself), somewhere between insomnia and bliss, it became clear that I too was a misallocated resource and due for some new goals.

Programming, animation, web design: they all got put on the top of my list.  I started training in a variety of internet technologies and began the process of beginning my own information design business aptly titled: Information is Beautiful.  And it is.  (Nicely, the seminar half of my job at IHS is also still on my plate.)

In a year or so, I’m sure I will have a few more stories to share.  I’m sure they will be full of romance, intrigue, and the struggles and triumphs of a protagonist and his trade.

In the meantime, I wish you many beautiful days.  I hope you are in good health and spending time with the people and pursuits that you love.  Let me know if you will be in Virginia in the near future and I promise I won’t geek out (too much) about productivity blogs, the wonders of Javascript libraries, Edward Tufte, or Settlers of Catan.

Economic Freedom and GDP per capita — Gapminder-style

For a while now I’ve shared common hopes to have the Economic Freedom data take new forms.  The relationship between Economic Freedom and GDP per capita for example is not hard to imagine, however there is always something a bit more compelling about a nice visualization.  Gapminder’s Trendalyzer seemed to have established the perfect format — it was just a matter of time before unique data sets could be plotted in a similar manner.  Google has now made this possible, and with the release of their new spreadsheet gadgets I’ve taken the opportunity to dive into the Economic Freedom data, and add motion.

This first graph compares the Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal’s Index of Economic Freedom country scores with GDP per capita in US dollars as reported from the United Nations Common Database the data from 2000–2005.  Colors denote regions.  Size denotes population.

This second graph uses the same data minus some of the clutter.  I’ve selected to display just a few countries which I think are interesting to compare to one another: North Korea and South Korea, China and Hong Kong, Cuba and Spain, and Botswana and Zimbabwe.

A hat-tip to Google for making this powerful tool available at such an accessible level. Now, on with setting free all that interesting information housed in academic jargon, repelling visuals, and bullet-pointed presentations.

Dinosaurlandia

Deep in the heart of Virginia, six friends find themselves in a land unfamiliar and rare… Their task: 1) Shoot a bunch of video, 2) Share that video amongst everyone, and 3) Let each person tell the story as it was.  Here’s my take on the fiction-enhanced memories.

UPDATE: Another fine entry: Dinos Alive!

Book Review: Fooled by Randomness

“Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette.  First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands, of chambers instead of six.  After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under numbing false sense of security,” says Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  He refers to this as the black swan problem.

Mistaking Luck For Skill

Fooled by Randomness is a book about mistaking luck for skill, a mistake Taleb sees most prevalent in journalism and the world of markets.  At the root, “risk detection and risk-avoidance are not mediated in the ‘thinking’ part of the brain but largely in the emotional one.” “The consequences are not trivial: It means that rational thinking has little, very little, to do with risk avoidance.  Much of what rational thinking seems to do is rationalize one’s actions by fitting some logic to them.”

Yet, “[p]eople fail to learn that their emotional reactions to past experiences (positive or negative) were short-lived.” “[T]hey continuously retain the bias of thinking that the purchase of an object will bring long-lasting, possibly permanent, happiness or that a setback will cause severe and prolonged distress (when in the past similar setbacks did not affect them for very long and the joy of the purchase was short-lived).”

He paraphrases a remark by Einstein: “[C]ommon sense is nothing but a collection of misperceptions acquired by the age eighteen.”

Other Common Misperceptions

Taleb also redefines a common misperception of the word ‘mistake’:  “A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.”

This point ties succinctly with the concept of creative destruction which embraces the role of failure in development.  Mistakes need not be avoided, but learned from.  But, many environments are not conducive to such a framework.  Many of these frameworks have been engrained in society and social relationships for years.  Taleb explores why “bad traders have a short- and medium-term survival advantage over good traders,” by tying the world of markets to naive evolutionary theories.

“[M]any amateurs believe that plants and animals reproduce on a one-way route toward perfection. Translating the idea to social terms, they believe that companies and organizations are, thanks to competition… irreversibly heading toward betterment.” This is simply not true.

Taleb offers multiple reasons.  I will follow each with a few of my own thoughts.

1) Organizations do not reproduce like living members of nature.  Competition is never between buyers and sellers.  It is always between buyers and buyers or sellers and sellers.  While finding the perfect mate could fall in the same category as competition between businesses, reproduction is different in many ways.  Perhaps a more valid metric to compare the social environment of organizations to reproduction would be one of accessibility.  That is, to what level do companies, or mates, have the opportunity to enter or exit the marketplace?

2) Randomeness.  Some mutations are for the better, others for the worse.  “Negative mutations (Gould) are traits that survive in spite of being worse, from the reproductive fitness standpoint, than the ones they replaced.” Again, this acquires a level of complexity when translated into social terms.  While market trends may be surprising on their own, subsidies, labor protection laws, and a variety of other market distorting policies add another level of randomness to the mix, often allowing unprofitable enterprises (negative mutations) to survive.

In Taleb’s mathematical verse: “Just as an animal could have survived because its sample path was lucky, the “best” operators in a given business can come from a subset of operators who survived because of over-fitness to a sample path--a sample path that was free of the evolutionary rare event.” “[E]volution means fitness to one and only one time series, not the average of all possible environments.”

The Dive Bar that is Journalism

Distinguishing between signal and noise is widespread, though, journalism receives the largest swath of Taleb’s relentless skepticism: “[J]ournalism may be the greatest plague we face today—as the world becomes more and more complicated and our minds are trained for more and more simplification.”

This effect of this large-scale compression—going from the particular to the general—“is the reduction in the degree of detected randomness.” Journalism, through induction, favors the palatable over the counter-intuitive.  In sum: “[M]ost poetic sounding adages are plain wrong.”

From journalism to winning streaks, “if someone performed better than the crowd in the past, there is a presumption of his ability to do better in the future.” But this is a weak presumption.  It depends on two factors: “The randomness content of his profession and the number of monkeys in operation.”

While Taleb doesn’t offer any advice on which particular profession to choose, he does offer a suggestion.  Don’t shoot for a profession where you only like the way people live at the top. Consider the lifestyle of the average person, there are many more of them.

Escaping Randomness (Kind of)

The idea of alternative histories across several disciplines all seem to converge on the same concept of risk and uncertainty: “certainty is something that is likely to take place across the highest number of different alternative histories; uncertainty concerns events that should take place in the lowest number of them.” Taleb mentions examples in philosophy, physics and economics.

However certain this convergence may appear, one still has to stay alert.  Profits and losses are never guaranteed.  “The frequency or probability of [a] loss, in and by itself, is totally irrelevant; it needs to be judged in connection with the magnitude of the outcome.”

Book Review: Why Wages Rise

At a talk this Fall, Charles Koch mentioned that the book Why Wages Rise by F.A. Harper was an influential book in his career.  Curious of the subject and the inspirations of such a successful man, I decided I best read it myself.

It was fascinating to see that the book did not begin with much framing and jumped right into the discussion with a focus on labor unions and the misperception that their demands lead to a rise in wages.  This says a lot about who Harper was trying to communicate these ideas to and places the stage of development of the US economy at the time the book was written, in 1957.

Harper draws a nice analogy to explain why it can be harmful to simply raise workers wages without a commensurate increase in productivity:

During 1955, the average pay of an employee of GM was $5,011.  Yet GM’s profits for the year were $1,189,477,082 (or $3,751,477,082 before any ascertainable taxes) on a total business of $12,433,277,420.  It can be seen at a glance that doubling the pay of this employee would be no more noticeable in the whole enterprise than would be the adding of another automobile to those owned in the State of Michigan.

Doubling the pay of all GM employees, however, would be quite a different story.  It would eat up in one year more than the total value of the firm’s real estate, plants, and equipment.

He continues to explain how productivity is the true source of real wage increases and how inflation can harm wages.  He emphasizes the role a sound currency play when considering wages:

When you accept money in trade, you are proceeding on faith in it as a sort of implied contract.  The implied contract is this:  When you trade something for money as an intermediate step to getting what you eventually want in exchange, you are operating on the assumption that the money will serve your intent rather than thwart it.

Harper’s broad approach to understanding the forces which influence wages is commendable.  I truly enjoyed Harper’s use of images throughout the book to complement his main points.  Here are a few of my favorites:

The Business Cycle

The eloquence of this graph captures the fluctuation of the economy as a force that is always present rather than a cycle that fluctuates around some sort of equilibrium, as the business cycle is often depicted.

Buying Power

What I particularly like about this graph is how it labels the section in between the citizens buying power before taxes, and the citizens buying power after taxes. The section is labeled: The Cost of Being Governed.  I find the language eye opening in a small way.  Most of the costs that we have in our life we try to find a way to reduce.  Increased productivity involves identifying better ways to do things and then changing our ways accordingly, freeing up more time to invest in other ways or for leisure in the process.  By framing the data in such a way, it suggests that governance has a specific role in the economy and leaves the hope that: if we can improve the ways in which we currently govern our society, we can reduce our necessity of this governance, freeing up more time to invest in other ways or for leisure across the society.  A very nice way to put it.

Recipe: Mock Mince Meat Pie

Mix together the following ingredients and stir until well-blended.

1.5 cups Seedless Raisins
4 medium-sized Tart Apples (Cut into small pieces and squeeze in lemon juice so they do not turn brown)
10-15 dried Apricots (Cut into Small peices)
Grated rind of 1 large Orange
Juice of one Orange
.5 cup of Sparkling Apple Cider (or other fruit juice)
Handful of broken Walnuts (optional)
.75 - 1 cup Brown Sugar (a mix of brown and white sugar is also good)

In a large frying pan, cover these ingredients and simmer until the apples are very soft (add more cider to keep them from scorching).  (You can also add in 2-3 tablespoons of Brandy while these wonderful flavors are simmering together.)

I mixed these in with the above ingredients (minus the crackers and tapioca, which I did not include).  Mom might have suggested these ingredients get mixed in after the simmering (I couldn’t tell from the handwriting).

.5 tsp Cinnamon
.5 tsp Cloves
1+ tsp fresh grated Nutmeg
2-3 tlbs finely crushed soda cracker (or cracker meal and 2-3 tlbs tapiocca)

Preheat oven to 450
Make a nice Pie Crust

Bake for 30 minutes or so.

Mmmmmm!

My Flourescent Persona

February 2001, Narrative Verse

Having just returned from the grocery store, I am with my friends, entering the house from the north side. He begins passing as we unlatch the door, taking note of a florescent orange scrap which lies on the ground. Everybody knows him, he passes the house many times a day. He’s mostly referred to as the guy with the Barbie tucked into his football helmet or the guy that walks like this.

Today he is wearing the usual bright colors, layers of vividly striped shirts, on and wrapped around his waist where he fastens his pink bunny along with other items, trinkets of his personality. The left pant-leg of his faded blue jeans is securely pegged at the knee. Loose tennis shoes chase his feet and his selected headgear is a boxy, brandless, florescent-green cap over a paisley forest-green bandana disguised in more attached finds and an array of ballpoint pens wedged into the band of his swimming goggles. All this set off with a silver-laced smile.

Our eyes meet, though, as this makes our intentions vulnerable we quickly look back to our respective paths. I wonder his name… My friends are already heading downstairs toward the kitchen. I hold back, curious, peering out the small window on the door as it closes. His walk, confident, brisk with a hint of athleticism, exhibits a pause. He turns back toward the florescent orange scrap lying exposed, approaches and stands in observation for a moment. Decided, he reaches down, gathers and houses the treasure alongside his waist, as if he has found a piece of himself.

An Onslaught of Caterpillars to an Air-Conditioned Building in Florida

November 2003, Take 2, Italian Sonnet

A million footprints far away from branch
Abandoned, why? No parachutes or silk
String routes, pre-made cocoons or juice or milk
Await, yet still they fall as an avalanche
May hurry down. They flex their glands, crash land
Dismiss their guilt, reorient and bilk
The prey and predators they stilt—full tilt,
And like an arrow, make for the entrance.

From solitaire and lazy window gaze,
Through hall to patio, a cool demise.
The door hydraulically slows down to aid
A million feet beneath a glow of eyes.
What does it matter who will win the race?
They will not be tomorrow’s butterflies.

Temporal to the White Sea (As told by a critter to his kind)

October 2003, Blank Verse

The sea was blue for gravity, appeased,
Had pulled the blood of sky unto her depths,
With cold hand, tucking every tide between
The sands, as space calmly skipped asteroids
Across her breadth. In step with time, she took
A breath, nevertheless, quite hydrokinetic
And asymmetric—just this once. It’s said

Her shadows housed red fire—a vein between
The trenches and mountaintops, aloft, embraced
In nimbostratus—plentiful and racing
At a catastrophic alien pace. The breeze,
She held a sip of mist, permit a taste—
A tease of seasons, nonetheless, displaced—
Then hopped a hill to quench the groves who grew
As tides unto thus high. And as an eye
Who never winks, our clearing fathomed fate
At hand. Her lush grass grasped in fist of soil,
An offering to tempt the wave to land.

Now sea aside and trees asunder, close
We sit in history’s cold wake, the dark
Blue skyline silenced by a cumulous
Rouge silhouette with solar eclipse drawn
Upon—her lunar awning from folklore
And myth, eons beyond this campfire pit.

Much Thanks to Wild Boars

Shades of gray pervade
The night; 6:10 dark orange, true orange
Yellow, green, cyan forms
A defining light, shadows vague
She tromps ambitiously in plaid.
Contrails streak, contrails torn
Wispful, coyoteful, adorned
Sunlight, day, the colors fade…

Twisting away lampulike
As so am I?
And so as I,
Begins the day lamp bulb bright.
Bed we’ve emptied, cab arranged
And she romps vividly in plaid.

* italicized words deserve French pronunciation.

The Valiant Turtle Metaphor

October 2003, Non-metrical split couplet

Run little turtle, run for me
Swim little turtle, swim to freedom
And little turtle, when you’re free
Dance little turtle, dance for me.
~the people on the hill

The sand cracks, I take a peek,
Sneak
A whiff of a world I’ll only frequent
A minute.
Sun ringing, crisp air, cool sand tickling my nose—I tremble
Like a finger without thimble,
Exposed. I struggle forth, amazed with the beauty, the birds.
An urge
Overtakes me to slip from the shore. Oh, look! Not far,
There are
A whole lot of me budding and shuffling toward the sea.
The low frequency
In the wind spins whirlwinds, the colors are so bright.
So different than last night.
I inhale, my palate explodes, the scent of seaweed
Sweet,
So neat, there are no roads! A gust upon my face
Gracefully
Unfolds an air lift with a twist,
Brisk
As gold. It’s a great day for a dip, I’ll explore
Offshore,
As a form crosses the sun and circles once more—a goodfella,
Hello.
Wow! So quick, oh, he’s dive-bombing now.
I look around.
And why are those people up on the hill yelling,
Arms waving,
As if they’re suggesting I move?

Oh, God! He just ate one of me! Yellow mouth vice
Not nice—
Bad. Oh, jeez, six or eight out of one-twenty, reduced
By two,
Four, sixty, two—a handful. What luck,
Stuck
Here, I survived the selection. I survived the waves.
Now droves
Of jackals, wild pigs—insane. This is quite rare,
Where
Is my mom? I’ll take refuge in this rusty can.
Oh man,
Not for long. I must drag myself to the sea. Go fast.
At last,
A foot less, I’m so slow. No, fast, I will go
Straight as the crow,
Eyes! He pecked out one of me’s eyes! Oh dear,
So near
Keep plugging just twenty-five more years.
Tears,
They’re blocking my view. No accumulated salt
Yet, just the thought
Of the blue. Now quick, flip by flip, gosh, I’m so slow.
Flowing
Trickles of aid wrap soft like a handkerchief
On my ankle.
And why are those people still up there,
Dumb stares,
I could’ve used a little help you know!

Ahh, it seems my sight has improved.
I’m moved
By the undertow, swirled and shoed.
Glued
To a worry in the back of my mind, yellow beaks,
Tusks, cheeks
Munching the orange-peel soft carapace
Inside.
Snazzy, if I move my flipper like this, I glide.
No need for a guide,
I’m quite alive. Whoops, by surprise I’m tossed
Lost,
The sun, obstructed again, casts a long
Shadow and is gone.
What’s that figure? It grows. A big fish,
No, a shark!
Not this again. Go! Paddle fast as a galley
Two, three
Gunpowder’s incentive if you ask me,
Free
At home, yikes, what’s this? SWISH…
Ha hah, missed!
Look mom, I can survive on
My own.
As I come up for air, their cheers blare
Social welfare,
Jeers and suggestions of what I should know,
So,
I yell back, I’m not impaired!
Aware
However, that I am a little turtle and they probably don’t understand.

Little Friedrich & Uncle Sam

Take 3

When I was a kid I had a few questions
Like how to walk and how to kick
Was I conceived in liberty?
What’s the use of knowledge in society?
At first I queried then I poked
Amazed and leary, brimmed and stoked
Then Uncle Sam took my hand
And said, “You’re looking stellar you mild Fabian.”
While he justified his grip
I pulled away and ran from him
To the Privatseminar and on
To some coffee house, here’s what I saw
People communicating
The universe, the kosmos mating
An organic compound of benzol rings
The lattice of a crystal’s strings

I saw order
Spontaneous order
Hey Sam, get your visible hand off me.

I gasped aloud yet Sam grabbed my arm
And insisted that I don’t be alarmed
He said there could be competition
He said he calculated with precision
“There’s no taxis in these galaxies
The wind carries us quite happily,”
I said, “No Sam, competition is a discovery procedure!”
He did not understand, of course
I tried to explain, however, verbose
The double negative, after all
Has yet to be banned by federal law.
With a firm hand on my shoulder
Sam showed me his campaign hats and price controls
He offered to subsidize my thoughts
As I pulled a way again, he looked shocked

I want order
Spontaneous order
Hey Sam, get your visible hand off me.

I ran, I fled his crooked stare
Until I stumbled upon Ms. Lacy Faire
As fine a form as one need see
To be free to choose, and choose to be free
Lacy and I chose to get together
With a few good ideas and a few good friends.
Amongst us all and amongst us some
She’s who embraces our decisions.
As Sam carried on down the road to serfdom
I found myself in Switzerland
Between the firm, the market and the law
On the shores of Lake Geneva, here’s what I saw
People communicating
The universe, the kosmos mating
An organic compound of benzol rings
The lattice of a crystal’s strings

I saw order
Spontaneous order
Hey Sam, get your visible hand off me

Casual Tunes (Lauren’s Closet Poem)

Paths cross on the lawn, under tree, in the shade
With no path yet past fascinates and arranges the day.
A pair of swimsuits, a handfull of notions
Like geysers in showrooms or spoken explosions
To once again soak me
And you.

Tucked in an enclave, a pocket of sun
From short stories to a contraption that clunks
After the Fairmont the rain fell in lumps
Until the shelter of the Rep and a tale called ‘True Love’
That you asked that I read
To you

I won’t define well defined casual tunes
For the songs that I sing are the songs that grow old
Though the tales that I tell are the tales that I’ll tell
Again and again and again

Hidden in few - two tents, cookware and steed
Seeds, flower books mesmerize, marvel and feed
Your quaint mind mapping ‘tography photons with reeds
On your fingers whom dance on a stringed hollow-shaped tree
That once sung for me
I remember

Propriety and Developing Countries

At one point they were referred to as the "third world."  As some considered this disrespectful, "developing countries" was suggested (though aren’t all countries developing?  and isn’t the problem just that, the countries being referred to are not developing?).  Some believe LDC (Least Developed Countries) is the new respectful standard.  Others equate such a metric to the "fourth world."  Doesn’t seem we’re moving forward here…